This three-minute visualization of the relative sizes of four empires—France, Portugal, Spain and England—from the early 1800s to the present is mesmerizing. Once you’ve seen it, you want to see Holland, Russia and the U.S. as well. Definitely watch until 1960 so you can see the wonderful explosion of the French empire!

Visualizing Empire's Decline (YouTube)
 

The post Grammar Challenge! by Amy McDaniel includes a quiz written by David Foster Wallace that she obtained during a writing course many years ago. Each of the sentences has one major fault—not necessarily a grammatical one—though there may be other, smaller ones as well.

The full text of the quiz is included below; the footnote for each line links to its answer.

In matters military, the Obama administration has followed closely in the footsteps of the Bush administration. The Bush administration, in turn, only really innovated in brazenness and speed of execution, but also pretty much hewed to the military policy of the 50 years before it. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Obama administration decided not to sign the most recent ban on land mines. Perhaps Carter would have signed it, but he’s proven to be a much stronger former president than he... [More]

Fabio Viale’s Hyper-realistic sculptures are all marble, but of everyday objects and with exquisite detail. Click on the images for more detail. Check out the site for much more. (Including a marble boat!)

Two Tires (Infinito)Popcorn (Big Bang)Styrofoam Skull (Skull)

The title of the article, The Big Squander by Paul Krugman (NY Times), neatly illustrates the deferential interpretation of the financial robbery it describes.

“About the A.I.G. affair: During the bubble years, many financial companies created the illusion of financial soundness by buying credit-default swaps from A.I.G. — basically, insurance policies in which A.I.G. promised to make up the difference if borrowers defaulted on their debts. It was an illusion because the insurer didn’t have remotely enough money to... [More]”

The following citation from That Couple by Tom Schaller (538) applies to so much in popular American culture today.

“No, you’re not famous; you’re infamous. You’re situated squarely at the bottom of an already too-deep and increasingly murky barrel of celebrity culture, celebrity journalism, and (un)reality TV, the depths of which are probably making even Andy Warhol cringe in his grave. I want this to be your fifteenth minute. I want your egg timer to ding now, so you can exit our national discourse as swiftly,... [More]”

This user streams comments that come, purportedly, from his father. Some are quite pithy.

The following picture is from a photo essay, Ian Fisher : American Soldier (Denver Post) following a young American from his initial recruiting to deployment in Iraq and return to America.

Child Soldiers

The picture of the four recruits during basic training makes them look remarkably young, far less than the 18 years each of them must be. The two to the right—with Ian, the star of the essay, on the far right—really look like they dressed up in Daddy’s war togs.

To be honest, Ian’s story is neither particularly... [More]

This article was originally published on the Encodo Blogs. Browse on over to see more!

Perforce servers have a checkpointing mechanism in order to back up the server metadata. That checkpoint, along with the depot data and a journal file (for changes made since the checkpoint was taken) are enough to restore a Perforce database.

Here at Encodo, we take a checkpoint every evening right before the depot files are backed up. We retain a few days worth of these checkpoints, just in case. Since... [More]

Christ almighty, does America suck.[1]

We’re so politically moribund it’s hard to see how anything significant will change without a revolution.

Consider the following citation from the column, The Defining Moment by Paul Krugman (New York Times):

“For this is the moment of truth. The political environment is as favorable for reform as it’s likely to get. The legislation on the table isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anyone could reasonably have expected. History is about to be made — and everyone has to decide which... [More]”

Psst, Anglican clergy!

Listen up.

Is your church way too liberal for your tastes?

Are you tired of the homos and broads cluttering up your ranks?

Are you tired of having to live in a world run by liberals with their annoying need to make everything equal for everyone even though everyone knows they’re not?[1]

Well, has the Catholic church got an offer for you!

Act now and you can get back into the good graces of a real church; one that has no room for homos or broads and with the added bonus... [More]

Encodo Systems AG[1] has released Quino 1.1.0.0 to licensed customers; test licenses are available on request. Feel free to contact them at “info [at] encodo [dot] ch”. Read the Quino Fact Sheet for an in-depth overview.

Big, new features include:

• Multi-language support
• Remote method execution
• Remote query execution
• Full support for Microsoft SQL Server (including schema migration)
• Improved support for object graphs in the ORM
• Typed constants in the metadata
• Beta support for ASP.NET MVC

More... [More]

Human Space Exploration MapSaturn at Equinox (75 exposures)Hubble's final servicing missionWith recent rumblings from NASA as to the successor to the aged and mostly retired space shuttle fleet, National Geographic published the lovely graphic of human space exploration seen to the left. Also very recently, NASA has been trumpeting their images of Saturn as sent back over the years by the Cassini probe. The second image to the left is from the photo essay, Saturn at equinox (Big Picture/Boston.com). The final image on the bottom is from another photo-essay called Hubble’s final servicing mission (Big Picture/Boston.com). Click the... [More]

In early September, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report made a triumphant return after a hiatus of a few weeks. They unfortunately dragged some obnoxious commercials with them, so I wrote the following note to Comedy Central:

“I just checked out the first show for this fall and noted that the commercials are back. That’s cool, you guys gots to get paid; however, is there any reason you need to run the same pair/trio of commercials in four, two-minute blocks during about 20 minutes of content?... [More]”

For we Mac-users still stuck in a pre-”Snow Leopard” world, the occasional glitches in the Finder still rear their ugly heads from time to time. Sometime over the summer, my system got its panties into a bunch to such a degree that, though the system was not technically crashed or unusable (or potentially rescue-able), it was just easier to kill it and reboot. Upon reboot, I was greeted with a “something awful seems to have happened; could you tell us what you were doing when it all went wrong?”... [More]

The web page, Ballpoint Afghanistan (EnglishRussia), includes images of artwork created during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. These are purportedly the work of a soldier and were done primarily with a ballpoint pen (and colored pencils, apparently). There’s some really cool stuff in there for fans of line-drawing and doodling. I particularly liked the drawing of a soldier gazing out over mountain ranges (reproduced below; click to enlarge).

Biden is at it again[1]:

Gaffe-Prone Biden Embarrasses Nation Yet Again By Sneezing During Meeting (The Onion)

The consensus on Biden and his constant slip-ups is summed up by one analyst thusly:

“It’s a stupid, stupid error from a half-human, spit-spewing gaffe machine. […] It’s our fault for voting Obama into office alongside a half-retarded adult baby.”

Version 1.5.2 of the Encodo C# Handbook is now available for download. It includes the following updates:

• Expanded “8.1 – Documentation” with examples (this section is now four pages long)
• Added more tips to the “2.3 – Interfaces vs. Abstract Classes” section
• Added “7.20 – Restricting Access with Interfaces”
• Added “5.3.7 – Extension Methods” and “7.17 – Using Extension Methods”

It’s also available for download at the MSDN Code Gallery.

DSL is a buzzword that’s been around for a while and it stands for [D]omain-[Specific] [L]anguage. That is, some tasks or “domains” are better described with their own language rather than using the same language for everything. This gives a name to what is actually already a standard practice: every time a program assumes a particular format for an input string (e.g. CSV or configuration files), it is using a DSL. On the surface, it’s extremely logical to use a syntax and semantics most... [More]

A usable API doesn’t usually spring forth in its entirety on the first try. A good, usable API generally arises iteratively, improving over time. Naturally, when using words like good and usable, I’m obliged to define what exactly I mean by that. Here are the guidelines I use when designing an API, in decreasing order of importance:

Static typing & Compile-time Errors

Wherever possible, make the compiler stop the user from doing something incorrectly instead of letting the runtime handle it.... [More]

C# 3.5 has a limitation where generic classes don’t necessarily conform to each other in the way that one would expect. This problem manifests itself classically in the following way:

class D { }
class E : D { }
class F : D { }

class Program
{
  void ProcessListOfD(IList<D> list) { }
  void ProcessListOfE(IList<E> list) { }
  void ProcessSequenceOfD(IEnumerable<D> sequence) { }
  void ProcessSequenceOfE(IEnumerable<E> sequence) { }

  void Main()
  {
    var eList = new List<E>();
    var... [More]

Fluent interfaces—or “method chaining” as it’s also called—provide an elegant API for configuring objects. For example, the Quino query API provides methods to restrict (Where or WhereEquals), order (OrderBy), join (Join) and project (Select) data. The first version of this API was very traditional and applications typically contained code like the following:

var query = new Query(Person.Metadata);
query.WhereEquals(Person.Fields.Name, "Müller");... [More]

August 1, 2009

Kath and Marco pick up Sean, Amber and Chloe from the Kloten airport in the morning and bring them home for their first brunch and the start of a long, jet-lagged day. After brunch, Chloe and Amber take a nap while Marco, Sean and Kath take a walk around the neighborhood, walking up to the waterfall in the Tobel before heading back to wake up the sleeping beauties. In order to keep everyone going and on their feet, we took advantage of the great weather and walked to the lake... [More]