Survival Arts

Still busy, not dead

Thanks to those of you who've sent email wondering if I've dropped off the face of the earth. I haven't (dropped off anywhere, that is.) It's my first week back at school (organic chemistry, calculus, and biology) and I've also been busy with work and visitors from out of town. I expect I'll be blogging again semiregularly in the next couple of weeks.

For the time being, also, this blog's comment facility is still malfunctioning. It's been a low priority, given my recent time crunch, to track down the root cause. My apologies for that; I will fix it sometime in the near future.

Quote of the Day

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy induced not by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before.

Max F. Perutz

Assault Weapons Ban died today

The infamous "Assault Weapons Ban" died today. I wish I had more time to express my happiness about this, but I'm extremely busy.

Quote of the Day

> I thought many on this list would take exception to the part where he
> says, "The rights of the people come from God."

Why should I care if you want to believe your rights are a form of celestial welfare?

e0ts

Quote of the Day

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too. One of the less publicized benefits of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. When I learned to program, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. The one big chunk of code available then was Unix, but even this was not open source. Most of the people who read the source read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published until 1996.

Paul Graham, in "Hackers and Painters"

This blog's commenting facility is acting up

Damn: 2 years of running this blog using MovableType with no problems, then 2 users in the last 2 days tell me they're seeing this when they try to post comments here:

"Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

You are not allowed to post comments.

Please correct the error in the form below, then press POST to post your comment."

I very rarely block users from commenting here, and certainly wouldn't have blocked the two of you who've told me in private email. I apologize for whatever is causing this problem for you, and ask your indulgence while I try to troubleshoot the problem. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend to this until later tonight; thanks for your patience!

"A Brief Monetary History of Gilligan's Island"

Thanks to David Purves for the pointer to an entertaining article published yesterday, "The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell II (sic)," which I've discovered is also today the subject of intense discussion on Slashdot.

Those cactus pears I mentioned recently

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my discovery of the cactus pear as an edible fruit. Here's a picture of that succulent delight:

 
I'll be looking for more of these on my next trip to Half Moon Bay. Yes, yes: I do often take pictures of stuff I eat, if I find it particularly interesting. I'm not a normal guy.
 

Quote of the Day

As [Charles] Adams writes, the Lincoln Cult is terrified that this truth will become public knowledge, for it if does, it means that Lincoln "destroyed the separation of powers; destroyed the place of the Supreme Court in the Constitutional scheme of government. It would have made the executive power supreme, over all others, and put the president, the military, and the executive branch of government, in total control of American society. The Constitution would have been at an end."

Exactly right.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo
"Lincoln’s 'Great Crime': The Arrest Warrant for the Chief Justice"