That’s not news: it’s called space. But the news is that the space near us is especially empty. You can see a map of what’s called the “Local Cavity,” a region about 260 light years across that’s more empty than average. Scientists believe that this void is a sort of crater blasted empty by a supernova 5-10 million years ago.
One of my frustrations as a casual Rubyist is trying to use some of these wonderful CPAN-like things that have appeared since I began playing with Ruby after the Hunt and Thomas article in Dr. Dobb’s. For example, gems.
The problem with Ruby (and especially rubygems) is that they don’t play nicely with the other package management tools on your system. (Ubuntu/Debian’s .deb‘s and MacPorts‘ ports). And I’m too stupid and lazy to bypass all that and go back to using tarballs and stashing everything in /usr/local.
Enter RVM, the Ruby Version Manager. It bypasses your system’s package management system. It creates a hidden folder ($HOME/.rvm) and puts whatever Ruby versions (and gems, etc.) there. But it does it all so cleverly you don’t realize what’s going on in the background. I like it.
I keep finding fun things to do with my iPhone besides making phone calls. We’ve had a lot of rain lately, but I went out last night and held my phone up to the sky and this is pretty much what I saw.
Wow! The statists running the German government think it’s a bad thing for you to educate your children.
A German couple who fled to Tennessee so they could homeschool their children was granted political asylum Tuesday by a U.S. immigration judge, according to the legal group that represented them.
Remember Animal Farm. Comrade Napoleon said he’d take care of educating the dogs.
Or if fiction’s not your thing, remember Ceau?escu’s government in Romania and its orphans.
(Kudus: Big Journalism.)
I see someone has already come out with a new Hitler Parody. This one is about the special election in Massachusetts to replace Ted Kennedy:
I saw the other day (redirected from I forget where) an interview with the director of the original movie, who is “pleased, nay, thrilled” about the development of this unique art form derived from his work.
I saw so many of these Hitler parodies that I finally Netflixed Downfall, the original movie from which the video is excerpted. It makes the third Nazi movie I’ve seen in the past several months.
I live in the future. I’m posting from my car. Cool.
Here is the GPS telling me how fast I’m going.
That’s a cool number, because it’s 29. In hex, it’s 200 (traditionally written 0x200, or 200H for old-school 8080 assembly programmers). Inn octal it’s 1000 (or, traditionally, 01000). In binary it’s 100000.
(After I noticed that, I was of a mind to wait until 01-10-10 to publish it.)
Update: it’s actually not number 512. WordPress is counting something (edits? comments?) rather than individual postings?
In this awesome piece, Bill Whittle nails both the severity of the crisis we are in, and the reasons we have to hope that all is not yet lost.
I haven’t watched Sesame Street in about a million years, but this makes me wonder what I’ve been missing.
“Is Ricky Gervais a celebrity?” Hilarious. (Via Eric Bryant.)
Lileks recounts the fun of getting a new scanner for Christmas. There’s really nothing new or novel about it though (except that he took time to make screen captures of all the dialog boxes, so he could mock them). The fact is, all scanners suck.
I have ready access to scanners (all-in-ones, actually) made by HP, Epson, Brother, and, at work, a monster Konica-Minolta printer-copier that also scans. Every one of them is a disaster. The printing software is good and the scanning software stinks.
The hardware may be awesome, but the software is horrible. And bad as it is on Windows, it’s worse on a Mac. (Objectively worse; subjectively it’s worse by far, because the majority of software on a Mac is beautiful.) My personal theory, which I developed while working for one of the companies I just named, is that scanner software is written by electrical engineers instead of computer scientists. EE’s may be great with resistors and capacitors, but I haven’t met one in years who was a more than passable programmer. (But these are rants for another day.)
Anyway, my advice to Lileks and anyone else is twofold:
