Ivan's weblog

Who would have imagined it? The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.

Today I saw a fire extinguisher that had the equivalent of this NFPA diamond:

This is a standard code to tell firefighters about the risks of specific substances. The areas covered are health hazards, flammability, and reactivity.

Now, what is ironic is that, when fighting a fire, the last thing I would worry about is the hazardous (?) substances contained in the fire extinguiser itself (and I would certainly not expect them to be flammable!). But don’t worry, the 1/0/0 diamond above means “may cause irritation", and is the same as the one assigned to substances such as sodium chloride. So, in the end, this is almost like looking at the nutritional information label on a water bottle…

Disclaimer: fire extinguishers can be hardazous if misused–always use the appropriate fire extinguiser according to the fire source and conditions! (And while we are at it, don’t try this at home, eat fruits and vegetables, and talk to your doctor.)

Yes, that’s right, thanks to the Moronic UK Justice System when it comes to Computer Security.

Coming up next: man gets convicted of trying to rotate the knob of a locked door by using his hand…

For those of us who use it, JavaScript now has it’s own “CPAN": JSAN - JavaScript Archive Network. And of course, it has its own cute mascot:

For bloggers with some spare time… ;-)

See this Checkerboard Optical Illusion. The squares labeled A and B are the exact same shade of gray. Everyone who sees it says “there’s no way in hell!”

Very interesting short films ;-)

The first wine that I decided to try because it reminded me of an operating system! 2003 Fact Sheet

An anonymous victim told me this story of strife and suffering.

For mysterious reasons, most programs in her laptop (including, but not limited to Microsoft Office) worked fine while plugged in at the office, but they hung when trying to run them at home. After several perplexing months, the conclusion was that those programs didn’t work because they couldn’t find the network printer. The solution: to set a dummy printer such as PDFwriter as the default printer.

I like this browser so much that I’ll provide a free advertisement here:

A few weeks ago I mentioned the life-changing Japanese T-shirt folding technique. Now it’s time to discuss alternative, more efficient ways of tying shoelaces. Check out Ian’s Shoelace Site. Also on that site, 22 different ways to lace shoes.

Snowflakes are not exotic for people who live in cold countries, but for those of us who come from the tropics, pretty, hexagonal snowflakes only exist in textbooks and on TV. Even here in New Haven, they are fairly uncommon, because you need special conditions (particular ranges of humidity and temperature) for them to form; maybe we see them once a year. Today was one of those days, so we took some pictures for those of you who live in warm places and never see this phenomenon.

Note: a penny is 19.05 mm wide, so the snowflake in the picture is roughly 5 mm wide.

A two-page ad was published today in the New York Times advocating the Firefox browser. It was sponsored by thousands of people who donated something like $10 USD or more. Since I was one of them, my name is on the ad. You’ll have to look really close, to the right of the “x".

There are several sites that provide a service to make long links short. But now you can also make huge URLs if you want! For example, this is a link to my blog:
http://www.hugeurl.com/?YjhhZTI3N2E4YzE3NzgxZmI5YTUwYjI0OWE0
YTc4ODMmMTImVm0wd2QyUXlVWGxXYTJoV1YwZG9WVll3Wkc5alJsWjBUVlpP
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It seems that my friend Alán is graduating in a finite amount of time! He has 2 out of 3 signatures already.

Now I have to start working on my dissertation…

Of course, part of the reason for linking to his blog entry is that I’m new to blogs and want to test if the pingback feature really works. ;-)

Who would have thought that saying nucular (or nukular) had a technical name?

From Merriam-Webster’s word of the day:

epenthesis ih-PEN-thuh-siss noun
: the insertion or development of a sound or letter in the body of a word

[…]If you say “athlete” as “ath-a-lete,” you’ve committed
epenthesis.[…]

Someone went all the way there and took a picture!