anacronyms

We’ve been explaining stereotypes to HouseApe 3.0. HouseApe’s 1.0 and 2.0 are already onside with the whole stereotype thing, but small boys, even bright ones, aren’t known for their social sense, and such things usually elude them.
“The thing about stereotypes is that they are often based on some sort of truth,” I said, “For example, [...]

In Oracle, there is a pseudotable name DUAL. This is because, in the strict ANSI SQL (ISO has taken over, so we should probably talk about ISO SQL rather than ANSI SQL) every SELECT statement must have a FROM clause. SQL Server varies from the definition here, but both Oracle and DB2 follow it.
Since it [...]

This may be an odd and perhaps controversial choice as a Flickr Babe, but so it goes.
I think this woman is gorgeous.  There’s her undeniable good looks, for sure: the beautiful hair, the strong, lean features. But there’s more to it. She’s not dressed in some stupid cheesecake outfit and holding a gun that somebody [...]

Don’t let me distract you from the post that follows this one. It contains dimwitted babbling about pi, but it is cool nonetheless.
I have come to believe that somewhere, some day, someone will discover a formula that reveals that entropy is concentrated in 7 year old boys. I realized this last night when a certain [...]

In the previous post there was some interesting discussion about pi, and Graham posted a link to a math forum. In the forum, Maggie asks Does it ever turn into a pattern of zeros and ones, like a computer code?1
The mathemeticians dispel that, but I was thinking and I realized that since the decimal expansion of [...]

Avogadro’s Number – 6.023 x 1023 – this, in case you have forgotten, is the number of molecules in a mole, or, (I had to look it up) the number of atoms on 12 grams of carbon-12. I like this number because if you need to estimate how many atoms or molecules something contains, this [...]

1st Annual International Talk Like William Shatner Day

In honour* of The Great One’s birthday.
*Yes, it’s “honour. Bill’s Canadian, eh?

Love this. Can’t wait for it to be this warm again.

I think I’ve ranted before about how well-designed I think the Nintendo Wii is (I do – as someone who has spent some time and effort on interface designs, I think the latest generation of Nintendo products, the Wii and the DS, are amazing) but this… this is something else.

Things of which I am suspicious:

Anyone telling me I’ve won something. Usually, you have to pursue things that are worth winning. Any time winning just comes out of the blue, it’s suspicious. I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen – I won a nice bottle of wine at a Christmas party with my short curvy [...]