I love the essays of E. B. White. I happened upon a copy of One Man's Meat, his collection of columns about his moving from New York to a farm in Maine.

White is often compared to Henry David Thoreau, as a quintessentially American essayist. One of White's columns is called "Walden". It is a rambling letter to Thoreau about White's visit to Thoreau's home town of Concord. It begins with characteristic wit:

Dear Henry: I thought of you the other afternoon as I was approaching Concord doing fifty on Route 62. That is a high speed at which to hold a philosopher in one's mind, but in this century we are a nimble bunch.

» read more of: E. B. White on Walden... (6 paragraphs)

Industrial Light & Magic has a great short on their web site: Work In Progress. Not only are the animation and rendering fantastic, but it's a neat little parable about the process of creation, and the forces that must be properly combined to produce success.

The Child is an amazing little video. If you like type, or just different ways of presenting animated stories, watch it. It proves there is more to great animation than hyper-sophisticated 3D modelling and photo-realistic rendering. I saw this video a year ago, but was just reminded of it, and it made me smile again.

As a result of Mark Pilgrim's excellent "accessible blog" series, and in particular, his Day 6: Choosing a DOCTYPE, I put the effort in tonight to make these pages valid HTML 4.01, with a DTD and everything. I'm hoping to follow along with the other suggestions in the series.

I like the goals of Mark's series, and I like the way he's going about it. As a developer, I appreciate guidelines like this that explain what to do, and what I'll get for the effort. The explanation of benefits is especially important in this case, because many of the benefits are either "invisible" (since they don't affect the rendering of the page that most of us see), or are only visible to a small set of people.

I find nyc bloggers oddly compelling, but at the same time, totally pointless. It's basically an index to bloggers in New York City, organized by subway stop, with a graphical map of the New York subway at its core.

It's compelling and pointless for the same reason: the web is completely separated from geographical concerns. I can read and relate to weblogs without having any idea where the person lives, how old they are, what their demographic background is, and so on. To suddenly be presented with specific geographical details about weblogs is like learning that two celebrities went to the same high school: it's a strange behind-the-scenes factoid that has a whiff of significance, but makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

It's not like this grouping of blogs creates some sort of order out of the chaos: all it does is emphasize the unimportance of geographical neighborhood, especially in New York. For example, CamWorld and Cream Tangerine share the same subway stop. You won't find two more different blogs out there.

The other reason I'm interested in this is that I grew up in New York City (96th street on the IND was my stop).

I was born on this day in 1962, which makes me, let's see, borrow the 2, ... 40! Yow.

I was contemplating a coding task for work. It was going to involve copying a chunk of code from another project, and modifying it for the problem at hand. This is a common strategy in writing software (please, no lectures about commonalizing the code, writing libraries, etc. In this case is wasn't an option: trust me). I figured there ought to be a catchy phrase for copying and modifying, something with either rhyme (like "walk and talk") or alliteration (like "cash and carry" or "nature vs. nurture").

My wife and I brainstormed for a bit, and the best was "clone and hone". Here's what we came up with:

clone and hone
pinch and paint
grab and grind
skim and trim
append and amend
sneak and tweak
swipe and stripe
take and shake
lift and sift
mooch and mash

The Philosophy of Punctuation is a short essay about the use (and abuse) of punctuation. I'm not sure I agree with everything he says (why must language be strictly linear?, for example), but I appreciate his appreciation of philosophical principles to guide even the small things (like punctuation).

I'm the same way: I examine many small, seemingly insignificant, details of my life, and settle on a philosophy for how they should be. For example, spoons should go handle down in the dishwasher, forks and knives handle up (so that sharp implements don't impale, but blunt implements get cleaner). I don't insist that others do it the same way, but I think it is better, so I do it myself, and am pleased by it.

I hadn't been following the progress of eSpeak, Hewlett-Packard's XML middleware project. Apparently it has ended. An engineer on the project has written a brutal and hilarious summary of the project.

I've never worked on a project that went this badly, but, like Dilbert, this has a familiar, if exaggerated, ring to it.

Xaos is a realtime fractal zoomer, which means you can fly around your favorite fractal. I don't know if this is old hat, but xaos does a great job of it, making the rendering and navigation quite seamless.

Xaos can render a number of different fractals, in tons of different styles, including after-effects like edge detection and 3D. It is also scriptable (in a simple ad-hoc way), and includes a tutorial about fractals that shows off lots of cool Xaos features. Also: My kids love it (they call the Mandelbrot set "the apple tush").

The home page is a little discouraging: the latest news entry is dated well over a year ago, and says, "We are alive again" (it reminds me of some half-forgotten Monty Python skit). But the software is great, and is the perfect thing to while away the minutes when you're on hold on the phone.

Synaesthesia is the blending of two senses, for example, where certain numbers "seem to be" certain colors. I don't have that experience, but I do have a strong sense of the shapes of number lines and time sequences.

For example, the number line for me is not a straight line. It takes a left turn at 10, then a right at 20, then another right at about 80, and a left at 90. After 100, the 0-through-100 line repeats again, but for 200, 300, and so on, they line up like rows in a raster.

I was reminded of this because my local pool opened after a 10-week repair, and I had to print up a new weekly schedule for lap swims. To match my mental model of the week, I laid out the week like this:

This has the advantage of being intuitive (for me), and also fits nicely on a letter-size sheet of paper.

Other sequences have their own shapes: the months of the year, the years of the past two millenia, the hours in the day.

Most synaesthetic experiences seem to be about relating colors to words or letters. My wife strongly relates colors to months and sounds. This story mentions just my experience: shapes for time sequences.

I don't play many Flash games (twitchy shoot-em ups were not for me even before my hands starting feeling the effects of keyboards and mice). But I love the games at Orisinal.com.

They are cute and playful and original. OK, maybe they are too cute, but I admire Ferry Halim's creativity, and his attention to detail that make each of these feel like a finished product.

As I have said before, my brother Patrick is a freelance photographer. More of his pictures are up on a stock photography site: PhotoSourceFolio. Take a look. And if you happen to be an art director someplace, buy some pictures!

I was trying out Google Sets (you give it a few words or phrases, and it tries to find other words or phrases that belong in the set). Being of a geometrical bent, and having already tried Happy, Dopey, Sneezy (it got it exactly right), I entered "icosahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron". It came back with a very respectible list of polyhedra, including the surprise "teapotahedron".

The teapot is of course, prevalent throughout computer graphics circles, and even makes a cameo appearance in Toy Story (a factoid which earned me a mention in Rob Fahrni's weblog). But I had somehow missed the term "teapotahedron". It is used as part of the joke that the teapot is the long-overlooked sixth Platonic solid.

A little surfing through the Google results turned up Steve Baker's A Brief History of the Teapot, and Andrew Glassner's home page.

While writing the last blog entry, I looked up info on banned books, and found Fat Chuck's Banned Books Index. It's a pretty good list of banned books. He also includes a link to PABBIS (Parents Against Bad Books In Schools), which of course presents the opposing view. The PABBIS site includes "offensive" snippets from banned books, which is hilarious when you consider that it makes their site one of the sites that would not be reachable with internet filtering.

In this story, LawMeme covers the decision by Federal judges to throw out a law requiring federally-funded libraries to install Internet filtering software.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this one. I think on the whole it is the right decision, but I also think there are a few hiccups in it. First off, I don't think the judge's claim that patrons might be "embarrassed" if they had to ask to disable filtering is bogus. Yes, the patrons would be embarrassed, but the first amendment does not guarantee against embarrassment.

» read more of: The federal government shouldn't decide what we can read... (4 paragraphs)