Nimrod

Looks interesting. I wonder how it interops with C.

DDo$

Hilarious and scary at the same time: the Pirate Bay founders are encouraging people to make small payments that incur more fees than the payment is worth to the law firm that represented the music companies in the trial.

The bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm’s ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm.

Where does the line come from?

I'm like staring at this graph and trying to figure out where that line came from. Are they hiding the other countries or did they just pull a convenient line out their asses?

Goats

Yes, smart people do talk about goats farting.

Clojure

I've been seeing quite a few jabs at clojure lately. Sometimes I wonder if people actually tried to use the things they claim to hate.

On a related note, there's a book about it in beta now. I hear it's geared more towards Java programmers than CL ones - which is a plus imho since CL users are apparently (at least from the attitudes I've seen) the best thing since sliced bread :)

Maybe I should go buy the book.

How bad is the Swine flu so far?

Swine flu - 9 deaths so far.

Heart disease - 34 deaths in the last second.

Hmmm.

SHA-1 collisions down to 2^52

Heh.

Overreacting

They might as well kill everybody to prevent regular flu, car accidents and alcohol related deaths...

Rails drama

So there was this presentation in a conference that was sorta inappropriate and some people that got offended, and a then things sorta derailed a bit (no pun intended).

On the comments of a rant post, the presenter rethorically asked what is it that makes IT less friendly to women. He says:

"Try asking young teenage girls why they don’t want to become software developers. Again I’d be surprised if they say, because of the macho environment."

Well, so would I. We can't just ask people to explain out what they feel is a cultural issues. On the off chance that they are actually able to explain out in words what the root of the phenomenon is, there's still the chance that people involved in that culture won't agree with the conclusion that there is a problem to begin with.

On a somewhat related topic, I never really understood why is it that some people feel compelled to associate software with this idea of "end of a journey": being a rock star, being a ninja, whatever. You don't see rock stars calling themselves "ninjas". Does being a real life programmer suck so much that we need to pretend to be something else? Where's the focus? Where's the pride?

Miracles and rationality

Old blog post, but interesting nonetheless.

The definition of miracle seems rather fuzzy, imho.

On the one end, people say splitting a sea in two is a miracle. On the other, gravity and tides are known natural phenomena and it is theoretically possible to split a sea in two, given that a bunch of highly unlikely events happen simultaneously and someone is paying attention.

Often, an event is called a miracle because it's very personal, e.g. a loved one surviving cancer or a gruesome accident. I'd say the explanation for these cases just happen to be beyond comprehension, but not they're certainly not necessarily beyond the forces of nature.

There are those who say that miracles are things that can never happen because there are very specific scenario constraints, e.g. walking off the top of a building and expecting not to turn into a flattened pancake. But hey, it can be done. Voluntarily, at that.

I tend to be pragmatic and go more by the street usage of the term miracle (i.e. that it can happen), so I figure that since miracles only escape our understanding but not necessarily laws of nature, yes, we can be rational and believe in miracles.

As the saying goes, I only know that I know nothing.