90% of Enviro Skeptic Books Have Think Tank Roots - where do all these reality-denying books come from? Conservative think tanks in the US seem to have a big hand in it. And as the study so nicely puts it: "Thus, the notion that environmental skeptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of skeptics as marginalized 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as skeptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations."
Archive 9. June 2008
Algorithmic Botany: Publications - "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" as download!
Cog Blog - fascinating blog of a programmer who is building a new Squeak Smalltalk VM, and writes about the problems of the Blue Book architecture and possible solutions - and he comes from VisualWorks VM development, so he should know what he's talking about. Very interesting to read and the result could also be interesting, as he predicts significant performance gains for his new VM.
Factor: a practical stack language: - why I love following Factor development: the programmers have no qualms about radically redesigning the language and making massive changes to semantics, even shying away from redesigning defining words. This of course makes the use of the language for real purposes a bit hairy, but it's simply thrilling to see how language constructs are juggled and the path to an optimal language is sought. And since they adjust the entire included library every time, the transition pains are not quite as great (and the included library is already absolutely impressive and currently has one of the best Unicode implementations I've seen so far)
Fractured YEARFRAC and Discounted DISC - interesting summary of the disaster called Excel and OOXML. The standard that is not one, because it is not standardized. But Microsoft presents it as a standard, so it fits perfectly into the times when no one knows how to spell "standard" correctly anymore ... (and anyone who does financial calculations with Excel deserves to be slapped and whipped)
TileStack - Your Creative Playground - HyperCard rebuild on the web. Compiles their HyperTalk dialect "Speak" to JavaScript. Interesting idea, could definitely make sense.