1. Goodfellas (1990) — 8/10
2. Cop Out (2010) — 5/10
3. Cloverfield (2008) — 3/10
4. The Joneses (2009) — 6/10
5. A Serious Man (2009) — 8/10
6. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) — 8/10
7. Fitzcarraldo (1982) — 9/10
8. Eraserhead (1976) — 7/10
9. Blue Velvet (1986) — 8/10
10. Dazed & Confused (1993) — 7/10
11. Wild At Heart (1990) — 8/10
12. Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) — 6/10
13. Factotum (2005) — 7/10
14. Broken Flowers (2005) — 7/10
15. Lost Highway (1997) — 8/10
16. Mulholland Drive (2001) — 8/10

Goodfellas... [More]

Late December/early January are what I call “guy movie month” here because the wife is away.

1. Inception (2010) — 9/10
2. Zombieland (2009) — 8/10
3. The Invention of Lying (2009) — 7/10
4. Surrogates (2009) — 7/10
5. Defendor (2009) — 8/10
6. 9 (2009) — 5/10
7. Primer (2004) — 7/10
8. Four Christmases (2008) — 7/10
9. Moon (2009) — 8/10
10. Fred Claus (2007) — 8/10
11. Family Guy − Something Something Dark Side (2009) — 7/10
12. JCVD (2008) — 8/10
13. The Expendables (2010) — 7/10
14. The Book of Eli (2010) — ... [More]

1. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) (second half) – Umberto Eco
2. The Great War of Civilization (2005) – Robert Fisk (second half)
3. Naked Pictures of Famous People (1998) – Jon Stewart
4. The Drought (1965) – JG Ballard
5. Drowned World (1962) – JG Ballard
6. Spook Country (2007) – William Gibson
7. Free Lunch (2007) – David Cay Johnston
8. Stardust (1999) – Neil Gaiman
9. Heat (2006) – George Monbiot
10. Unbowed (2006) – Wangari Maathai
11. Grieche sucht Griechin/Mister X macht Ferien/Zeitungswesen in der Steinzeit... [More]

It was the start of the long week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and it was time to start a new book. A quick scan of the book shelf revealed many interesting candidates, but most of those were a bit more challenging than a week of this kind warranted. But look who’s hiding on one of the shelves: good ol’ Dan Brown.

This copy of The Lost Symbol had been obtained from the local Salvation Army secondhand shop for only a couple of bucks. I’d gotten Brown’s two other books in the same way,... [More]

The article What WikiLeaks revealed to the world in 2010 by Glenn Greenwald (Salon)offers a terse and eye-opening list of leaks in 2010.

The leaks range from revealing that U.S. forces are operating in Pakistan and Yemen—contrary to official statements by high-level U.S. officials—to revealing that the Obama administration folded on prosecuting Bush-era human rights transgressions (as well as avidly continuing them) to the Pope refusing to aid investigators in sex abuse investigations to dozens of other instances... [More]

You would think that this article, Down and Out on $250,000 a Year by Karen Hube (Fiscal Times), is an example of Swiftian satire. You would be wrong.

“The bottom line: It’s not exactly easy street for our $250,000-a-year family, especially when it lives in high-tax areas on either coast. Even with an additional $3,000 in investment income, they end up in the red — after taxes, saving for retirement and their children’s education, and a middle-of-the-road cost of living — in seven out of the eight communities in... [More]”

The author wound up an article on recent findings on climate change with the following paragraph:

It is, apparently, indefinitely delayed due to the advent of a completely new class of devices that no longer need desktops. Pity. In a recent discussion on Hates Software, one commenter noted:

“Those of us with jobs and credit cards won’t put up with that nonsense and will pay for the problem to go away.”

“That nonsense” to which he refers is any of the typical just-download-the-sources-and-compile-it-yourself claptrap peddles by those who don’t understand a good-goddamned-thing about usability.... [More]

The article Leak Soup by Morgan Meis (The Smart Set) discusses Ambassador Ischinger’s[1] response to Wikileaks actions, published in the New York Times, in which he wrote: “[t]his is more serious: It is about war and peace, and it can be about life or death.”.

“And that is where Ambassador Ischinger lost me for good. That is where I went over to the other side, where I became a Julian man. There is only so much bullshit that any man can ingest, and I’ve been topped off. Mr. Ischinger is in the same lineage as all the noble men... [More]”

tl;dr: This is a long-winded way of advising you to always be sure what you’re comparing when you build low-level algorithms that will be used with arbitrary generic arguments. The culprit in this case was the default comparator in a HashSet<T>, but it could be anything. It ends with cogitation about software processes in the real world.

Imagine that you have a framework with support for walking arbitrary object graphs in the form of a GraphWalker. Implementations of this interface complement... [More]

I’d heard that Java was a memory hog, but this is ridiculous:

Java uses 16 million terabytes of virtual memory

It’s impressive that the machine was responding at all, actually. :-)

The essay interpreting Eric Cantor’s blatant religious censorship as an art statement is brilliant.

“This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship; it’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art-banning. And, while its point of departure may be Senator Jesse Helms’s admittedly ground-breaking defunding of the National Endowment of the Arts over André Serrano’s Piss Christ, it’s not a derivative “Oooh, I’m a Christian, I’m so offended” because, as the... [More]”

If you browse through the new iLife videos, you’ll notice that the person doing the iPhoto demonstration is clearly using an OS X with a new UI style. The styling of the controls has changed subtly, with a stronger and darker blue highlighting line around the focused text-box and a much smoother look for the dropdown list:

Text fields & Popup menu

When the dropdown list is opened, the popup menu is much different than that in Snow Leopard, in that it’s now black and sports a softer shadow:

Popup-menu Open

Well, exciting stuff... [More]

Another NFL season is upon us. The Jets—weary, beleaguered, eternally unrewarded warriors—once again trudge to the line of scrimmage. The New York Jets: Week One by Morgan Meis (The Owls) has sports writing that borders on poetry:

“His name is Darrelle Revis and … [i]t is his fate to be the greatest cornerback, the greatest. He is so good that he erases himself. Did you see him during that first game, on Monday Night Football even as the fog lifted? No, you didn’t see him. That’s because his defensive genius... [More]”

Just a quick note on Contador’s behavior in the Tour de France when he took advantage of Schleck’s mechanical failure on a mountain stage. Schleck caught Contador napping and managed to break free of the group with only Alexander Vinoukorov managing to keep pace. He was free and clear of the group and riding like a man possessed; it’s hard to say how it would have ended, but it certainly looked like Schleck was about to build on his lead over Contador.

Instead, his chain dropped and clamped... [More]

In the category of font-geek humor, the perennial whipping boy of the font stable fights back in the essay, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher (McSweeney's Internet Tendency).

“Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

“[…]

“While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen... [More]”

Sporcle has a lot of fun quizzes, but my favorite is Countries of the World. After you start the game, you have 15 minutes to type in the English names of all of the internationally recognized states in the world. Not only do you have to actually know them and be able to recall them just by looking at the political boundaries on the map, you have to type pretty quickly to get them all.

A while back, I (well, the wife and I) used this game to try to learn all of the countries. We did pretty... [More]

Reading this article, This Is Your Brain. Aging. by Sharon Begley (Newsweek), reminded me of some notes I scribbled down and never posted, because I was actually doing something else at the time.

Does our capacity for learning grow or shrink as we age? Some things seem easier to grasp with distance: E.g. in school certain concepts just needed to be learned, but didn’t necessarily fit in with anything else—with age, these concepts are more evidently revolutionary. The light is a wave/particle experiment, for example.... [More]

There are a few (relatively) popular sites that do not even attempt to provide unique page titles for article pages. For example, Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon.com or 3QuarksDaily both use the same title for all pages.

This is a huge pain in the neck if you have multiple pages from those sites open in a browser. It would be much more useful (for bookmarking, etc.) if the page title included the title of the primary content on the page.

For example, instead of simply using

Glenn Greenwald... [More]

Here’s the cover of a recent issue of the Weekly Standard. Though it’s possible that they were being highly ironic, it’s highly unlikely.

The Weekly Standard is not alone in promulgating this propaganda. It is the standard story that the U.S. military is on the point of collapse not because it is too large or used too often, but because the “liberals” are trying to strangle it in its crib. The poor, benighted thing barely stands a chance at survival if the American people don’t rise up and... [More]

The Gulf of Mexico fills with oil. This disaster is short-term insoluble, even for highly-advanced, 21st-century, western nations. Medium- to long-term, there is likely to be a solution. There always is. The cleanup process will be long and painstaking, but it will be out-of-sight for most people. Once the problem is solved and years have passed, the shortness of human memory will serve to help us forget what happened—and to be surprised the next time it happens.

Petroleum is intrinsic to... [More]

I missed the second half of this game because I was watching the Tour de Suisse racing through my home town. In catching up on the news, I discovered the the U.S. had been robbed of a game-winning goal! Or so Facebook and Reddit told me. A search for videos on YouTube turned up several links to videos showing the goal in question: the play was not offsides and no U.S. player committed a foul (to the contrary, it was the Slovenians who were all over the U.S. players).

It seemed quite clear-cut:... [More]

Ah, those lovely U.S. taxes—there’s no way to avoid them, even when living abroad. You can’t even renounce citizenship in order to avoid taxes, as documented in the article, Expatriation Tax. Even if you’re no longer a U.S. citizen, the U.S. reserves the right to require you to pay U.S. taxes if you’re either (A) in non-compliance with filing rules or (B) you’re rich (in which case, you probably won’t be paying anything significant, like other rich Americans). I’m not sure how this is... [More]

Portions of this discussion are taken from a discussion I had on Facebook.

Joe Legal vs. José Illegal

This comparison of Joe Legal vs. José Illegal (Snopes.com) reaches its conclusion by employing both straw-man reasoning (knocking down an exaggerated, drastically simplified or superficial version of a premise and then claiming to have refuted the original) and a pretty cavalier attitude toward fact (e.g. undocumented workers are not eligible for welfare; their American children, on the other hand,... [More]

The reason that so many people believe unquestioningly that the Israeli attack on the cargo flotilla was completely justified is that these people really and truly believe that there were terrorists on board. It’s hard for those who know that the boats were mostly filled with humanitarians, activists, foodstuffs and cement to imagine how people could really and truly believe that their main mission was to deliver missiles and suicide bombers. It’s faith, pure and simple; those that don’t doubt... [More]

In Switzerland, you can now watch the world cup live online in three different languages (German, French and Italian). It’s very good quality and easily good enough to watch the match. Compared to 4 years ago, it’s absolutely incredible. With a 5MBit connection at the office, we can easily spare some bandwidth to pull down the live stream and stay up-to-date as we work.

Apparently, we’re not alone in doing so.

This afternoon, during the Netherlands – Denmark match, we couldn’t log on to... [More]

Two recent events have elicited reactions from participants

Pat Buchanan on the Flotilla Attack

The recent Israeli attack on the the Hamas military resupply flotilla (as it must surely be called in U.S. media) forced Patrick Buchanan (Wikipedia)—perhaps most famous for having such stridently and racist nationalistic views that the fact that so many Florida Jews voted for him was cited as proof that something was rotten in Florida in the 2000 presidential election—to write the article, Lift the Siege... [More] (Antiwar.com)