Sunday, May 31, 2009

Who Will Think of the Children? Nicholas Winton Will

In 1938 and '39, a man named Nicholas Winton saved many, many children's lives.

It doesn't get any niftier (though the circumstances decidedly weren't).

Searching for the NSX of programming languages

Programming.reddit.com had a discussion about an interesting analysis of how languages relate as far as speed versus code size. The analysis is based on data from The Computer Language Benchmarks Game, which takes submissions of programs in different languages to loosely compare the performances of the languages.

Both the blog article and the reddit discussion are worth reading. The reddit page includes posts by both the author of the article, gmarceau, and the one of the Benchmarks Game's maintainers, iguoy.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...

Who hasn't dreamed of making their own computer?

Well, Steve Chamberlin -- also a video game developer -- has gone ahead and done it.

See what having a girlfriend keeps you from doing?

Dan Ariely and Being Irrationally Predictable

A couple of videos:

Are we in control of our own decisions?

and

Our buggy moral code

Monday, May 25, 2009

Greece is the way we are feeling

Who wouldn't want to go to church that celebrates Easter by launching a barrage of fireworks at their neighbor?

Of Dice and Men

Apparently, for some board game players, dice-like random number generation is of vital importance. So important, that somebody built a dice rolling machine. Nifty, no?

Though, it turns out that dice aren't exactly random, whatever that means.

Open Source UAVs

Paparazzi is an open source autopilot (both hardware and software)