Link Dump 2015-04-30

2015-04-30

• There's a space shoot-'em-up where you fire your lasers by making "pew pew pew" noises.

• I'm not sure I entirely buy this theory that people hit ceilings in their mathematical ability because they missed some crucial lesson early on. Speaking personally, I don't necessarily feel like I hit a ceiling with differential equations (the last hard math class I took). It feels more like that I hadn't spent sufficient time on the subject, and at this point have little incentive to do so.

• A semi-truck overturned on I-5 (in Washington State) and spilled what it was carrying. Its contents? 40 million bees.

• The best crossword solvers can finish a New York Times Friday puzzle, on average, in under six minutes (5:38, to be precise). The Monday puzzle averages out to 1:40... about the same time it took a layman to fill the squares with their name.

• A list of problem-solving strategies for programmers. I've thought about creating a chat bot interface to mind mapping that does this, doing surface-level natural language processing to generate new, context-specific prompts. The code is on Github, although I haven't touched it in a while.

• A beautiful visualization and explanation of the UK airspace and it's 6000 daily flights.

• Wingception; Or, How Do Airplanes Fly.

• Pokemon Yellow (as sold for the Game Boy) is Turing complete - as in, within the game, you can perform a sequence of "legal" actions that would turn the "game" into any other computer program you want.

• "Card Juggling"

• Stanford's CS 106A has 700 students.. As does Michigan's EECS 183 - and enrollment is expected to go up to 1000 in the fall.

• As indoor bouldering moves further and further away from the shapes found in real rock, is it becoming a different sport? Has (should) it merge with parkour? Or be something else?

• When can a professor give an F? And when can the administration intervene? Failing an entire class is probably over-reacting, but what should a faculty do if they fail a student, but the grade is then changed by the administration (due to, say, athletic reasons?).

• From William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience (emphasis mine): "Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing." Well chosen quote for how corporate American meditates.

• I've always wondered how we deal with bugs in gambling software. Apparently it's enough for the casino to say "Sorry, software glitch!", then refuse to pay out.

• Video games create a lot of cool, picturesque virtual worlds, that are often left desolate soon after new games come out. Here's a tour of some such locations in World of Warcraft. This reminds me of a conversation from Daniel Saurez's Freedom, between the MMORPG avatars of two characters: "[This place] lies beneath the kingdom of Avelar. It's called the Cave of Forgotten Kings. Built from what remained of a sunken city. Phosphorescent moss made this cave livable after thousands of years of glacial erosion. [...] What do you mean, 'wow'? What I just said was complete rubbish. This is a bunch of bitmap textures wrapped around a 3-D model."

• We need to be okay with mediocre female engineers, 'cause we're okay with mediocre male engineers all the time.

• What I find curious about transphobia is that people are not repulsed by the product (ie. the body of the transgendered person), but by the history of that product (ie. that the body used to be of a different gender). This is why people would catcall a woman to begin with, then deride them after learning she's trans. I really want to know how people would justify their change in attitude.

• A high school friend of mine got featured in a Poynter article about online journalism.

• If you're still stuck in the 2048 craze: you can stop now. AI's get easily get up to the 16384 tile.

• UPenn has a course titled "Wasting Time on the Internet". I actually think it's a good idea, although I object to it being classified as a writing course.

• I'm about to start a second blog, and am also about to start writing my thesis, and I wonder if I can get into the habit of writing continuously. Of course, I have also been keeping a personal journal for 13 years, but that seems different from public writing somehow.