malvasia bianca

I’m pleased to announce that my friend Jordan has joined the ranks of people with obscurely-named blogs. As of now, it’s a pleasant mix of the funny, the cute, and more serious math culture thoughts.

Looking back, I had my lean book-buying revelation more than a year ago. As I said at the time, “right now, I have … lots of books to read before I can start buying again”, and while I have hardly sworn off from buying books since then, I have made an effort to read down […]

I recently ran into a couple of interesting episodes (if that’s the term) of podcasts that I don’t regularly listen to. Hanselminutes had an interview with Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson; great stuff. Lots of good talk about design, beauty (I didn’t know that Japanese Ruby code apparently has a rather different aesthetic than […]

When I first started listening to podcasts, I checked to see if This American Life had one: I very rarely listen to the radio, but it is one show where I regret reaching my destination if it’s on the radio while I’m driving. Unfortunately, a podcast wasn’t an option: you could listen to the show […]

I was looking at the HTML version of the HTTP standard on the W3C web site today. Apparently there’s a bug in their text-to-HTML conversion program, causing some words to lose their initial letters. Which led to this: 4.If the message uses the media type “multipart/byteranges”, and the ransfer-length is not otherwise specified, then this […]

I learned about the band GrooveLily from an episode of Next Big Hit. I wasn’t paying too much attention when the song, “No Room In Your Bag”, started: a patter song over a drum backing. But then some chords on the piano came in, the instrumentation started getting richer (electric violin, yay), and I started […]

Game 5 was in Dallas; the Mavs went up twenty, I decided that it just wasn’t the Warriors’ night. I wasn’t worried about them not winning the series or anything, but the Mavs were a good team on their home court, and the Warriors were obviously having an off night. And then the Warriors started […]

In the fourth quarter, the Warriors went on a run a bit earlier, and it paid off. Dallas tried to come back with threes at the end, but the Warriors sealed the game by stealing an inbounds pass with 3.3 seconds left. I guess I’ll be watching a fair amount of basketball over the next […]

A puzzle from This Week’s Finds, Week 250: You and your friend each flip a fair coin and then look at it. You can’t look at your friend’s coin; they can’t look at yours. You can’t exchange any information. Each of you must guess whether the other person’s coin lands heads up or tails up. […]

The steal and dunk at the end of the third quarter to tie the game perhaps wasn’t quite as impressive as the midcourt shot at the end of the half, but it was pretty close. Or maybe it was more impressive: hustle rather than luck.

Not sure yet how this game will go, but it’s looking up all of a sudden. For much of the half, the Warriors couldn’t really get anything going; the Mavs weren’t doing anything too special either, though, so the Warriors stayed within 8 or so. But then Pietrus came in, and had several excellent blocks […]

I don’t watch basketball much. I don’t have anything against the sport – it seems reasonably entertaining to watch – but the baseball season alone already provides more sports than I really feel like watching over the course of the year. And it doesn’t help that my local team for the last eight years has […]

As presentations about how the world is changing go, this one is well done.

Housing prices as shown on a roller coaster. I had no idea that the ups and downs had been so small until recently. An Agile Toolkit interview about movie making. (This one had some interesting non-programming analogies, too. Go Steve! Different ways of looking at the world.

For the non-EU flights in Schiphol (at least where we were), they place a metal detector at each gate, instead of having a central bank of metal detectors that everybody goes through. And I can’t figure out why. This seems like the worst possible solution from a queuing theory point of view: you get your […]

I now have braces. Or a brace, perhaps I should say: it’s only on my lower jaw. Not for cosmetic reasons: though I am, of course, shockingly vain, my teeth are really pretty straight. But I’ve had annoying amounts of buildup behind my lower front teeth for years now, and even going to the dentist […]

A random factoid from Cheaper by the Dozen: Also of exceptional general interest was a series of tricks whereby Dad could multiply large numbers in his head, without using pencil and paper. The explanation of how the tricks are worked is too complicated to explain in detail here, and two fairly elementary examples should suffice. […]

The life of a Mii. Neat pictures. (And a bit more discussion.) Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1. I do not like that my government does evil. Planarity is a neat idea. Though I admittedly didn’t feel like playing it for too long. I played Boomshine for a while, though: it’s sort of a humane […]

I’ve been back from vacation for more than two weeks now; I really should find some time to clear out the backlog of blog posts to write, shouldn’t I? Maybe if I write them down here, that will give me some incentive to knock out several of them over the weekend. Things to talk about: […]

I just turned on Akismet, for spam filtering. (And upgraded to 2.0.9, but that should be a minor change.) Let me know if you see any problems…