PFunked

George Carlin

George Carlin (along with Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor) was one of the groundbreaking comedians of our lifetimes.

His obscenity charges were taken all the way to the Supreme Court, in the landmark 1978 case. A narrow majority (5/4) ruled his work was indecent but not obscene.

A lot has changed about the culture since then, and we owe a lot of our freedom of expression to Carlin.

shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

Joe Pesci bless you, George. We won't forget you.

Wheel of Lunch

This might be ancient but it's my new favorite thing. Wheel of Lunch

Habeas Corpus Restored at Guantanamo

Finally, the Supreme Court has ruled that even "enemy combatants" being held at Guantanamo have a right to contest their detainment in civilian courts.

You see, this is exactly the kind of situation for which Habeas Corpus exists.

BBC article - Supreme Court ruling cripples Guantanamo trials

Ruby and Duck Typing

Poking around with Ruby (the programming language). One of the first things I noticed is that it's a weakly typed language. While that's true, it's a little more interesting than that.

This method of not caring about the actual type of a variable, just relying on what methods it supports is known as “Duck Typing”, as in “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”. The benefit of this is that it doesn’t unnecessarily restrict the types of variables that are supported. If someone comes up with a new kind of list class, as long as it implements the join method with the same semantics as other lists, everything will work as planned.

from Ruby in Twenty Minutes

So at runtime you can check an object to see if it supports certain methods (e.g. sort, or [for] each, or join) and perform actions based on that. I find it to be neat. Of course you have to remember to check for these things, but it seems Ruby code is adaptable in a good way.

Not far enough into it yet, but this seems to trim some of the fat out of using Interfaces (a la Java) for many cases.

I'm sure it's happened to you

So I was on the road, explaining the complex plane (as used in the Mandelbrot set) to my girlfriend. I was so involved that I didn't notice I had entered a small town (cruise still set to 65, town is 45). Got pulled over.

Didn't get a ticket, but I was too nervous to tell the cop the truth -- I was so excited about math that I missed the 55 sign.