Ruby is all about the duck-typing. Most of the time, I am too. But sometimes, it can lead to some very confusing and very nasty issues. Suppose you get a variable, h , from someone's cool helper function, and with it you want to build up a hash of Widgets. You have millions and billions of Widgets in your database, but you...

Herman Melville is my favorite author, hands down. I could describe his writing like a fine wine: it's dark and complex, full of subtlety and nuance; it's full-bodied and has an incredibly long finish. I'll have a lot more to say about Herman Melville in a few weeks. I'm at the beginning of The Confidence-Man , the awesome...

Jessica spoils me....

The last few days have thrown a deluge of posts about applications of consistent hashing into my path. Enough so that I broke down to read one , then another , and then a third. I liked the way that third article read the most, so I decided to link to it a little more prominently: read on to discover what consistent hashin...

London Transport is running an interesting ad campaign to encourage drivers to watch out for bicyclists. What interests me most about this is the fact that it's a verbatim copy of some very interesting visual cognition research done in the late 90s. Take a look at the original video here (warning: 7.5mb Java Applet). I fou...

Forget dividing states by political tendencies or CO 2 emissions — the real question is, Starbucks or Walmart? . ( via kottke.org )...

I recently finished reading Fracis Bacon's Essays, Civil and Moral ; I found these essays to span the range between insightful, enjoyable, tedious, insipid, and outright offensive. One particular excerpt from Of Judicature struck me as particularly insightful, and nearly prescient of today's litigious attitude towards copy...