free variable

b-side

• “I thought that these images were robbing people of their dignity, and I felt that the rest of the story should be told as well.”

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• “The silence which followed this stretched out like an elongated object of some kind described in unnecessary detail for comic effect.”

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• I’m pretty excited about checking out Cinder, an open-source library for creative programming, once I have some free time.

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• Stuart Buck has just released an album of classical guitar for children. I ordered a copy and suspect it will be excellent; I may review it after it arrives if I get a chance.

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• I first saw the “Fight Club theory of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on Metafilter sometime last year, but was reminded of it this morning by Ann Althouse. Be warned that the link contains spoilers for both Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Fight Club; if you’ve seen both, though, it’s absolutely worth reading.

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• We’re only about a third of the way through 2010, but I think Joe Carter at the First Things blog may already have the bon mot of the year: “No doubt there will still be some magical realist-style conservatives who will scoff at the empirical evidence and argue that we just haven’t given the strategy enough time.” Well played, sir. Political ideologues of all stripes are generally inclined to ask for a bigger pyramid.

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• Happy May Day. (via Ilya Somin, who has much more on the matter.)

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• I don’t read or speak Japanese, and don’t have any good way to evaluate Japanese typefaces, but Kazuraki, a new calligraphic face from Ryoko Nishizuka at Adobe, is pretty stunning. For some reason, I find these samples even more impressive than best-of-breed Latin script faces.

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• Here’s an excellent op-ed on the recent “South Park” controversy and what it reveals.

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• Sage advice from Eric Bodden on metrics for evaluating slide presentations.

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• Here’s an amazing photoessay about the boombox, complete with ample and comic reminders of cassette-era industrial design, when — much as with today’s Windows laptops — every unchromed surface of your product was available for copy touting dubious features. (via Art Gillespie on Twitter)

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• Although I believe that legislators in a representative democracy must have (but generally should not exercise) the capacity to do unpopular things, I think Atlantic editor Megan McArdle is on to something in a piece that she closes as follows: “We’re not a parliamentary democracy, and we don’t have the mechanisms [...] that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians. The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think. If that slips away, America’s already quite toxic politics will become poisonous.”

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• My latest side project is capricious, a Ruby library for making random numbers in various probability distributions. You can download the source from github or install a package from rubygems.org.

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• In honor of the Tour de France, I’m now linking to the only two times I’ve mentioned Lance Armstrong on this site: in 2004 and in 2009. (I’m rather fond of the latter.)

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• This flickr photo set, which features whimsical macro photos of toys and recreations of famous photos in Lego bricks, is one of the neatest things I’ve seen in a while. (via Chris Bowler)

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• Why is a “minimal” Fedora installation 225 megabytes? I really enjoy these kinds of investigations, and Richard W. M. Jones provides a nice explanation of where that space goes — and what the low-hanging fruit is for those who are interested in making a smaller image.

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• The story of this bug, in which emails traveling more than 500 miles failed to deliver, is one of the more entertaining compunerd things I’ve read recently.

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• I’m wondering how hard it would be to put a car seat in the back (if there is a back) of the Tesla Roadster, which is apparently available to order now — in Canada.

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• I, too, learned basic computer programming at home.

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• In case your twitter friends don’t already include someone with a golden mouth, you can follow John Chrysostom.

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• Good grief, this attempted justification is absurd. (backstory here.)

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• Check out this amazing evisceration of Shepard Fairey’s oeuvre and bask in the shocking temerity.

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• Any article that has a sentence like this is likely to be funny: “Blalock told police he wanted to ‘throw weed’ and shoot the gun to get recognition from a record label.” But that sentence alone doesn’t do it justice: the facts of the case are bizarre, and there are nontrivial digressions on the nature of volition and the Washington Nationals.

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• Just in case you’re interested, I’ve posted a “web version” of my dissertation. (This version is different from what one might get on microfilm from UMI: the formatting is somewhat nicer, it is single-spaced, and it is designed to be printed two-sided.)

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• Kevin Seifert points out that, since they won the NFC Central in 2000, the Vikings have lost every regular-season game with “direct playoff implications”. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but sure could do without all of the Nate Poole highlights on ESPN this week.

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• Do you need a quick reference card for all of the symbols included in the LaTeX pifont package? Well, someone might, anyway: share and enjoy.

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• For his birthday, Khoi Vinh‘s girlfriend commissioned a WSJ-style hedcut of Khoi’s dog, Mister President. Unbelievably cool.

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• I suspect that children who receive ponies for Christmas are more likely to grow up to be adults who receive luxury sports-utility vehicles topped with oversized novelty bows for Christmas.

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• I got 10/10. How about you?

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• I’m mainly posting this for Andrea’s benefit, but it is probably amusing to a general audience: “I am not and have never been a vegetarian”

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