dsandler.org

You know that guy who hangs suspended from the ceiling by hooks pierced through his epidermis? Well, if you take that mental picture, turn it upside down so the ceiling is hanging from the man, and instead of a ceiling you picture a tiny cat, well, you’d have a pretty accurate idea of what’s going on here, right now. (How is she able to do this? With impossibly-sharp kitten claws. See Exhibit A; Exhibit B.)

Emmaline’s also got this peculiar habit of playing soccer with individual kibble units (kibble atoms? particles? kibblons? kibbloids?). Of course, she can’t take just one out of her dish and play with it; she has to scoop a whole pawful out onto the kitchen floor and watch them scatter. (See Exhibit C).

All is forgiven, however, thanks to Exhibit D.

Erin’s site launched today. Coming soon: pictures, rants, and episode summaries of your favorite TV shows — “provided they’re [her] favorite shows.”

A somewhat awkwardly-written but +5 Insightful piece at Slashdot contains an excellent summary of why gene patenting is stupid. In essence: (summary mine)

Patents are for protecting an invented process, not the end result of that process. Purifying a protein to isolate a gene is a process; you can patent your purification technique [though those have been around for a while, and you’d have to work hard to find a truly novel technique] but you can’t [shouldn’t be able to] patent the end result — the protein, and the gene it represents. Eli Whitney didn’t receive a patent for cotton, he received it for the cotton gin. The patent system was developed to protect novel inventions, not end results; results are [should be] free to be sought by all mankind, unencumbered. If a result can be obtained by a patented method, you can license the patent and pay royalties, or develop a new method. Product patents exist and cover invented drugs and chemicals, but genes are discovered in the genome. Tell me, once a gene has been patented, how many ways are there to replicate that genome (which you may feel you have a right to do, especially if that genome is in your own cells)? Someone else has a patent on your DNA.

In an int erview with Spielberg and Cruis, Roger Ebert learns about a novel application of algorithmic/computational robotics [2], specifically motion planning: (warning, the interview has quite a few spoilers; I think I’m going to suspend my reading until I’ve seen the movie)

Spielberg: Another shot I want to talk about is the overhead shot when the spiders first swarm into the tenement building. We’re looking straight down into all those rooms, and the camera follows the spiders over to a girl’s face, and to a guy sitting on the john–all these people in the building.

Now that looks like it must be a computer shot but it isn’t. That’s a real, physical set. I tried to storyboard it, but it was so complicated, and finally Alex McDowell [the art director] suggested we try designing the shot on the computer. No set had been built yet. And we asked the computer, “How do we get this shot?” and the computer said, “You need a crane that goes in and out.” There happens to be a TechnoCrane than telescopes in and out like a car aerial, and the computer told us where to put the crane, how to move it, how to get all the shots I wanted, all in one take. Then Alex built the set. So, no, there’s not a single CHI [sic] shot in that sequence–but a computer told us how to do it!

Whoa. Looks like there’s a new Palm-powered … uh, handheld?

I have discovered that my project’s codebase is like a sweater knitted from one continuous piece of thread. Except instead of “thread” think “gobs and gobs of 500-line functions, taking no arguments and returning none, modifying global variables.”

In order to clean up some of the functionality, I grabbed a thread and started pulling … and pulling … and pulling …