The Avail team has announced the first release of Avail, an “articulate programming language,” which attempts to offer a somewhat natural expression form for solving programming problems. While other languages, such as Perl, have tried to do some of the same things in providing an English-like parsing structure, Avail uses a very human-readable syntax to [...]
CSS and Aside Text
I am having some difficulty with CSS and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it. So I’m putting this out there in the hopes that someone with CSS expertise can look and say something simple, like, “Hey, dummy, why not…” The problem is “aside text.” This is an example of “aside text.” Aside text [...]
Repost: Music that moves you?
I hate to admit it, but one of my favorite songs right now is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which I first heard on American Idol. What… a… song! The lyrics are freakin’ STUNNING. Amazing piece of work. The relationship between sex and God explored artistically and respectfully. Other music that stands out among the madding crowd, [...]
First World Problems
There was a tweet (captured on imgurl, of all places) that said: “Muslims view ‘Islamic’ terrorists the same way most Christians view the Westboro Baptist Church…” A lot of comments suggested otherwise, with justification. The thing is: would an Iraqi Christian rather be faced with ISIS, or a moron from the Westboro Baptist Church? It’d [...]
Ah, the happiness of new beginnings.
Welcome to my new site; it’s not a new url, but everything’s been rebuilt from the ground up. Well… I say it’s been rebuilt, but that’s not quite true yet. It’s in the process of being rebuilt as of this posting, more accurately. I haven’t migrated over any content, and I haven’t even finished configuring [...]
Repost: Brandon Sanderson might actually understand people
I’ve been reading Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, trying to finish it at last after having abandoned it fourteen years ago or something like that. I abandoned it because the books were becoming repetitive, and because Robert Jordan created characters who were plastic and immature even then; his fondness for corporal punishment was [...]
Repost: Java 8 Streams: filtering and mapping
I’ve been making some progress with my Java 8 streams and lambdas explorations. I’m still not anywhere near an expert yet, and chances are that the literati would see my attempts as childish and ignorant, but that’s okay. How else do you learn? What I’ve been working on is a tokenizer. I’m feeding data from [...]
Repost: Playing with Java 8 Streams
I’ve been playing around with some more neural network algorithms lately, which has given me yet another chance to revisit a machine learning library. Since Java 8 is due later this month, I’ve decided it’s time to take the plunge and start using it. Overall, I don’t think I’m leveraging it whatsoever. I know it [...]
Repost: Godwin’s Law, expanded
Recently, I had a discussion with someone in which I took a position that is not representative of my actual thought on a matter, against a rather … energetic opposing point. In it, Godwin’s Law was in full evidence, along with some corollaries; partly inspired by the corollaries, I’d like to propose an addendum to [...]
Repost: Graduation rates in college football
Wouldn’t it be awesome if the contracts for college football coaches paid out at the graduation rate experienced by their players? It’d have to be tweaked, of course; it’d be unfair to punish an incoming coach for the poor graduation rates of his predecessor. But imagine: the first year, you might pay the coach 100% [...]