A normal order lambda calculator, by Oleg Kiselyov. “The present calculator implements what seems to be an efficient and elegant algorithm of normal order reductions. The algorithm is “more functional” than the traditionally used approach.”

Sexy primes are pairs of prime numbers that differ by six. Genius naming.

Hard drive sounds, the horror!

Ejacs: a JavaScript interpreter for Emacs, Steve Yegge is a hell of a coding machine. Read the novel or skip straight to the code.

O’Browser, an OCaml in a browser. “We present a way to run OCaml programs on a standard, unmodified web browser. To achieve this, we designed a bytecode interpreter in JavaScript, as well as an implementation of the standard library.”

Blogging Like a Hacker, the return of minimalist blogging systems! I gotta release Trivium too…

Trivium, my minimalist blogging engine that runs this site.

From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents, an interesting correlation.

Oiligarchy is a playable commentary on the oil industry. Play the Flash game first, then read the postmortem. (I managed to get a “Farewell West”, but no M.A.D. at all.)

Mv_Embed is a javascript library for easy embedding of ogg theora/vorbis media with the HTML5 tag.

Vernacular Video, by Tom Sherman. “As video technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of complete decentralization. Forty years later, video technology is everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralized digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power.”

ProofWeb is both a system for teaching logic and for using proof assistants through the web. Supports Coq, Isabelle, and a few others. Awesome, check it out!

Teaching logic using a state-of-the-art proof assistant, by Cezary Kaliszyk, Freek Wiedijk, Maxim Hendriks, and Femke van Raamsdonk. On above system.

acts_as_git is a simple plugin which stores all changes you make to a text field in a Git repository. This is ideal for something like a Git-backed wiki.

Paul Dirac Anecdotes

A positive aspect of the Bush legacy, “The international community now has a potent new motivating tool to dissuade world leaders from engaging in tyranny and aggression – tell them they’ll be like George Bush if they do it.” WJW.

New York Times Special Edition, 4th July 2009. You wish.

DRGBLZ, (O TEH HUGE MANATEE.)

Javascript Parser Combinators, an excellent library by Chris Double.

All Time Greatest Hits of the Twelve Tone Masters!

Hofstadter’s Terrible Law, interpreted as “nontrivial software is too complex for a single person to write in a single lifetime, let alone in a subset of that lifetime.” I say: Therefore, write simple software!

State of Love and Trust, Pearl Jam classic.

The first 100 days, what US presidents did. Great viz.

Swing States, by Robert Kosara. “I always wondered how much those swing states actually swing.” See comments too.

The Case of M. S. El Naschie, WJW. Must read.

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, by Eric Bogle.

Xlib programming: a short tutorial, very short indeed, but what’s there is well written.

A Timeline of Western Philosophers, from Thales to Bordo.

Flag variables in Bourne shell programs, Mark Dominus discovered a nice trick.

You Should (Not) Have a Lobotomy, the first one was Nov. 12, 1935.

gae-sqlite will allow you to run Google’s App Engine development server with an SQLite backend.

There are only two kinds of people: those that can write well and those that don’t. I don’t count myself to the former, but I can as well have a look at them.

What do they, with their well writing? Bored from pleasing the common readership, the members of this rare folk start trying to please each other by writing the finest and most subtle texts. They write on writing, of course. People who can leverage the full power of a medium end up using the medium for nothing but communicating about it.

Thus, writers write on writing. Ham radio operators morse about signal strength. Mailing lists discuss net culture. Film directors produce movies full of inside jokes. It’s all a mere end in itself.

That’s what literacy is, in the end: Eternal rereading, reinterpretation, recombination of age old stories. Stories that are plain shadows. Metaphors that stand for nothing but themselves. And finally, once you’re bored from the idea of structuralism, you start discussion of structuralism itself.

I shall not act the innocent. Look at what I’m doing, not only writing about writing, but guilty of all above.

Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results

389 years ago…, “Inspired by the genuine progress of this country, I created this typographic mashup of the history of slavery, racism, and the progress of African Americans.” Must see.

Merb 1.0 now released.

Tender Tub made from polyurethene coated foam rubber; not cold and hard like the average bathtub, but soft and warm, and comfortable like a sofa.

tr.im is an URL shortening service with a nice URL.

Strasheela is a highly expressive constraint-based music composition system. The Strasheela user declaratively states a music theory and the computer generates music which complies with this theory.

Wet Hot American Summer, great drawings by Justin Longoz.

The Trouble With Pictures (PDF), excerpt from John Man’s book “Alpha Beta”: “It is an astonishing thing that human beings should be able to see marks on a surface and hear them talk of realities visible and invisible.”

FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer used by the NSA to perform higher-level mathematical calculations. The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words of memory (~2 terabytes), and could perform at 65.5 gigaflops.

Scientists Turn Tequila into Diamonds, WJW.

Town in Oregon Elects Genderqueer Mayor, why not.

From Monoids to Monads

twicl, my 120 loc shell twitter client.

Total Functional Programming, classic paper by D. A. Turner.

What about the natural numbers, by Colin Runciman. “A prime concern in the design of any general purpose programming language should be the ease and safety of working with natural numbers, particularly in conjunction with discrete data structures.” Includes pragmatic definitions to close the natural numbers.

Prediction and Entropy of Printed English, by C. E. Shannon. A very nice experiment.

Greatest common divisor in Coq

Write Or Die

The door code of the lock at the Catholic dorm is 2-0-4-6.
(The Jewish dorm has a lip detector instead.)

Plan 9 and related projects continue being a neverending source of inspiration to me. Consider Octopus’ Mails, which stores mails as directories, with all attachments unpacked. What could be easier and more convenient at the same time? Also see the implementation.

OpenBSD 4.4 has been released. I see improved EeePC support.

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License, “This version of the license allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 license.”

aoeui is a very small and efficient display editor built upon a philosophy of making interaction with UNIX text manipulation commands easy, rather than duplicating their features. Only 6kloc.

Bembo’s Zoo

js-comint.el is a comint mode for emacs which allows you to run a compatible javascript repl such as Spidermonkey or Rhino inside of emacs.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Plan 9 (PDF), University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece, October 30–31, 2008.

Colm is a programming language designed for the analysis and transformation of computer languages.

Matt Webb’s 100 Head Cattle Drive 2008

Notices of the American Mathematical Society, A Special Issue on Formal Proof.

Tangled Up in White, John Gruber on tangle-resistant cable.

Let’s have some fun with divergent geometric series. It can be shown (or rather, argued) that

In fact, Euler already knew this. Intuitively one can simply try the well-known closed form for geometric series, that is

for (at your own risk!), to find the solution:

Alternatively, you can use Riemann’s Zeta function

which, with , results after heavy rewriting in again.

For a different perspective, see Bill Gosper in HAKMEM 154, where he figures:

By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra:

let

now add X to itself;

thus, so

therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) which is twos-complement.