My brother is a big fan of Tim “The 4-Hour Workweek” Ferriss. I haven’t read any of the Ferriss books: nothing personal, just haven’t gotten to them yet.
But this was linked from the Y Combinator Hacker News twitter, and deserves some linky love:
Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide
Some pull quotes:
Left unfixed, you’ll have more dead kids on your hands, guaranteed.
This, too.
Our great and good friend Borepatch has a post up about all the folks who died on January 30th, including Gandhi, Sir Everard Digby, and that guy who crossed the 47 Ronin.
Borepatch’s post, and an email from Chartwell Booksellers, reminded me: Winston Churchill died on January 24th, 1965, but his funeral was today er, on this date in 1965.
A couple of years ago, I read John Keegan’s Winston Churchill: A Life
Queen Elizabeth II attended his funeral.
I know that sounds like something you’d expect for Churchill, and I doubt there was any question about her going. But the royal family almost never attends the funeral of a commoner: they only go to funerals of other members of the royal family. I have this mental image of Elizabeth arguing with her people: “I’m going. I don’t care about tradition. He won the war, you…” Well, I doubt Elizabeth would say “assholes” but she might think it. I know it is fashionable to sniff at England and wonder what they need with the royal family, but it does seem like Elizabeth II is the class act of the bunch.
(And he got a state funeral, too. According to Keegan, the last commoner to get one of those was the Duke Of Wellington. In 1852.)
While I was working on this post, I found that the BBC has a nice archive devoted to remembering Churchill. I haven’t had time to go through it all yet, but I’m bookmarking it here.
Not much going on today, so here’s a few links I found interesting.
Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University and the author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.”
“the case for abolition”? We’ve seen how well prohibition worked for alcohol. We see how well it works for marijuana. If you outlaw cigarettes, I promise you: the resulting chaos will make Prohibition and the War on (Some) Drugs look like a Sunday School picnic.
Two more things that I wanted to bookmark:
Peteris Krumins’ “A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat“. Actually, I want to bookmark his entire site, as there’s a lot of good stuff there, including “Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know“.
Also: Michael Ossmann’s HackRF Kickstarter, which is fully funded and has 29 days to go. This is a project I’m really excited about and will probably end up backing. Short version: HackRF is a project to build a software defined radio that is about the size of a USB hard drive, runs off of USB bus power…and if you back the project (and if it ships, this being Kickstarter and all), the cost is around $300, which puts it into “Shut up and take my money” territory.
Thanks to Joe D. for the SQL injection by automobile photo in the earlier post.
Something else I happened to stumble across, while reading a Stack Overflow thread (“We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup application when his last name is used as the search term (which happens to be quite often now).”). There’s a website devoted to preventing SQL injection.
Is that unusual? No. But the URL sent me into giggling fits. My hat is off to the folks behind this site.
Something else I’ve been meaning to link, and which Tom Ritter’s Twitter feed reminded me about: “Applied Cryptography Engineering“.
Applied Cryptography
The camera that shot Che. And a bunch of other people, too.
I’ve been going to Precision Camera about once a week to poke around and drool over the used Leicas. One of these days…
Everything you wanted to know about SQL injection (but were afraid to ask). My only complaint about this article is that the author failed to include the XKCD link required by Internet Law.
As best as I can tell, there has been no mention of Banks’s death in the NYT yet.
At dinner Saturday night, Lawrence, Andrew, and I were talking about how bad the Marlins (and Astros) are. I remembered that someone on FARK posted a link to a site that provides updated win-loss projections for each MLB team, but I was unable to find that site in my history, on FARK, or in Google.
“DeWayne Mann” on FARK was kind enough to respond to my inquiry with three links, which I provide here for bookmarking purposes:
CoolStandings, which currently projects Miami at 106.9 losses and Houston at 103.1.
Baseball Prospectus, which has Miami at 102 losses and Houston at 99.5.
FanGraphs, which has Miami at 104 losses and Houston at 99.
(As Dewayne notes, all three sites use a more sophisticated model than (winning percentage * 162). Based only on that calculation, the Marlins project out to 115 losses, and the Astros to 106. For comparison purposes, the 1962 Mets lost 120 games and had a .250 winning percentage. The 2003 Detroit Tigers lost 119 games, and had a .265 winning percentage.)
Here’s your obit for Herbert Streicher, aka “Harry Reems”, the male star of “Deep Throat”: NYT. A/V Club.
Oh, look! New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is re-thinking his hastily passed and poorly thought out gun control measures! It couldn’t have anything to do with his declining popularity, could it?
But gun control works!
I have not had time to go through all of it yet, but the NYT special section on “Museums” looks interesting. Call this a bookmark.
Here’s the LAT‘s second day article on the Bell convictions.
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the national recording registry…
(Also: The Ramones first album! “Einstein on the Beach”! “South Pacific”! “Sounds of Silence”! The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack?)
My mother sent along an article from the WP that I had missed, “Better bread starts with a sponge“, which discusses some sourdough techniques for home bakers.
I appreciate her sending that along, and have already sent her some comments. But since they’re easy blog fodder, I’ll repeat them here. I don’t really have any problems with Marcy Goldman, or her article; I want to try her “Favorite French Bread“. But there are some questions I have and comments to make.
. I’d like to try that, but it takes 14 days to get to the point where you’re ready to bake with it, and it seems very fussy. While I was looking up Silverton’s starter, I found this starter recipe from Michael Ruhlman, which doesn’t take 14 days, doesn’t call for added yeast, and also looks like something worth trying.
and The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America
, the latter of which I paid $1 for at the Austin Public Library bookstore. At one point in Making, Ruhlman mentions a CIA chef who has a starter he’s kept going since 1985; the book came out in 1997, so that was at least a ten-year-old starter.)