There was a good article I was going to link to today. In the four days since I bookmarked it, the company whose blog it was on has been taken over by another company and their website closed down Luckily, a few fragments of the web remain:
Happy invoicing!
- Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel - Tim Maly contemplates the cultural impact of the technological changes that have led to vacuous books on coniferous wood imports to Bosnia and Herzegovina (a mere $156), "object spam" in Second Life, and - this past weekend - a company selling (supposedly) automatically-generated t-shirts bearing rape jokes on Amazon: "Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel twisted through the logic of SEO and commerce." (N.B.
his link to The Library of Babel is mangled; I've fixed it thereI tweeted him about the broken link, and he's fixed it. If you don't know the story, you should read it, because it's awesome.)
- The 8085's register file reverse engineered - "On the surface, a microprocessor's registers seem like simple storage, but not in the 8085 microprocessor. Reverse-engineering the 8085 reveals many interesting tricks that make the registers fast and compact. The picture below shows that the registers and associated control circuitry occupy a large fraction of the chip, so efficiency is important. Each bit is implemented with a surprisingly compact circuit. The instruction set is designed to make register accesses efficient. An indirection trick allows quick register exchanges. Many register operations use the unexpected but efficient data path of going through the ALU." A Zeity special, by Ken Shirrif
- How Does SeaWorld Masturbate their Stud Killer Whales? Rocker Tommy Lee Says “Cow Vaginas” And He Is Almost Right. - "As far as killer whales are concerned, the semen is collected from an adult male trained to voluntarily ejaculate. The male, positioned belly up and adjacent to the edge of the pool, is trained to present his penis." The article includes photographs of this process, which may be NSFW if you work with large marine mammals
- Coding Confessional - "Anonymous Confessions from Programmers." Such as "I use pictures from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic when client takes too long to send actual images for site." (I use a large collection of pictures of apes for the same purpose.)
- Why Your Music Files Sound Like Crap - "All of the compression algorithms are based on outdated understanding of how the human ear works." Looks like you'll have to re-encode all your CDs if you want to make the most of those gold-plated speaker cables
- Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street - Former trader Chris Arnade on the way financial incentives positively encourage investment bank employees to be reckless: "If you make a bunch of money you get personally wealthy. If you lose then you just go home and look for a new job."
- 5 Easy Ways to Spot a B.S. News Story on the Internet - David Wong offers a simple guide to identifying crap, including a special mention for CUK's favourite crapfest: "I guarantee that everyone reading this has clicked on, and believed, a bulltulip Daily Mail story within the last year. Their website has become the most popular news website in the world, largely because of their talent for getting Americans to forward their bulltulip to each other."
- My First Message From the Future: How Facebook Died - First in a series of great blog posts by Joe Hladacek: "...hindsight being 20/20, they should have seen – should see – that the Facebook social network is destined to become little more than a stale resting place for senior citizens, high-school reunions and, well, people whose eyes don’t point in the same direction." Also check out his second message: Messages From the Future: The Fate of Google Glass - "Glass just smacked of the old I’m-an-important-technical-guy-armor syndrome. The 90′s cellphone belt holster. The 00′s blinky blue bluetooth headset that guys left in their ears blinking away even while not in use. And then Google Glass."
- The Left Bank Ape: An exclusive look at bonobos - "Suddenly a screechy altercation broke out between Nobita and another male, Jiro. Kiku, Nobita’s elderly mother, charged over to support her son. Cowed by the two of them, Jiro retreated. He sulked in a nearby tree. It’s interesting, Sakamaki noted, that Nobita is the largest male in this group, and yet his mother helps him in a fight." Sounds like the police catching up with a teenage joyrider just as he makes it back to his mum's council house. (Sorry, bonobos, didn't mean to insult you with that comparison.)
- Before VFX - "Blockbuster movies without visual effects." Good collection of stills taken before the magic is added, such as this one from Planet of the Apes with green dots standing in for fur:
Happy invoicing!
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