I half-heartedly competed in this http://kaggle.com/chess?viewtype=results, which was a competition to predict chess match outcomes based on observed past matches. ( ... )

http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/mickey_mouse_medicine_man/mickey_mouse_medicine_man.shtml

Wow.

Some good media I've experienced recently: Moon (Duncan Jones) and "Mister Squishy" (David Foster Wallace). I also watched District 9 (Neil Blomkamp).
( ... )

Fun quiz: these alternate titles were all suggested for which movie?

( ... )

This stuff is pretty much the bomb. Smoky and hot, and cheap. I've seen it (or another brand of it) in pretty much every supermarket I've been to. http://www.amazon.com/Costena-Chipotle-Adobo-Sauce-12-Ounce/dp/B0011T8XGW

You can add it to anything! For a milder touch, just use the sauce. For more kick, chop up the peppers too. I am pretty much hooked on a lentil-and-ground-turkey chili of my own devise. The only seasonings are this stuff and cumin.

Thanks to the salt and vinegar and capsaicin, it keeps forever in the fridge if you put it in a tupperware.

4*/5.

This is a sort-of Soho Lower East Side landmark, a hip independent bakery and storefront owned & operated by a passionate doughnutier from a family of bakers. ( ... )

Bud: Credit is a sacred trust, it's what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia?
Otto: They don't pay bills in Russia, it's all free.
Bud: All free? Free my ass. What are you, a fuckin' commie? Huh?
Otto: No, I ain't no commie.
Bud: Well, you better not be. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

Take Firefox and Thunderbird.

Please. (ba-dum-pish)

But seriously, look at Firefox and Thunderbird. A web browser and email reader, developed under shared auspices and even sharing some modules. (You can tell because sometimes Firefox freezing will cause Thunderbird to freeze. But I digress.)

Here is how little priority there is, toward user interface. Think about this: in an email reader, what is the action most analogous to reloading a web page? Clearly, it is checking the servers for new email. What else could it be? And here is where the brain-damage shows itself:

Under firefox, ctrl-R does a reload. Fair enough. But what does that do in thunderbird? No, not refresh, but rather reply. WTF?

Now, let's go at it from the other direction. In thunderbird, to check for new messages you press ctrl-shift-T. I dunno what that stands for; "take messages"? And why does it need two modifiers? It's definitely my most frequently used command in thunderbird. But the best part is this: in firefox, ctrl-shift-T will in fact open the previously closed tab.

Two applications, supposedly part of a suite, and they're in complete discord.

i've been listening to exactly one song, 3 minutes long, on loop, practically non-stop during my waking hours, for over 2 days straight.

What's kind of neat is that the variance of compute-power is decreasing as the years roll on, indicating a convergence of commodity parts. (Although this may be due to a non-representative sample; for history, there's ENIAC but none of today's special-purpose super-computers are listed.

I'm also far from convinced that `3-D perception', doth a guppy make... Let alone the progression of skills -> adaptation -> imagination -> reasoning.

Also, I like how "manual calculation" is way below "bacterium". But then, why have humans wasted so much time on it...?

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/revo.slides/power.aug.curve/power.aug.gif