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"If a programming language was a boat… ..."

(author unknown) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 02:24:16 PDT

If a programming language was a boat…

By Tony ⋅ April 4, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

This one is inspired by a recent forum post, that still leaves me in amazement.

Hi, Im wondering how i can create a boat in turing and if someone can post a example.

This makes no sense, since one doesn’t normally make water vehicles in Turing, the programming language. Though this got me thinking — if a programming language was a boat, what would it be?

Turing

Turing would definitely be a kayak (thank you for comments). It’s small. It’s human powered. It’s often used as a beginner “boat”. And it’s also very Canadian.

Original photo by naokomc

Java

Java is a cargo ship. It’s very bulky. It’s very enterprise~y. Though it can also carry a lot of weight. Will carry a project, but not very fun to drive.

Original photo by cfarivar

Perl

Perl is a tugboat. Powerful enough to tug Java around, in 80 characters or less.

Original photo by xeeliz

Ruby

Ruby is difficult to describe. It’s sleek, sexy, and very fun to drive. Here’s a picture. Very trendy.

Original photo by Tony Falcon

PHP

PHP is a bamboo raft. A series of hacks held together by string. Still keeps afloat though.

Original photo by permanently scatterbrained

C

C is a nuclear submarine. The instructions are probably in a foreign language, but all of the hardware itself is optimized for performance.

Original photo by Ryan C. McGinley

HTML

HTML isn’t really a ~~programming language~~ boat.

Original photo by ascendeddaniel

There’s a lot more to this, and it’s all up for discussion. How would your favourite programming language fare in open waters?

–If a programming language was a boat… | CompSci.ca/blog

[Reposted from FreXxX]

LinkedIn Hackdays

(author unknown) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:32:29 PDT

Shared by bdarfler
Jim is in my reader

What happens when you give several hundred engineers free reign to build anything they want? Something amazing. Check out this video to get the inside scoop on the magic of LinkedIn Hackdays and the great teamwork, competition, and products that have come out of them.

LinkedIn has a tradition of dedicating one Friday per month to a Hackday competition. Engineers in the company are encouraged to form teams, work on any project they can dream up, and put it together in one day. Just about anything is fair game, from build tools, to trying out new technologies, to entirely new products and business lines. The engineers then get the chance to present these projects to the entire company, including the executive staff, with the best projects winning prizes and getting turned into real products.

More hackday resources:

LinkedIn Labs: a directory of previous Hackday winners
10 Ways to Make Hackdays Work
Hackday posts on the LinkedIn Blog

Tags:

Hackday

Video

Author:

LinkedIn Hackday

Author's LinkedIn Profile URL:

http://www.linkedinlabs.com

LinkedIn Since:

05.03

Author Avatar:

Author Title:

Wizard of In

Content For:

Blog

June 13, 2011

(author unknown) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:38:10 PDT

Shared by Lee
It's amazing how many arguments in macroeconomics sound just like this.

BAM!

MIT students develop liquid fuel for electric cars

(author unknown) — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 08:40:15 PDT

Shared by Paul Russell
Hmmm liquid fuel. Interesting...

Filed under: Emerging Technologies, EV/Plug-in

A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students may have come up with the perfect solution to our electric vehicle charging woes. Instead of relying on lithium or nickel, the new battery design stores its electrons in semi-solid flow cells. Charged particles are suspended in an electrolyte solution and pumped between compartments used for storing or releasing energy. The tech supposedly makes the batteries up to ten times more efficient than their traditional counterparts, and even more importantly, the new tech is cheaper to produce. Estimates say that the design could cut the size and expense of current batteries by as much as 50 percent.

That's all well and good, but the really cool part is that charging the cells is as simple as pumping the drained fluid out and pumping fresh charged fluid in. That means that getting on your way could take as little time as a standard gasoline fill-up, greatly reducing the inconvenience and range woes associated with modern EVs. An operational prototype is expected to be completed in the next 18 months or so.

[Source: Brammo | Image Copyright 2011 Zach Bowman / AOL]

MIT students develop liquid fuel for electric cars originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Thu, 09 Jun 2011 07:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There can only be one

(author unknown) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:40:29 PDT

The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable | Threat Level | Wired.com

(author unknown) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:43:42 PDT

Shared by Lee
Oh yeah, so this is why Bitcoin matters. Too bad that all this anonymizing means that economists will never be able to get our hands on the data.

Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.

True Love

(author unknown) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:41:16 PDT

Presidential Speeches to Be Captured in Real Time… by a Single Photographer

Michael Zhang — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:00:13 PDT

The White House announced last month that it would be ending the long-running practice of reenacting Presidential speeches for photographs, but stated that they were still working out how the new system would work. Last week it reached an agreement with the White House Correspondents’ Association — rather than reenacting photos for a larger group of photographers, a single photojournalist will be given permission to shoot future speeches as they happen:

[...] news photographers will now be permitted to designate a single representative to act as a “pool” for the entire press corps. The photos taken by the pool representative will be made available to all news organizations. Reporters use a similar pool system for presidential events in which space is limited. [#]

“Hey, no pressure, but the world’s media is depending on your photos!”

(via The Washington Post)

Angry outlet terrifies his neighbors

(author unknown) — Sun, 29 May 2011 14:40:39 PDT

Russian Police Cadets. That is all.

(author unknown) — Sun, 29 May 2011 14:40:17 PDT

Male lactation: Can a 33-year-old guy learn to breast-feed?

(author unknown) — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:48:18 PDT

Shared by Lee
You CAN milk anything with nipples! Point Fokker.

You don't see many men in the lactation section of Buy Buy Baby, but that's where I was when I bought my first breast pump. I wasn't there on a mission for a pregnant wife or girlfriend. I was preparing to test an obscure secret of biology: Men can lactate. While not widely known, the image of the breast-feeding male dates back thousands of years. The Bible provides one in Numbers 11:12, where Moses complains to God about the difficulties of watching over the freed slaves in the Sinai wilderness: "Have I begotten them, that you should say to me, Carry them in your bosom, as a nursing father bears the sucking child … ?" (There's a more literal reference in the Talmud.) In more recent times, Charles Darwin himself observed that "it is well known that in the males of all mammals, including man, rudimentary mammæ exist. These in several instances have become well developed, and have yielded a copious supply of milk."

[more ...]

Battle At F-Stop Ridge

(author unknown) — Tue, 24 May 2011 04:44:01 PDT

Shared by bdarfler
haha nice

I’m whupped, so I’m going low brow on this one. Had to laugh. You gear heads are gonna love this.

The Camera Store in Calgary.

Chart Of The Day

Andrew Sullivan — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:02:00 PDT

A blog devoted to the arctic ice caps provides the above chart. Kevin Drum sighs:

On current trends, the Arctic will be entirely ice-free in September by about 2016, and will be ice-free year-round by the early 2030s.

U.S. Secret Service pulls a herp derp on Twitter

(author unknown) — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:41:59 PDT

Shared by Paul Russell
We need more honesty like this from our government.

Just nine days after joining Twitter, the Secret Service had its first major public relations blunder. Earlier today, posted on the @SecretService account: "Had to monitor Fox for a story. Can't. Deal. With. The. Blathering." The tweet was deleted promptly, and the agency said an "internal follow-up" was in progress.

"An employee with access to the Secret Service's Twitter account, who mistakenly believed they were on their personal account, posted an unapproved and inappropriate tweet," read a statement from the agency this afternoon. "We apologize for this mistake, and the user no longer has access to our official account. Policies and practices which would have prevented this were not followed and will be reinforced for all account users."

Too bad: this was the first tweet from the account that read like it came from a human being.

Brilliant.

(author unknown) — Wed, 18 May 2011 05:20:03 PDT

I GOT THIS

(author unknown) — Wed, 18 May 2011 05:18:22 PDT

Hobbes and Bacon

(author unknown) — Sat, 14 May 2011 10:16:38 PDT

Shared by bdarfler
For John

Jon Stewart On The Photos Of Osama Bin Laden

Joel Johnson — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:20:00 PDT

[The Daily Show via ★]

The Big Lie: Torture Got Bin Laden

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 May 2011 06:37:16 PDT

Shared by Paul Russell
So just to clarify, they got nothing out of torturing people.

Dave Weigel predicts Republican spin:

Expect to hear more about this report that the information that led to the tailing of bin Laden's courier, and eventually to his death, was acquired in interrogations that Obama ended once he took office. It may not be Republican candidates pointing this out. They don't need to. George W. Bush has a considerable amen chorus in the press, with former staffers like Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, and John Yoo writing regular columns about how the 43rd president was right.

Predict it? It's already become a meme. Last night, O'Reilly simply said "What about the waterboarding?" before moving on to other issues. A military reader writes how Fox is leading with the torture lie:

Driving right now - flipped on Fox News Channel out of curiosity on Sirius. Since 07h30, they have been openly encouraging waterboarding and have at least 6 times that I've noticed said that the reason we got OBL is directly attributable to what had been revealed during waterboarding sessions. I am, in two words, fucking disgusted.

Here's Andrew Malcolm:

That previous president authorized enhanced interrogation techniques which convinced folks like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to give up, among many other things, the name of their top-secret courier, now deceased.

Leave aside the horrifying fact that Republicans, seeking to score some ownership of this triumph, would look to torture as their contribution. Why not the beefed up on-the-ground intelligence from 2005 on? That's Bush's legacy that Obama built on. Besides, there is no evidence that it played any part whatsoever. From the NYT:

Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

My italics. So in torturing these two men, interrogators got nothing of substance. In fact, it was only by assuming that these men were lying under torture that the investigation continued. It was subsequently, during normal interrogations that KSM gave us a central clue:

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

To repeat: in the one instance we now clearly know about, the CIA is telling us that torture gave them lies. Which they were. Only when traditional interrogation was used did we get the actual names of the couriers. Marcy Wheeler looks at the current data set:

We can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

Follow up here. Jane Mayer's thoughts. Brian Beutler focuses on the flaws in the AP story torture apologists latched onto. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld himself has denied that torture played any role in finding bin Laden:

“It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”

What really broke the case? From the NYT:

Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling ... placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar.

Old-fashioned, painstaking, labor-intensive intelligence work. The American way. We never needed to stoop to bin Laden's standards to get bin Laden. We needed merely to follow our long-tested humane procedures.

(Photo: Newspapers left by visitors grace the fence overlooking the crash site of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on May 2, 2011 following the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan. Nearly 10 years after September 11, 2001, construction is underway to erect a formal memorial at the crash site. By Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Cause and Effect in Sydney Australia

Marc — Tue, 03 May 2011 06:59:23 PDT

Photo nicked from The Opening Hours.