Rich Blogs ... Again

Fair questions, though it does seem to me a index of our present confusion about food that people would feel the need to consult a journalist, or for that matter a nutritionist or doctor or government food pyramid, on so basic a question about the conduct of our everyday lives as humans. I mean, what other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?

Michael Pollan

In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

Robert O'Callahan discussed various approaches to string representation.

I think Io takes a sensible approach to Strings. Io represents strings as sequences (C arrays) of bytes. Each sequence is associated with a type that holds information of the number of bytes that represent an element in the sequence. Multibyte strings are converted to their smallest fixed with encoding, allowing a coherent String interface (size ... etc work as expected). This conversion only happens for strings that contain multibyte characters, so space is only traded for coherence / speed when needed.

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I just released my first desktop software SoundConverter for Windows. Even though working on Windows is a bit of a challenge, I found the experience more enjoyable than my recent web development work.

Most of the credit goes to Steve Dekorte, for all of his effort learning the quirks of sound conversion over the past few years as well as his contribution of the logic for this version. Nothing is more rewarding than working with great people.

This guy trusts his life to his code:

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Computers form a new kind of math. They don’t really fit well into classical math. And people who try to do that are basically indulging in a form of masturbation.

Alan Kay in The Computer Revolution hasn't Happened Yet.

It appears that the Rubinius folks are interested in implementing the VM in Lisp. If they want to implement the VM in Lisp, why are they going to create a Lisp interpreter in Cuby, which outputs C, that parses Ruby to Lisp sexps and then evaluates the sexps. Why not skip Rubinius and just implement a Ruby VM in Scheme or Common Lisp?

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Alice in Wonderland

Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. "Yes -- $100 bills in plastic wrap," Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. "We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while."

This reminded me of a scene in Cocaine Cowboys where Jon Roberts describes finding bricks of $100 bills in his horse feed that he doesn't even remember hiding.

The Great Iraq Swindle

Update

According to the most reliable ­estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America's contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches.

Steve just described to me how Keynesian economists feel that spending (created by demand from consumers OR the government) and full employment are signs of a healthy economy. He disagreed with this point of view, giving the hypothetical example of the government paying everyone to dig ditches full-time and then fill them back up again ...

Fiat money then calls into question the veil of money: Money ceases to be a commodity like others, and begins to have special and peculiar properties. Instead of focusing on production, investment and consumption, economic actors begin to attempt to divine the actions of government. Since actors can have foreknowledge of government actions in a way they cannot have of a market, this leads to economic efforts to bribe, control or curry favor with the entities holding fiat power.

Fiat Currency on Wikipedia

Being surprised by new technology always makes my day:

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

Video

Interesting phenomenon possibly responsible for risky investments followed by busts.

Carry Trade

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Always check in code in a little bit nicer condition than when you checked it out.