The Hive Archive

“I tried to rotate the parachute and look in other directions. But with one hand devoted to keeping the face plate up and both hands numb from high-altitude, subfreezing temperatures, I couldn’t manipulate the risers enough to turn. Before the breakup, we’d started a turn in the New Mexico-Colorado-Oklahoma-Texas border region. The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude, so I wasn’t even sure what state we were going to land in. But, because it was about 3:00 p.m., I was certain we would be spending the night out here.”

SR-71 Blackbird Break-up

“Adults possess billions of individual items of knowledge, and the rate of acquisition must exceed one item per second, which is totally inconsistent with current views of human nature,” said the mathematician, who is affiliated with UCSD’s Institute for Neural Computation, as well as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. “How many times has your child come home from school and, when asked what he or she learned today, said ‘nothing.’ But that’s not true. They have probably accumulated hundreds of thousands of items of knowledge, and when we sleep, we consolidate that knowledge. No wonder we need eight hours of sleep!”

Cogent Confabulation

Interesting theory, heard about it for the first time today. Will have to look into this further, sounds promising!

From a forum I frequent: “what a pleasant surprise this morning. the floor above us was putting down some floor leveler and it just happened to leak right onto our rack, covering the whole thing is a cement like shell. luckily everything is still up and running. oh happy day, oh happy day”

The Legal Affairs magazine has a great article comparing terrorists to pirates in the eyes of the law.  One of the major obstacles has been finding a common definition that works under international law.  As the author points out, in order to eradicate pirates, nations had to come together and recognize them as a special threat to all states.

“TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili’s De jure belli: “Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked with impunity by all, because they are without the pale of the law. They are scorners of the law of nations; hence they find no protection in that law.” Gentili, and many people who came after him, recognized piracy as a threat, not merely to the state but to the idea of statehood itself. All states were equally obligated to stamp out this menace, whether or not they had been a victim of piracy. This was codified explicitly in the 1856 Declaration of Paris, and it has been reiterated as a guiding principle of piracy law ever since. Ironically, it is the very effectiveness of this criminalization that has marginalized piracy and made it seem an arcane and almost romantic offense. Pirates no longer terrorize the seas because a concerted effort among the European states in the 19th century almost eradicated them. It is just such a concerted effort that all states must now undertake against terrorists, until the crime of terrorism becomes as remote and obsolete as piracy.”

The Cathedral of Santa Eulalia. Makes me want to build something beautiful.

It was a lot of work, but it was sure worth while.

Link.

In a psychological experiment first designed by Wolfgang Köhler, people are asked to choose which of these shapes is named Booba and which is named Kiki. Try it yourself, assign the name to each shape and then compare your results here.

• Why functional programming matters
• Brief discussion on Lambda - The Ultimate
• The next mainstream programming language - A game developer’s perspective
• Gentle Introduction to Haskell 98
• Functional Programming
• Lambda Calculus

IBM DeveloperWorks has a great article on the details of the JVM garbage collector, including some neat foreshadowing of escape analysis that will be present in Java Mustang.

“The Java language does not offer any way to explicitly allocate an object on the stack, but this fact doesn’t prevent JVMs from still using stack allocation where appropriate. JVMs can use a technique called escape analysis, by which they can tell that certain objects remain confined to a single thread for their entire lifetime, and that lifetime is bounded by the lifetime of a given stack frame. Such objects can be safely allocated on the stack instead of the heap. Even better, for small objects, the JVM can optimize away the allocation entirely and simply hoist the object’s fields into registers.”

Coming from OpenBSD background, installing Solaris can be an eye opening experience. There are many services enabled and listening to the world; luckily for Sun, most Solaris boxes are running on Sparc. Linux used to do the same thing, up until Red Hat starting to get a reputation for getting owned. Finally, there is some sanity at Sun and the Open Solaris project has some design documents on what they are working toward:

Secure by Default Design Specification

SBD is available in Nevada build 42 and greater.