Grandmother’s in town, from Texas, and while we were talking she mentioned that the last names “Smith” and “Brown” seem to be less popular today than they were now. That made me think about families, and the mathematics of families. In particular, I considered what I call “name dominance“, “not marrying your third-degree relatives“, and “minimum sustainable population size with an n-degree restriction.”
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Crooked Timber (a neat, stylish site) has an entry about giving kids the right to vote. As presented, it’s a silly idea, because parents would get their kids’ votes as proxies.
When I was a kid, I wanted to vote. And I think that perhaps I should have been able to vote. But I believe that what we need is a rite of passage, or some sort of public community acceptance that a young person is now an equal member of society, not the number 18. I would place the actual age a little lower, perhaps around 14-16, but not allow politicians to muck with it too much. Worth thinking about…
My group’s senior design project in the computer science department at NC State was to create a device that would help people with visual disabilities maneuver. The semester after that, my group in the Benjamin Franklin Scholars capstone course studied what we called “neural interface technology,” which included prosthetic eyes.
The Guardian is carrying an article about what it’s like for a guy who’s been blind almost his whole life to see again. It’s compelling reading.
Whiskey Bar describes the despicable state of Iraqi safety and the US’s ability to help women there.
Here’s a short article that illustrates why I like Perl.
My friend Rob has been talking about The Geek Test on his message board. Well, I’m almost (not really) ashamed to _ admit that I got a 33.33% on it. I mean, really, could I admit the superscript _ if I got “total geek”?
If you want to be weirded out, and you run Mac OS X, and you have installed the developer tools, run “/Developer/Applications/Quartz Debug” and check a few boxes. It’s *real* weird if your background rotates every five seconds.
The program flashes colors on top of the areas of the screen that Quartz is currently drawing.
Yesterday I heard about PithHelmet, but I didn’t know what it is. Turns out, I discovered it today (again) when trying to figure out how one would go about setting Safari up to “keep state” a la Opera when you quit.
PithHelmet is an ad-blocker for Safari (the web browser) that sits on top of SIMBL, an application “enhancer.” I also got the other known project, iCar, which stands for “iChat auto-reply” so that people will get my away messages when I’m away.
ftp.gnu.org has been compromised since March 2003. The history and a list of steps taken to fix things is in their MISSING-FILES.README. They have a resolution for all future file uploads:
All releases after the 2003-08-01 date will have checksums GPG-signed by
the GNU maintainer who prepared the release. This assures automatic
certification of the integrity of all GNU source from that date onward.
Smart!