I still hate Flash objects

Look, I ain’t saying they ain’t beautiful and fun but every single time they break my back button, I utter a vile oath. Macromedia is trying to make Flash more accessible but they still have a long way to go. Until then there shall be none on my site. If that makes me a stick in the mud, so be it.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on I still hate Flash objects

Nerd subculture is no place for wannabes

Speaking as an old school nerd, it’s my opinion that these attempts to attach chic to nerd subculture are unnecessary and a source of needless stress. Perhaps it’s sour grapes and crass elitism on my part but, I dislike these interlopers infiltrating our ranks and attempting to make us cool. Nerds ain’t in it for the cool. We like science because science is beautiful in and of itself. We like computers because they are interesting by themselves not because there’s any money in it or because they’ll somehow turn us into the hip rave DJs or something.

I find it ironic, now that some of us have made a little money doing the stuff we love, that we are suddenly interesting.

Some nerds are fairly lucky to be blessed by an interesting phenotype but a lot of us are chubby, pasty Joes and Josephines with weird hobbies and who are socially inept. This is price paid for high intelligence. If I had a choice between intelligence (and maybe a little wisdom) or beauty, you know which I’d pick. If this dichotomy gives some wannabes trouble so be it. Nerd subculture is no place for wannabes. We’ve had to accept being excluded from the in-crowd and beautiful people during our formative years for millenia so, in all fairness, we reserve the right to spill a little vitriol to keep these new parasites out.

Anyway we’re caterpillars and most of us never turn into butterflies. A lot of us learn to accept this and eventually find another gentle, devastatingly intelligent, high-strung caterpillar to settle down with and perhaps raise a few more caterpillars.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Indestructable!

Listening to South African Rhythm Riot (The Indestructible Beat of Soweto Volume 6) right now. Feeling very transcendent. I guess you’d have to be me here now but, I really believe this stuff is the best damn music on the planet currently. If this stuff doesn’t move you, you’re already dead.

Posted in Music | Comments Off on Indestructable!

This Use of MS Proprietary CSS is Disturbing

Browsing the links to my follow Greymatter users, I can see it because I, like vast hoards of other unwashed users, have IE. I hate to break the news to you young, aspiring page designers but scrollbar-[something]: is not legit CSS. It’s Microsoft proprietary and can lead to much badness if abused. Maybe it might be incorporated into CSS3 but, it isn’t now. Almost certainly the W3C recommendation will not be the same as the Microsoft implementation so, watch out.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on This Use of MS Proprietary CSS is Disturbing

Here's a thought at 4 in the morning

Can the human mind cope with extreme longevity?

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Server trouble

It’s early Friday, and I still can’t make secure connections to the farm. Kind of annoying because I have a big content update for a friend’s site. Ah well, probably should go and get a hair cut and take care of other errands.

Posted in Webmastering | Comments Off on Server trouble

Powered exoskeletons?!?

For the last few decades of the cold war, the Soviet and US military establishments had been funding rather bizarre engineering research on machines that would amplify the strength, reach and endurance of human combatants. These were often called “powered exoskeletons” or “limb amplification linkages” and so on.

Now that peace dividend has arrived, here are a Russian and a US attempt to commercialize some of this research.

Of course these shouldn’t really appear that strange, lazytongs and stilts have been around for hundreds of years.

Posted in Science and Engineering | Comments Off on Powered exoskeletons?!?

How do you differentiate a tetration function?

“Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers.”
Scott Aaronson

A wonderful quote, eh? Well, I think it is.

Anyway, for some odd reason, today I was thinking about the mathematical operation of tetration. Many people have heard about addition, multiplication (which is interated addition) and exponentiation (which is iterated multiplication) but tetration is the obscure forth operation in this sequence–interated exponentiation. There are others that follow in this sequence of operations–repeated tetration, and so on–but let’s just wrap our brains around this first.

Anyway, again, I was searching the Web for information about tetration and I came across Aaronson’s interesting collection of essays on computer science, mathematics, AI and other matters. This kid’s existance reassures me that universities are still turning out smart people.

Anyway, still again, if anyone knows the rule for differentiating tetration functions, let me know in the comments. Or mail me.

Posted in Science and Engineering | Comments Off on How do you differentiate a tetration function?

Hip, I'm Not!

A few weeks ago someone infected me with the “All Your Base Are Belong Us” meme by way of the e-mail vector. I’m not going to explain this because you probably already know about it or will hear about it soon. However, before the multinationals catch this meme and attempt to sell stuff to us with it, innoculate yourself. It’s so damn hard to be an eccentric these days.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

Need to Tweak Greymatter a Bit

It still doesn’t output strict XHTML 1 so I may be fiddling with things over the next few days. Namely:

  • Need to make certain the script outputs strict XHTML
  • Need to make certain that script outputs ampersands, double quotes, etc. as entities.
  • Need to remove all the beautiful but unnecessary presentational attributes from the forms GM generates. Just so the script is easy to read.
  • Need to limit what markup the comment forms accept.
  • Perhaps Noah has a site with hacks up.
Posted in Webmastering | 1 Comment