free variable

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.)

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)

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.

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.

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.

I, too, learned basic computer programming at home.

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

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.

I got 10/10. How about you?

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”

Facebuster, a new slab-serif by Silas Dilworth, has caught a lot of buzz lately. It’s pretty nice, but the real delight for me was in idly browsing through the rest of the Type Trust site and remembering how much I like Dino Dos Santos’ Leitura Sans.

Apropos of this observation of WT and my undying, white-hot scorn for Elmo, here’s an interesting post from Language Log on the subject of toddler illeism and personal pronouns.

“[O]nly two in five Americans know that we have three branches of government and can name them,” and other comforting thoughts. (Thanks to Tony for the link.)