Whale Oil Beef Hooked

Idle thoughts from an idle fellow

Welcome to my webbage. Browse around.

Wed, 08 Oct 2008

22:40 Old jokes: funny and not funny 

Still Funny: This usenet post on May 12, 2001, from Keith F. Lynch to alt.math.recreational: Re: Converting Pi to binary (DON'T DO IT!)

Not funny Anymore: This January 17, 2001 article to The Onion Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'.

Fri, 15 Aug 2008

22:03 Minesweeper 

Sat, 24 May 2008

10:27 Riceboy 

Riceboy < Woodring but it'll do.

It's well drawn well enough and the lettering is nicer yet. The story, however, seems confounded by it's own premises and needs, in my opinion, less C.S. Lewis and more Jack Vance. I anticipated the ending back in chapter three. In spite of this I read the whole thing in one sitting.

The other kind of riceboy.

Wed, 30 Apr 2008

20:32 Type Morphology 

Probably some fonts will work better than others.

Xx*+tf-=_~NHARQ4^MmwW3EFL<KkxXYTJS5938B&\`'.,/%7Zz2ad@?!:;ji!I1l|$Ss59gyqpePQ0OoD)}]>V<[{(CG6bhcnuUVvx

Fri, 15 Feb 2008

08:43 Humor table 

From Fowler's Modern English Usage.

MOTIVE or AIMPROVINCEMETHOD or MEANSAUDIENCE
humorDiscoveryHuman natureObservationThe sympathetic
witThrowing lightWords and ideasSurpriseThe intelligent
satireAmendmentMorals or mannersAccentuationThe self-satisfied
sarcasmInflicting painFaults and foiblesInversionVictim and bystander
invectiveDiscreditMisconductDirect statementThe public
ironyExclusivenessStatement of factsMystificationAn inner circle
cynicismSelf-justificationMoralsExposure of nakednessThe respectable
The sardonicSelf-reliefAdversityPessimismSelf

Sat, 12 Jan 2008

10:44 Archimedes' Universe 

The Sandreckoner is a remarkable work in which Archimedes proposes a number system capable of expressing numbers up to 8 × 1063 in modern notation. He argues in this work that this number is large enough to count the number of grains of sand which could be fitted into the universe.

This is from Mactutor's biography of Archimedes. The story of Archimedes well illustrates the wisdom of state-funded pure research, but also, ironically, follies of war.

Henry Mendell of California State University has a collection of Vignettes of Ancient Mathematics and there may be found his illustrated, commented translation of Sand-Reckoner.

Wed, 26 Dec 2007

20:12 Christmas Story 

Last year, for Christmas, I read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This year, I'm reading James Joyce's The Dead.

Update

Jorn Barger links to the World Wide Dubliners project which has an annotated The Dead. This is where I learned that, while The Dead is a Christmas story it's set in early January, for the epiphany, rather than Christmas day. I also learned a lot of other things indicating that I hardly understood the story when I first read it.

Sat, 15 Dec 2007

14:48 Interview with Jack Vance 

In 1976 Jack Vance appeared for two hours on a radio show Hour 25 where he answered questions and opinionated for the hosts and a few call-ins. Posted on YouTube in may of this year by TimRMortiss, part one of 12.

Mon, 22 Oct 2007

06:07 Mnemonic 

For new Oregonians.

U of O is in Eugene
and their colors are yellow and green
OSU is the other one.

Wikipedia on the "Civil War."

Sat, 06 Oct 2007

19:23 Audio Musings 

I'm trying Alsaplayer for music playing. I like being able to control it from the command line. I like that it plays all kinds of files: wav, mp3, ogg-vorbis, flac, and ogg-flac.

Which reminds me. I wonder if the ogg developers have ever reconsidered the filename extension idea. Currently they insist that ogg files end with "ogg". However, since ogg can contain different kinds of data streams, it makes sense to me that they ought to have different extensions. Currently, I'm doing the dual extension thing: my ogg-vorbis files end in ".vorbis.ogg." It's just kind of funny to name a file "song.vorbis.ogg" and call it an "ogg-vorbis file" when talking about it.

The other day I was making a mix CD and I found this song I downloaded wouldn't burn because it was sampled at 16000 bps instead of 44100 bps. It took a bit of fiddling around with SoX to resample it. Sox is kinda like ImageMagick for Audio. I think ImageMagick has been around a lot longer because it's way more involved and seems generally more sophisticated at what it does. Anyway, it's great to have these kind of tools around.

It made me think though, there must be a way to take an audio file and have a an oscilloscope type program create an image file of the waveform.

09:15 New Server Test 

Yaay! New server! SSH access! Testing 1, 2, 3, ...

Tue, 18 Sep 2007

22:50 Patent Pending 

My new get-rich-quick scheme is to invent the ultimate hand-held cleaning gadget. I'm calling it "The Fingernail".