dsandler.org/wp

Archive for January, 2005

Not One More Damn Pseudo-Intellectual Poorly-Conceived Protest, Quote Unquote

Friday, January 21st, 2005

Brilliant rant about Not One More Damn Dime Day. [Update 1/23: dkp recommends Naked Economics to those looking for more reasons that this kind of zero-sum thinking is unproductive, no matter how well-intentioned.]

Posted in Notebook | Comments Off

Coffeehouse renovation update.

Friday, January 21st, 2005

I never heard anything back from the Rice Coffeehouse about my suggestions for the renovation, but a recent visit to the site shows that they’ve developed a final concept that seems to share a few things with my sketch (including bar seating and a convenient coffee-condiment station).

I’m still not sure I like the partitions, but maybe they’ll look better in person than they do in my head.

Posted in Notebook | Comments Off

גז״י

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

GZY, a collection of all references and descriptions of the fable of King Solomon’s ring (or, “This Too Will Pass”). [via Boing Boing]

Posted in Notebook | Comments Off

Master Foo educates the zealots.

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

One day, Master Foo was browsing the Web, reading about optional typechecking on Guido’s blog.

A great multitude of static typing zealots arrived up the mountain from the town below and begged an audience with Master Foo.

Posted in Notebook | Comments Off

Half-life.

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

Brian explains why Half-Life 2 should be the game of the year (er, that is, last year).

Then, there’s the Havoc physics engine. My God, the Havoc physics engine. It is a thing of beauty to behold and to exploit with the gravity gun. There are also many areas that can only be passed through an understanding of physics, as well as several ancillary things that can only be obtained or reached through judicious use of the gravity gun and materials.

Posted in Notebook | Comments Off

insert pipe joke here

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

Yahoo’s Jeremy Z. just wants to insert a printf() in his plumbing.

Posted in Notebook | No Comments »

nofollow, no cry

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

Christopher Baus: “I boldly predict that in one year Google will give up and ignore “nofollow” meta-data.” His argument, in a nutshell: “Link data is Google’s number one asset. Today they just admitted that asset isn’t as valuable as it used to be.” Bah. They admitted, instead, that the world has changed, and that A links-to B no longer strictly implies A endorses B.

Update: It seems that there’s a growing backlash against nofollow, claiming it damages the Web or PageRank doesn’t motivate spammers (+) or even that spammers don’t even bother with HREFs sometimes.

I guess my problem is that I keep viewing spammers as essentially rational (which they are) but I totally misapprehend the utility of their various strategies. (Can you tell I’m enrolled in a game theory course this semester?)

Update #2: Via Brad DeLong, an even-handed opinion by Chuq Von Rospach: “Why ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ isn’t the answer. Or is at best only a partial one.” In essence, not only is it free to comment-spam, but it’s also highly unlikely that weblog software will be updated to annotate untrusted links appropriately. I think I can get behind this viewpoint—it’s a great idea, a useful thing to add to our bag of WWW tricks, but it won’t eliminate comment spam tomorrow.

Posted in Notebook | Comments Off