One thing I love about Ruby (vs php)
The case (aka switch in other languages) control structure in Ruby is great. The first when clause that evaluates true is the only one executed.
Compare to PHP’s switch, which lets execution fall-through to every passing case until it finds a break. That’s just wrong. It’s so counter-intuitive. Sure, a veteran PHP programmer will have those breaks hardcoded into their fingertips, but that’s learned, not instinctual behavior. And yeah, you can get clever and take advantage of the cascading execution, but you do it at the expense of legibility. How many debugging hours have been spent chasing down forgotten breaks?
Ruby, on the other hand, does it right. The language doesn’t even give you the option of letting execution fall through. Less is more here. Less mental clutter and debugging, more natural, clean code.
Blue-Ringed Octopus
My sister is a TA for a Carleton study abroad program in Australia right now, and she just clued me in to their program blog. It’s full of gorgeous underwater pictures, like the blue-ringed octopus:
Or, as I like to call it, the blue-ringed octopus of death. It uses a type of neurotoxin called a tetrodotoxin that blocks sodium channels and paralyzes you. It doesn’t inhibit mental facility, though, so its victims have the gruesome pleasure of being totally cognizant of their fate as they lay motionless and people around them assume they’re dead. There are stories of people getting buried alive after a run-in with one of these creatures. The blue-ringed octopus is small but still carries enough venom to poison 26 adult humans.
And my lucky sister has seen not one but three of them in the wild now.
Bush and the Tolstoy Syndrome
That is a clip from A Charge to Keep, Bush the younger’s favorite painting because he believes it reflects pioneering ideals — he sees a man forging on into the wilderness, blazing a trail for all to follow. The reality is somewhat different. That Harper’s article goes on to explain that Bush has “Tolstoy Syndrome,” something I’d never heard of before. But I like the idea and can already think of some other people it applies to.
That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. But in fact he’s a wily criminal one step out in front of justice. It perfectly reflects Bush the man. . . and Bush the president.
Volubilis
Someone named John wrote me the other day to ask permission to use this pic of Volubilis on his myspace page. Cool.
Public Art in St. Petersburg
Ji, whom I collaborated with on the interactive version of the Bubble Project, and with whom I am currently working on another, unreleased project, was in Russia recently for a public art project. He has some interesting posts up on this Public Art Russia blog.
Hatred in America
Talking Points Memo posted a video of Bill Moyers explaining Hillary’s LBJ quote from a while back. It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it, although it seems the flap has mostly died down now. At the 1:33 mark there’s a photo from the fifties of some teenagers holding a sign that I’m not going to quote here. It got me thinking about hatred in America in general and the incredible, unconscionable tolerance we continue to have for anti-gay sentiment.
Here’s a video about how Huckabee recently compared homosexuality to bestiality.
I really believe that there will be a time, hopefully soon, when we look back on the debates about same-sex marriage and the way gays are marginalized in popular discourse, and have the same repulsed disbelief that we do now looking at footage of the civil rights activity in the fifties and sixties.
Bobby Fischer, dead at 64
Bobby Fischer died today. What an interesting iconoclast.
A related side note: For the past week, Choire Sicha (pronunciation mp3), formerly of Gawker, has been guest-blogging for kottke.org all this week. Jason did this before, and both times I’ve found it interesting how the particular interests of the guest blogger take the blog down slightly different roads. Joel Turnipseed tended to post long, intellectual interviews, and I’d say Choire’s dominant themes so far are gay, art, nyc, and music, in that order. He’s got a strong personality and a narrower, less technologically-inclined focus than Jason, and the dissonance has grated on me all week.
And when I read that Fischer had died, my first thought was, I should have read this on kottke.org, because I know it’s something Jason would be interested in.
Update: Yep, when Kottke came back to his blog, he was all over it.
Kerfuffle only has one L
I always, always thought it was kerfLuffle. Huh. Thanks, A Word a Day, today I am one letter smarter than yesterday.
Melbourne, Distilled
When I was studying abroad in Melb’n I remember walking down Lonsdale street once when a passing, slightly drunk-looking Melburnian greeted with me an effusive, “G’day mate.” I wanly said, “Hi,” and he confidently replied, “Yeah, not bad,” as he strode past me. That experience has always seemed uniquely Australian to me, and this video captures pretty much the same spirit.
(passed to me by the danimal)
St John 2006-2007
Here’s my “life poster” from my family’s holiday travels in ‘06 and ‘07. Click through to see the whole slideshow.
