Prosthetic Conscience
Jason McBrayer's weblog; occasional personal notes and commentary
Sun, 04 May 2008
Links for 2008-05-04
- Sorry Absinthe Trippers: Scientists Say You’re Just Really Drunk
This isn’t really new news — it’s been proven that neither thujone, nor any other component of wormwood oil has no significant psychotropic effect. But the new aspect of this study is that they tested antique bottles of absinthe, and found that the thujone levels of original absinthe were within the range of modern absinthes.
- XEmacs is dead, long live XEmacs
- The Emacs Problem
An oldie but goodie from Steve Yegge. I’ve read it before; I may even have posted the link before. But I was just reading over it, and this paragraph seems to boil down all the problems I’ve ever had at my job:
What would you rather do? Learn 16 different languages and frameworks in order to do “simple” log-file and configuration-file processing? Or just buckle down, learn Lisp, and have all of these problems go away forever?
It’s a rhetorical question. The answer is patently obvious at this point: Lisp is evil, and you’d damned well better write all your code in C++ and XML and JavaScript and PL*SQL and CSS and XSLT and regular expressions and all those other God-fearing red-blooded manly patriotic all-American languages from now on. No more of this crazy Lisp talk, ya hear?
- What kind of Dungeons & Dragons character would you be?
I Am A: Chaotic Good Human Wizard (4th Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-13
Dexterity-13
Constitution-14
Intelligence-17
Wisdom-13
Charisma-11
Alignment:
Chaotic Good A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he’s kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society. Chaotic good is the best alignment you can be because it combines a good heart with a free spirit. However, chaotic good can be a dangerous alignment because it disrupts the order of society and punishes those who do well for themselves.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard’s strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
Chaotic good human ranger was the next closest, which I thought was reasonable. - Holy crap, electronics revolutionized.
The long-sought after memristor–the “missing link” in electronic circuit theory–has been invented by Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow R. Stanley Williams at HP Labs (Palo Alto, Calif.) Memristors–the fourth passive component type after resistors, capacitors and inductors–were postulated in a seminal 1971 paper in the IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory by professor Leon Chua at the University of California (Berkeley), but their first realization was just announced today by HP. According to Williams and Chua, now virtually every electronics textbook will have to be revised to include the memristor and the new paradigm it represents for electronic circuit theory.
…
“This new circuit element solves many problems with circuitry today–since it improves in performance as you scale it down to smaller and smaller sizes,” said Chua. “Memristors will enable very small nanoscale devices to be made without generating all the excess heat that scaling down transistors is causing today.”
…
As Chua predicted, Williams is already thinking about creating new types of devices with HP’s crossbar architecture beyond a simple memory device. “If we push current through it hard and fast, it acts like a digital device, but if we run current through it gently and slowly it acts as an analog device,” said Williams. “We are already designing new types of circuits in both the digital and analog domains using our crossbar architecture. In the analog domain, we want to build memristor-based devices that operate in a manner similar to how the synapse works in the brain–neuron-like analog computational elements that could perform control functions where decisions must be made involving comparisons as to whether something is larger or smaller than something else.”
Hello, Skynet!
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