blog.bookmach.com

A fantastic piece from Kevin Kelly on how our lives drift and flux from engineering decisions:

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases. We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

read it all

I just found this wiki on esoteric programming languages, there’s some good stuff inside:

ZOMBIE, according to its author David Morgan-Mar, stands for Zombie-Oriented Machine-Being Interface Engine and was designed for necromancers, particularly evil ones.

Programs are run in a multithreaded environment where every kind of entity (zombie, vampire, ghost, demon or djinn) acts in a slightly different way. A program is a list of entity declarations stating the action that each entity must perform.

Some of the more notable entries:

ZOMBIE
Spaghetti
Whitespace
DateFuck
Taxi

On the eve of the Firefox 3 release it’s only appropriate to view the kick-ass documentary Code Rush, which follows the burnout pace of a Silicon Valley superstar company on the verge of bankruptcy… and the beginnings of the open source Firefox codebase. Not available anywhere else, so see it now!

Via Waxy

A slickly produced music video by Justice.

A Babbagelicious wooden calculator.

This person is so insane he can draw cartoon characters using only HTML tables. Watch as he writes the code to build a picture…