Posts from — April 2009

I didn’t notice this earlier, but apparently Google’s C++ Style Guide is now public. I think it’s quite good.. acclimating to it wasn’t very hard when I started. Some of the rationales (when you expand the rule on that page) have good food for thought for programmers.

Chrome Shorts is a series of short videos about Google Chrome (sorta). This is my favorite because of its use of color, music, and animation.. it’s really quite beautiful:

My second favorite:

You can see the whole series here

“Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.”

- Charles Krauthammer, April 22, 2003

Writers and thinkers who aren’t self-critical are always the least interesting.

Politico reports:

A coalition of clean elections advocates and liberal bloggers is blasting the two major Democratic congressional fundraising committees as “hypocritical” for refusing lobbyist and political action committee cash when President Obama helps them raise money, but accepting it the rest of the time.

At the White House’s behest, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee last week agreed to forego contributions from lobbyists or political action committees at a June fundraiser in order to land Obama as the keynote speaker. But while Obama required both his presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee to forego lobbyist and PAC cash year-round, the DCCC and DSCC have only agreed to the Obama rules for fundraising efforts involving the president, and will continue accepting the funds the rest of the time.

So, for one day they’ll stop taking lobbyist money. 1/365th of a reform is not really a reform. You can sign a petition to stop this fake reform here:
http://www.stopfakereform.com/p-dscc-e

It’d be great if the Democrats made fundamental reforms in the relationship between money and politics, but I’m not particularly hopeful about this. It’s tough to justify changing the rules when you’re winning, and it’s tougher to change the rules when you’re not.

It looks like Twitter is entering phase 3 of the hype cycle:
http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ncl=1343407025&topic=t

In recognition of the release of Angels and Demons, I’m re-posting Language Log’s 2004 diatribe against Dan Brown’s writing style, in which they called Brown “one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature” who “writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching”. Read the article- it’s awesome.

A short excerpt…
Brown writes:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

To which Language Log replies:

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak —a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

previously

Tom Friedman writes:

Warren Buffett once famously quipped that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” So true. But what’s really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked — in more ways than one.

Credit bubbles are like the tide. They can cover up a lot of rot.

Which was critiqued by Matt Taibbi in typical style:

I’m not sure how possible it is to swim “buck naked — in more ways than one.” It may be (and I’d be inclined to believe it, if evidence were to surface) that Friedman is actually a member of an alien civilization that recognizes not two genders but nine and has fifteen different ways to be naked. But I don’t think “buck naked — in more ways than one” is something we understand here on earth.

Then there’s the line, “Credit bubbles are like the tide. They cover up a lot of rot.” Friedman is trying to say that credit bubbles cover up economic problems, much the way Buffet’s high tide covered up some investors’ lack of foresight. And that would have been fine, if he’d just said it like that. The problem is that Friedman fucks up the whole “tide” image by adding the two image-wrecking words bubble and rot. Only Thomas Friedman wouldn’t notice the natural relationship between the words “bubble” and “tide,” and wouldn’t realize that readers would see those two water words lumped close together and frantically search for some kind of figure of speech there. But there isn’t one: Friedman only means “credit bubble” in the sense of a “credit bubble,” so while you’re trying to figure out what the tide has to do with the bubbles, Friedman is on the other side of the room covering up rot, which most people cover with paint, using ocean water. It’s far from his best work, but bubbles are like tide covering rot is a solid base hit in the Friedmanisms game.

A techcrunch post begins with:

First, it was reported that Apple was talking to Verizon about getting the iPhone on its network in 2010. Then it was reported that Apple was actually working on new mobile devices for Verizon. With so much Apple blood in the Verizon water, it was only a matter of time before the Microsoft shark surfaced.

How is Apple bleeding in this analogy? Apple is considering jumping in to Verizon’s “water”, but the blood analogy doesn’t work. Nice try.

I make plenty of writing mistakes myself, but I at least try to make analogies coherent.

Using 5 HD projectors to animate the walls of the San Francisco Mint:

Not sure why I didn’t hear of this earlier- it would have been awesome to see live.

In case you haven’t seen it already, Auto-Tune The News is hilarious and awesome:

(this is the second one, and is my favorite)

The first is also pretty good:

Read more about Auto-Tune

Videos via Marc on twitter.