I love the human side of the law—that there must be actual case or controversy. Almost every case has some human on one side of that v.
I’ll let Justice Kennedy take it from here.
It looks like Chadha enjoys the American life today! That great story aside, I still just can’t imagine Anthony Kennedy going to Tower Records for some CDs, though…
I love maps, and digital maps are all the more cool. There’s tons of innovation, and someone needs to tell the big three (Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) what they’re doing well and what they need to improve on. That’s Justin O’Beirne’s job.
Another one of those great blogs in my Google Reader that never has more than one unread post. Encore!
Question: How long would it take to go from the numerically lowest ZIP code to the highest?
Answer: 3 days 4 hours of continuous travel (including a 662-mile ferry ride!)
The starting ZIP of 00501 is a special one given to the IRS. However, it turns out you can’t easily get to Nowhere, AK’s 99950, according to Google, so I had to settle for Ward Cove’s 99928:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to the great experiment “Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?” suggesting that Excel’s non-sequential workflow should be given a shot for visualizing or prototyping complex procedures:
Thanks to its Autocalc function the editor, the compiler, the linker and the runtime environment are integrated on such a high level that is unpaired among current tools. After changing a formula in a cell the result is visible immediately without the need for performing the steps mentioned above. Programmers don’t have to save, compile, link and run the executable and there is no need even to switch the active window.
Now, normally, the words “Excel engine files” should send you running, but I appreciated the paradigm shift and the author trying to bring some sexy to the (decidedly unsexy) spreadsheets.
Browsing the list of Excel worksheet functions, compelled me to designate one the least necessary. Soon, one rose above the rest: SQRTPI
Returns the square root of (number * pi).
So trivial is SQRTPI’s implementation, I don’t know why it was ever included as a core worksheet function. Where is this function even useful? Tenth-grade geometry students’ spreadsheets?
Thinking more led me to the conclusion that these core functions must be:
I’m sure everyone on the Excel team agrees with me on this, too; SQRTPI has no business being in the core spreadsheet functions, yet I’m sure its justification is “backward compatibility.” Now the question is not, “Why is SQRTPI in Excel?” but, “When did SQRTPI first get added to spreadsheet applications’ repertoire?” Anybody know?
Some API writer has infected us with SQRTPI, probably without thinking twice about it. It’s not the worst outcome in the world, but now we have this to show for that programmer’s lack of forethought.
You piss yourself once and your friends never let you live it down…
Amazingly, there exists a Wikipedia article on Japanese culture that is about vending machines, but not about panty vending machines: vendo.
You’d think the reviews of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (a book of tables of random numbers, back when generating random numbers yourself was difficult) would all be jokes, but after a friend referenced the book, I found this review.
Come on. That’s just touching.
The Onion’s A.V. Club just put up a great piece about Mystery Science Theater 3000 that attempts to explain the show’s appeal and why its fans are so diehard:
Mystery Science Theater had such a small circle of followers even at its peak that those who became one of them felt a responsibility to the show: to preserve it, to preach it. If you were a true fan, you didn’t just watch MST3K back in the ’90s, you taped it. And you didn’t set your VCR, you watched it while you were taping it, with your finger poised over the remote’s pause button so you could zap the commercials.
Indeed, I have very fond memories watching friends’ tapes, recording my own, and biking the tapes over to another friend’s to watch—so much damn fun.
Quick! Link the Verizon Guy and Sonia Sotomayor!
Easy!
