Category: Uncategorized

Okay, having just moved to WordPress, I must almost immediately report a problem. I have, at great expense, uncovered a truly weird bug. Believe it or not, you can’t make a post with the word perl in it. I had to resort to some tag trickery to get this to display. Here’s what I actually had to type:

p<span>erl</span>

Utterly bizarre.

At least I figured out why my post a few days ago didn’t work. I’m running WordPress 2.0.5, freshly downloaded. Can any WordPress users out there confirm if they’re seeing this too?

I realize my post about Movable Type and WordPress the other night may have been a little incoherent, particularly if you’re not familiar with blogging software. The engine that drives this blog is now provided by a software package called WordPress. Up until the beginning of this week, it was provided by Movable Type.

I had been thinking about moving to WordPress for some time, but I am a late adopter and generally lazy. It was the comment spam that finally put me over the edge. Movable Type has comment spam blocking tools, but I tried several and I couldn’t get them to work. I only have a certain amount of time each night to spend on this kind of thing, and if I blow through that installing and re-installing something that doesn’t work, I get very irritated. Someone at SixApart (the Movable Type folks) had written what looked to be a very nice spam-blocking plugin. I was excited to try it and be done with my spam scourge. But there was a long involved process to install it that involved unzipping archives, FTP transfers, rebuilding the site, inserting a special string in three different files, rebuilding the site again, then swearing when it didn’t work.

I took my troubles to the support site for the plugin. In an uncivil moment, I mentioned that I had “blown two hours trying to make this work” and was “feeling frustrated.” The plugin author responded quickly, and pointed out quite rightly that he hadn’t charged me a dime for his plugin, and that if I followed the steps carefully I would probably get it working. Upon reading his reply, I quickly concluded that we were both right. He didn’t deserve to be chastised for a gift, but I had good reason to be frustrated. The problem was Movable Type. It was just too damned fiddly and it smelled of overripe perl scripts. It was just never going to be easy to install a spam blocker.

This finally kicked me in the pants and got me to move my bags over to a newer cleaner architecture with WordPress. And it’s working for me very well. Aside from my inauspicious start the other night, flushing my very first post…

I’ve discovered a really fun Flickr party trick. If you want to turn your brain off and just stare at some amazing eye candy, pick a fun term to search for. Suppose you choose Hawaii. But what you really want are dramatic, luscious pictures of Hawaii, not somebody’s bad holiday snapshots. In that case you just click on the “View: Most interesting” link. Then you get a set of Hawaii pictures sorted by the interestingness quality algorithm, which is something like Google’s PageRank. On beyond that, suppose you’re going to do a conference talk about Hawaii and you want to punch things up a little. You’re probably going to want some freely distributable Creative Commons interesting pictures of Hawaii. A quick visit to the Advanced Search page makes this no problem.

But here’s the grand finale: from tag search results page, you can dial up an automatic slideshow sorted by interestingness. And you can roll it all into one juicy URL like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/hawaii/interesting/show/

Now you’re ready to blow some time. Pick one and go… color, burning man, Barcelona, Yellowstone, splash.

Now that’s the internet I used to dream about back in 1995.
[via O’Reilly Radar]

Here’s a sad story. I wrote a long post explaining why I was so happy to be moving from creaky old Movable Type to shiny new WordPress.

And then I saved it.

And then WordPress ate it.

So now I am writing this short, sad post instead of my long happy post.

Nevertheless, I am glad to be moving on from Movable Type.

If you’ve seen Line Rider, then you’ll enjoy this.

If you haven’t seen Line Rider, then you’ll enjoy this. There are stacks of these videos on YouTube. Who knew this guy was launching a franchise?

Now this is why I read blogs: Paul Docherty is head-over-heels in love with chemical synthesis and wants to tell you all about it. And I want him to tell me about it. His blog, TotallySynthetic.com is crackling with enthusiasm and filled with lovely diagrams and little stories that report on the latest news in the world of organic chemical synthesis. This is exactly what you don’t get in a typical chemistry class. Can you imagine how many chemists we’d have if high school teachers were half as thrilled as this?

Here’s a sampling from today’s post, Modern Aldol Methods for the Total Synthesis of Polyketides.

With all this focus on polyketide/macrolide synthesis, I thought I’d highlight an interesting review in this week’s Angewandte; a genuine masterclass in the aldol reaction.

There’s nothing pretentious about it. It’s all sinewy facts knotted together with excitement, punctuated by little self-effacing asides like “I was quite taken with this transformation, but it obviously shows that I need to brush up on my diazo chemistry…” Somehow I feel as though I’m learning something terribly useful, even though I don’t understand a word of it.

I’ve always loved technical jargon as used by someone joyfully immersed in it, whether it’s 19th century sailing terminology or dental jargon. Bring on your ipsilateral translation of the condyle, your girt lines and masting falls! Money pays the bills, but it’s Kocienski–Julia olefination that makes the world go around.

Popular Science magazine also hosts a blog, and it’s got a bunch of fun stuff on it. I had always thought of the old school Popular Science as a pretty silly magazine, mostly about hyped up quasi-science fluff. But it’s gotten a lot better over the last few years, and their blog is so entertaining that it definitely drives me to purchase the actual paper magazine more often.

They’ve been a real tear with their last few entries. I don’t know if they’re getting any work done on the magazine, because somebody’s doing an awful lot of web surfing. Here are a few choice items from the past week:

Watch a racing motorcycle crash and burst into flame. The rider is okay, and there is an interesting discussion of why this kind of thing never happens with cars, but did with this motorcycle. Goodbye, Moto

Watch a crane trying to lift a truck out of a river and back onto a bridge. As it happens, the truck pulls the crane down into the river. The Breakdown: Crane Overboard!

Every physics teacher who teaches the concept of resonance needs to show this in their class. A Boeing Chinook helicopter has two rotors, and if they start exciting vibration modes of the fuselage when it’s sitting on the ground, bad things can happen. If the word “resonance” doesn’t sound so bad, take a look at this video: Shake, Shake Chinook.

And don’t miss the African watering hole cam. It’s a live video feed with sound, and there’s something very appealing about listening to crickets on another continent.

Recently I watched the movie Touching the Void the story of two British climbers who have a really wretched experience climbing a mountain in the Andes. A friend of mine, who is a climber, had told me that this was the climbing movie that gets climbing right. This statement intrigued me, because climbing is a technical skill and it’s easy to screw up the movie about a technical topic.

If you are directing a movie in which much of the dialogue is built on a complex understanding between skilled professionals, you have a real problem. You have to find a way to explain to your audience what’s going on without damaging the scene. You see different approaches to solving this problem. Sometimes, a naive character is introduced so that one of the professionals can explain the technical details. More often, though, the director simply chooses to have two skilled professionals address each other using explicit elementary language that would never occur in real life.

This kind of thing often shows up in movies about pilots. Consider: you are a pilot, and your plane is about to crash into a mountain. What do you say? On the one hand, anyone dealing with a plummeting airplane is, at some level, scared. On the other hand, pilots are trained to deal with terrifying situations. They have years of experience all built around the idea of emotionless, concentrated problem-solving right to the bitter end. No matter how much a director wants it said, a pilot will NEVER EVER look at another pilot and say “I’m so scared.”

It’s the same with climbers. So much goes unsaid. In real life you get “Hmmph” instead of “Hey Joe, don’t drop that rope, okay? ‘Cause if you do I’m going to drop 3000 feet onto those pointed rocks down there.” How can a director communicate what’s not being said? In “Touching the Void” the director approaches the movie almost entirely as a documentary. You see nearly silent actors on the mountain against a narration by the original real-life protagonists. It’s a powerful combination. It surfaces the hidden dialogue and also solves the second problem of movies about technical topics. If you let the geeks make movies about geeks, they will put the correct technical details into a movie devoid of any emotional spark. Making a movie like this is a balancing act, but sure enough, “Touching the Void” gets it right.

What is the illuminating but hidden dialogue that follows you around throughout the day? Maybe something like this: “Hey Joe, if you knew you were taking the last of the coffee, then why didn’t you make more for the rest of us? Now I have to throw you over a 3000 foot cliff onto those pointed rocks down there. Asshole.”

Twice a year, I help run a MATLAB programming contest in which contestants try to write the fastest code to solve a math puzzle, using a resource any work done by previously submitted entries. In other words, you’re welcome to steal from those who came before you. It’s a free intellectual property open source barbecue. It works surprisingly well and results in seriously optimized code. So the first question I get when I explain it to people is this: can’t we apply this technique to some useful real world problem? But here’s the thing: the programming contest has a great advantage in its unambiguous figure of merit. If you can make the code run faster, that’s all I need to know, and I only need a clock to figure that out.

Suppose you wanted to make a similar contest to write a great poem. You’re immediately faced with a big problem: There’s no automatic poem analyzer. Who gets to judge whether or not your poem is better than the current leader’s? The Wikipedia approach comes close to programming contest idea here, in that lots of people are busy making improvements (or changes at any rate) to the same “code” or Wikipedia entry. But you can’t make a running report of the “goodness” of the article over time. It may get longer, but is it getting better? That’s a matter of opinion.

Into this space comes an interesting startup called Helium. They solve the problem of quantitative evaluation by letting members vote. So the same topic (say “How to find the best mortgage rate”) may have multiple articles, but only one of them will be voted number one. The lowest rated article for the mortgage question was this: “go to http://www.google.com and write down How can I get the best rate on a mortgage? you will get the best rate.” Good advice, but wouldn’t it be cool if the top rated result was this very page?

I think there’s still an optimal mix of Wikipedia and Helium that doesn’t exist yet, but we’re getting closer. (Helium spotted on Techcrunch)