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Gowran Co. Killkenny. Figured this would probably be a guy with an alligator in his bathtub, or at least it was there until it ran off, probably with the neighbour’s dog. They are now having adventures on a raft Huckleberry Fin style. And no I don’t know why an alligator would need a raft.
The Reptile Village was much better then I expected. When we walked in we were handed a boa constrictor. This was worth the price of admission alone. Next thing they handed us a legless lizard, which looked like a snake to me but wasn’t. Convergent evolution if ever you saw it. While I’m on the subject of evolution how do Intelligent Designers explain geckos feet. There was loads of geckos at the village, hanging upside down chilling out, you know. Anyway if God made there feet to grip on to walls like that how come our scrotums which look pretty much the same have no gripage powers. You would think she would have reused the same sort of kit after making it once. Have you ever tried to grip onto something with your scrotum? After walloping my knackers three times off the wall I kinda lost consciousness but seeing as I woke up on the floor I’m pretty sure no climbing ability accrues to you scrotum. While I am on a scrotal diversion, how bad has this world cup been for testicles? Between Rooney stamping and grinding on them and an Argie sub kicking a German in the nuts from behind, how low is kicking someone in the nuts from behind?
Anyway there followed spitting cobras, cameleons eating, loads of dragons, alligators, rattle snakes and lizards of all sorts. Really active as well not just lying around looking cold as you get at some zoos. Another thing is I tend not to like zoos because mammals in general seem to just look bored not having antelope to chase and trees to climb etc, the reptiles however did not look unhappy. Hard to tell what an unhappy iguana would look like but I’d like to think you could tell.
Next was feeding time. Feeding a rattlesnake, and a spitting cobra has to about has hardcore as you can get. The staff obviously loved there job and talking about the reptiles. It’s really rare to get non surly people in a place so its top notch to see. Just in case watching rattlesnakes and cobras eating was not interactive enough a bearded iguana like creature was happy to sit on your shoulder and the hissing cockroaches hissed when touched.
The reptile Village is a top notch place. If you are in Kilkenny for the weekend, even if your on the way from Cork to Dublin it really is worth calling in, I don’t know if its ideal stag weekend fair but handling snakes and seeing rattlesnakes eating has to be better then pitch and put for an afternoon.
How old school is wearing a cross round your neck? Could we not update the symbol to more reflect the life
of a semetic politician today rather then 2000 years ago? There unlikely to crucify him if he comes back today maybe we would have to wear a model explosive belt. How about a car being hit by missiles? Or someone out in a cafe getting ripped apart by shrapnel? Being crushed by a tank? being shot has been a consistent favorite maybe we can get gun necklaces.
Technology has moved on the "what would Jesus do?" slogan should be replaced with "how would jesus be murdered?"
Will Bill gone Microsoft are probably looking for a new meglomaniac autistic leader. Pity I am over qualified.
I have been trying to decide what new programming language to learn. The choice for me is mainly based on three criteria.
1. Nice, clean and useful
2. Decent community. In the sense of a good few libraries and people willing to help out.
3. Different, I want to get my noodle around something new so a Java, Perl, C, C++ knock off does not really interest me.
So the chooses seemed to be LISP, Ruby, Haskell or some such functional language.
There is all sorts of program language shoot outs. One problem with these is your comparing leet users with other leet users. An assembly program might end up being quicker but other then lines of code they do not really factor how difficult this program is to write, most importantly how difficult it is to get up to the level where you can write like this. The second problem is these benchmarks are necessarily contrived and so as soon as they are known can be gamed by language creators, i.e. introduce a language function “Fibonacci” or something more subtle.
Instead of going by these benchmarks I decided to set my own. Find the source code on the web to a port scanner written in a load of languages and make a comparison. This arbitrary unfair comparison is designed to test how well used and friendly a language is, how a program looks and be an actual example rather then an already gamed. This test is entirely unfair given that it is on a random topic that may be of interest to no one else and that it is based on my subjective judgements of what looks like nice code. If you can think of a program you’d rather write search for “PROGRAM” and various languages.
Yes you can write this program in you favourite language, probably better then the examples below, but this is looking at how it has been done.
Ruby About 40 lines clear enough but the regular expression stuff is a Perl like explosion in a punctuation factory.
Java example is not bad once you strip away the GUI stuff it seems to be about 20 lines of understandable (not crap.MoreCrap.ActionListener.ShoutingCrap()) code. Just to realign the universe there is an overly complicated version.
Erlang, Ocaml, Dylan- no sample could be found
Perl about 40 lines of very clean code or shorter one that makes me feel like I’m about to pitch a fit. There are nearly as many Perl scanners out there as C ones which does indicate a thriving Perl community in this area.
Php about 10 lines of incredible simple code. Strangely this makes me think not that PHP is good but that the test is stupid…
VB: Thank God these were awful I was beginning to doubt the whole premise. If I had to use this language I.would.kill= kill.everyone. Looking at this code reminds me of the scene in wrath of Khan where the guy gets his brains eaten by the beetle.
C, C++ are clearly hot molten evil. Well not really check out codeproject and codeguru there is loads of examples of how these would be written.
Haskell 50 lines of indentation balancing monadic grappling goodness. Considering I started this quest after seeing this code and thinking it was good in retrospect it seems very big and not very clever, or at least so clever as to be stupid.
Scheme/LISP
Code seems nice enough but for some reason the weird mixture of (o^+ in the rexexp parts make me feel like dancing the robot Genki Sudo style
Also redefining the syntax of loops does seem like showing off.
So what have we learned? Very little actually. I am still trying to decide between LISP, Ruby, Haskell.
My latest social network web 2.0 idea is a sure fire zeitgeist surfing IPO gauranteed* cert. PetPimp™ a social network of prostitute pets that you can hire. No hear me out on this one. We tag the animals by species, location, interests...we’ll I assume all dogs are pretty much into the same sorts of things, but you get the idea. We then link you up with other pets.
Poor old Spot is heading towards the end how about you let him have some fun before he goes? Would you be willing to let us introduce him to some like minded bitch? You could send off your treasured companion in style. See this is starting to sound classy already.
How immoral can it be to pimp out your pet to make a few extra quid on the side?
The bloodstock industry is worth billions, how is horses shagging a hot water bottle any different from our company. Ok Spot is hardly a thorough bred racehorse but does that mean he cannot get some little love in his life? Yes the pet sex isn’t intended to be procreative but who are you the Pope?
Ok you are not willing to go as far as getting a prostitute for your pet, how about some normal legal porn then? They do it for Pandas, why not get a mucky movie?
Ever year there is a spate of stories about the latest dog yoga or whatever pet related craze sweeping California, does PetPimp™ sound any less believable then dog psychotherapists?
*not a guarantee
In "The Open Society and Its Enemies" Karl Popper discussed how a free society can hope to triumph over a totalitarian society. The book written at a time when Nazi and Communist regimes seemed to be on the verge of destroying Democracy. One principle that Popper advocated was that only political parties and groups that support freedom should have the support of that freedom
"In a democracy, the full protection of minorities should not extend to those who vilate the law, and especially not to those who incite others to the violent overthrow of the democracy."
This type of argument allows free speech to be curtailed in the case of “hate speech”. So for example this reasoning was used in Ireland during the troubles where Section 31 banned broadcasts by the IRA's political branch Sinn Fein. So the question arises should those who refuse to defend the principles of a free society be sheltered by those freedoms? You would refuse to play a game of chess against someone who did not obey the rules but are the freedoms of a free society so fundamental that they should be given even to those who would remove them from others?
Free software is a movement that believes that software is like speech and the text used to produce programs should be openly available. Also you should be able to modify this text and this modified version then becomes available. The free software movement has recently been arguing whether software that curtails certain freedoms should be allowed to be classed as free software. This DRM software is designed to ensure that only authorised computers can access certain information. So when you buy a new song file on the internet DRM software could ensure that this song can only play on the computer you purchased the song file on.
Free speech does not cover shouting “Fire” in a cinema and I assume certain kinds of free software are also not covered, can anyone confirm this?
The question of whether free software should allow software that impinges on freedom seems closely related to whether free speech laws should allow speech that encourages freedoms to be impinged on. So if free software really is about freedom can and should this freedom be constrained?
Can we use the bleeding edge blue sky outside the box bullshit of Hype 2.0 in a real business? This is the Web 2.0 Laundry.
First thing is we do not charge for you to wash your clothes, that’s so last century. Instead when we wash your clothes we cover them in advertising. You get the free service you get the ads, bingo we have a business model.
Next we allow “donations” instead of expecting to get paid. This is the laundry’s almost traditional route of talking any money left in pants pockets. This donation is anonymous even to yourself so we advertise ourselves as cryptographically secure.
So far so good, but were lacking any “social network” buzzword bonus. Easy we give you someone else’s clothes. If you like these clothes the other persons karma is upped. In this way groups of people with similar interests cake, coke, and programming will form a unit and others with other similar interests bulimia, clenbuterol, and death will form another group.
Now we need to do something that works perfectly well at home and move it over to an unnatural habitat. Now clothes washing already qualifies for that but to make it really nonsensical like a chocolate kettle or an online isolation tank( actually forget I told you that I could get funding for that last one) we need to send the clothes on a really narrow network, pigeons trained to carry clothes is a good first start. Particularly as the pigeons shitting everywhere can only increase our profits.
So we guarantee to AJAX all your clothes send them off to random people who will using the hive mind form a social network , as soon as this reaches the tipping point our advertising revenue will 100% guarantee* that Google will wet themselves, then require our cleaning service and we will clean up.
*not a guarantee
Currently the worst name for a band I have ever heard. Things did not bode well when the bass player started warming up wankily on a six string bass. Lead guitarist is a great mixture of pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Rhythm guitarist gets all Frusciante on a great song called summer rain. This is another good thing.
Had a great song called Bully that makes you feel like you’re in the woods with a bread knife and a mission. This is a good thing if you are me but not if you are in the woods.
At this point they start swapping instruments with heroic abandon. They followed with some bouncy poppy numbers. Not bad songs but at this point it is like watching a chameleon, the changing becomes the draw rather then how it looks. The trick of changing styles takes away from the quality of the songs themselves. Also the sound poxed up, rhythm guitar seemed to be hiding in the wrong corner and unwilling to come out.
The band of obviously talented song writers and musicians never quite seemed to jell. They seem so busy showing you where they can go that they don’t really care if they take you along.
The worst name for a band I had ever heard, I had not yet heard the next bands name.
Have some great songs. “Drive” is a juggernaut that won’t even leave skid marks where it runs you over.
Rhythm guitarist is great in a dirty boozy kinda way. Bass player can play well but probably should not. Bass should grab you by the balls and shake anything else is over complicated. Singer guitarist hides behind a baseball cap and could do with throwing some shapes like the rest of the band.
Sound quality was good overloud drums but that’s due to the tiny Anaconda venue. Once this band catches you in the headlights they won’t miss you and you should not miss them.
What are you doing for the next 10 thousand years? There is a plan to build a clock that will keep time accurately for 10k [link=http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/ ]years[/link]. The main purpose of this is to get people to think long term and perhaps alter there actions accordingly. The clock is being placed in a cave because it is believed to be the most stable environment available.
Danny Hillis is building this clock. He makes some good points about the costruction.
If something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed.” f something becomes unimportant to people, it gets scrapped for parts; if it becomes important, it turns into a symbol and must eventually be destroyed. The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls managed to survive by remaining lost for a couple millennia”
Long term man made experiments have been taking place for about one hundred years. Observations of things in caves long term include.
1. Temperature readings using stalactites layer analysis.
2. Mud samples are used to tell climate in the past.
3. Natural nuclear reactors in Gabon could be used to test for changes in physical constants over time.
Could we set up an experiment in a cave now that would gather results for the next 10k years?
The choice of cave is important. It should be geologically uninteresting, no earthquakes volcanoes etc . The cave needs to be geographically isolated i.e. High above sea. Adding permanent structures to caves is a fairly bad idea. Also there is little point doing this unless people see it. So a tourist cave would be ideal given that it is fairly extensively damaged already.
So what experiment could you think of that would give out answers for 10k years? Apart form the Gedankenexperiment could any of these actually be set up?
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