Friday  28 Jan 2011           comment?

From the Tucson Sentinel:

National Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system near Naco observed a catapult being set up south of the border last Friday evening, authorities said.

Several individuals set up a trebuchet, a type of catapult powered by a counterweight, just south of the border fence, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a news release.

A video clip released by the agency shows a small group apparently launching drugs over the border with the device.

A Trebuchet! Next thing you know, they'll use a Palatino.

Wednesday  19 Jan 2011           1 comment

The Russians, being devious and cunning, hide their country around the curve of the earth. We, on the other hand, are out in the open on the front part.

(after a cartoon I saw years ago in I can't remember which magazine)

Thursday  13 Jan 2011           1 comment

Got a new clutch. It didn't come in a choice of colors, but fortunately I like red.

Sunday  09 Jan 2011           5 comments

Two brief (and wholly unrelated) observations:

• Courtroom scenes are often my favorite parts of movies.
• Brazil has some cool bridges.

Tuesday  04 Jan 2011           comment?

Way cool pic of today's eclipse. (And I like the desert landscape in the pic at the bottom of that page, too.)

Monday  03 Jan 2011           3 comments

Computers offer a choice of integer or floating point arithmetic. I sometimes use integers in cases where most people would reach for floating point, for a bunch of reasons: integer math is faster, it behaves more deterministically, I have a taste for doing things the hard way, and I just like integers.

In giving Tommyjournal its (customary, annual) new look, I made some tweaks to the code that generates the background images. For one, I wanted to banish some discontinuous-looking effects that cropped up from time to time, which turned out to be due to (integer) overflow. But when I fixed that, other effects that I liked went away.

The overflow was a bug in the sense that the code wasn't doing what I'd intended it to do. Yet I liked its good effects enough that I ended up leaving it in place.

This episode illustrates the limits of the maxim I heard from a teacher 36 or so years ago: Good writing is conscious writing.

Perhaps, instead, a directive due to Brian Eno applies: Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

In any event, the overflow and its effects--both desirable and otherwise--wouldn't have happened at all if I'd used floating point.

Happy New Year, everyone.