muegge's New Writeups

Heather Havrilesky (person)

2002-05-21T08:25:04Z

Heather Havrilesky (1971- ), is the actual name of the now defunct Suck.com's Polly Esther, the writer of the Suck's Filler column. She was offered the staple wednesday feature after serving a brief stint at the San Francisco e-zine as a copy editor, a position for which she had no actual training or experience - a job she in fact lied to get. She found her niche writing the Filler strip (illustrated by Terry Colon), presenting her jaded and cynical view of modern relationships, occupations and psychological problems to her jaded and cynical readers.

Prior to her time at Suck, she grew up in North Carolina, attended Duke University, majored in psychology and learned to play the Fender Telecaster.

During her time at Suck, she obsessed about commitment-phobic men, David Foster Wallace and crack smoking canadian rabbits.

Now, after Suck, she writes opinion piece columns for Salon.com and maintains a weblog at http://www.tinylittlepenis.com

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Bread and Circuses (idea)

2001-08-15T18:48:37Z

A translation from the latin - panem et circenses. In ancient rome at the time of the Emperor Claudius, more than half the yearly calendar was taken up with holidays. On a majority of these holidays public games were held. Along with the public distribution of food, these games served to deter the masses from revolting.

"Duas tantum rex anxius optat, panem et circensus."
( "The people long eagerly for two things - bread and circuses.")
-- Juvénal

Something to think about: when I went to see The Gladiator in a theater in Alabama there is a scene where they are throwing bread from a cart trundling around the ring of a colosseum. The voice-over during this part is describing how all the public wants in food and games, that the emporer will destroy rome by giving it to them. I started laughing, looking around at all the families eating their popcorn and watching that years summer hit blockbuster. I stopped when I realized I was the only one laughing in a theater of 150+ people...

An Appeal to the Young (idea)

2001-06-07T08:20:35Z

This essay is available on many forms on the web, legally, due to the expired copyright. It is reprinted here in it's entirety, hardlinked by yours truely. It is a thoughtful examination of why people of conscience, from any walk of life, should or must become socialists. It is long, but worth the read...

An Appeal to the Young

by Peter Kropotkin

It is to the young that I wish to address myself today. Let the old - I mean of course the old in heart and mind - lay the pamphlet down therefore without tiring their eyes in reading what will tell them nothing.

I assume that you are about eighteen or twenty years of age; that you have finished your apprenticeship or your studies; that you are just entering into life. I take it for granted that you have a mind free from the superstition which your teachers have sought to force upon you; that you don't fear the devil, and that you do not go to hear parsons and ministers rant. More,…

Langsam's laws (thing)

2001-04-03T22:21:43Z

As follows:

Everything depends.
Nothing is always.
Everything is sometimes.

These have a practical application as a philosophical approach towards Nate's word galaxy generator.

Degenerate Case (idea)

2001-03-28T00:35:07Z

A degenerate case is a instance of a problem whose parameters differenciate it from all other possible cases. These cases of problems are often trivial seeming boundary conditions, and in a inductive proof or recursive solution the degenerate case is often the terminal case.

For example, consider problem number 2 in hard interview questions (with the solution quarter game solution). A strategy must be generalized for the placement of a quarter on a table with an unspecified diameter (presumably non-negative). As mentioned in the solution node, one degenerate case of this problem is where the diameter of the table is equal to the diameter of the quarter. Another degenerate case would be a table with a diameter of zero.

In computer programming, as well as with mathematical proofs, degenerate cases can often pose problems that the general cases do not, and should be tested carefully.

Small helpful scripts for noders (thing)

2001-03-13T02:19:53Z

If you have procmail and perl installed on your system, this perl script will process the spam from everything@blockstackers.com into a html table, at least the top 25 cooled by rep section, which is my favorite...

First, add the following to your .procmailrc file (after editing the '/www/minitrue/data' to be an output path relevant on your system of course):

:0c:
* ^From:.*everything@blockstackers.com
| ParseE2DR.pl > /www/minitrue/data/table_DailyTopE2.html; 
  chmod o+r /www/minitrue/data/table_DailyTopE2.html

:0:
* ^From:.*everything@blockstackers.com
in-e2

This will process emails from everything with the script ParseE2DR.pl (which will be given shortly), and will send a copy of the email to the mailbox 'in-e2'. On a redhat 7 linux system, this mailbox will be created if it does not exist. You may want to test to see if this is different on your system!

The contents of ParseE2DR.pl are as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

#

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