b-side

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

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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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  • 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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  • 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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