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Death-taxis
I’ve come across a few articles recently about how modern medicine is on the road to conquer death in the next thirty years or so. I find this to be very unlikely, and I feel that people aren’t thinking about the real issues. I’ve seen two general themes. One is that the singularity will come…
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Martin Beck
Apparently the great popularity of Stieg Larsson’s novels have triggered a new interest in Swedish mystery authors. I’d like to plug the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. It’s ten books written in the 60s and 70s. Actually, other than being Swedish, they are entirely different from Larsson’s novels. Larsson reads like…
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gccgo panic/recover
Back in March Go picked up a dynamic exception mechanism. Previously, when code called the panic function, it simply aborted your program. Now, it walks up the stack to the top of the currently running goroutine, running all deferred functions. More interestingly, if a deferred function calls the new recover function, the panic is interrupted,…
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Proposition 16
California’s proposition 16, which will be voted on next Tuesday, is an interesting use of California’s bizarre ballot initiative process. The proposition says that if a local government wants to start a municipal electrical utility, it must get a 2/3 majority of votes. The proposition was initiated and almost entirely funded by PG&E, a California…
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Shrek Distances
I’m sure I’m not the only person troubled by the loose geography in the Shrek movies. In the first movie Shrek takes a couple of days to get to the dragon’s castle. In the second movie Shrek and Fiona appear to take a few days to get from Shrek’s swamp to Far Far Away by…