Killing animals and eating them may be immoral, but can we please stop claiming humans are “naturally” vegetarian? We’re opportunistic omnivores, which probably has something to do with why vegans need to watch their diets carefully in order to have working blood cells.
Look at your teeth. Now back to me. NOW BACK TO YOUR TEETH. That’s generalized dentition, and appears in classic omnivores. Look left. It’s a chimpanzee, our nearest evolutionary relative. He’s killing and eating a Colubus monkey, their most frequent prey. Look down. What’s that in your gut? Oh that’s right; it’s a lack of a fermenting vat, efficient digestive enzymes for grasses, and inability to synthesize key vitamins and amino acids. Look again. THOSE DEFICIENCIES ARE NOW A COLONY OF SYMBIOTIC BACTERIA WHICH METABOLIZE ANIMAL TISSUES. I’m eating a horse.
The back side of 9, Old La Honda, Skyline, and some bits in between. Shot with a GoPro HD Hero, helmet top mounted.
6:00 AM. Oh, snap.
I think I was supposed to be on a plane. This morning? Wouldn’t I have set an alarm for that? Yeah, the plane definitely leaves at 7. Today? I packed last night–it must be today. How long does it take to get to San Jose?
Most Rubyists know about monkeypatching: opening up someone else’s class (often, something like String or Object) to modify some of its methods after the fact. It’s both incredibly powerful when used judiciously, and incredibly dangerous the rest of the time. I’ve spent countless hours trying to debug conflicting definitions of #to_json, or trying to untangle ActiveRecord’s astonishing levels of dynamic method aliasing.
I’m here to introduce you to a far more exciting threat: set_trace_func. This invidious callback is invoked on every function call and line of the Ruby interpreter. Most people, if they’re aware of it at all, correctly assume it’s intended for profiling.
Jump to 1:50 for the fireworks.
A holiday present for Hacker News (and you too!): tund, a daemon to automatically maintain reverse SSH tunnels. If your laptop gets stolen, and the thief connects it to the internet, tund will reach out and establish an SSH tunnel from somewhere.com to itself. That means you can log into it, even if it’s behind a firewall or NAT.
I also use it to log into my home computer from work.
I think the most terrifying part of A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves is the abstract’s implication that medical researchers were, before this groundbreaking application of Riemann sums, unable to find the area under an experimentally obtained curve.
75 citations? Really?
Yesterday I had a sore throat and it rained for hours and hours. I spent the whole time working on various side projects and playing Minecraft. As my new mining operation and tree farm are several kilometers distant from the spawn point, being eaten by spiders and walking five minutes back to the cave to get eaten again got tiresome. I needed pig meat–or better yet, delicious, even more life-sustaining bacon.
But pigs are hard to come by, and killing them is time consuming. Luckily, these delicious creatures will appear anywhere grass is present, which led to the construction of The Facility.
There are some songs which are incredibly close to me. I resonate so closely with them that they are not so much something I enjoy–but a defining element of my emotional core. Like the books you read growing up which you not only remember fondly but strive to fulfill. I’d like to write a little bit about these songs, and try to understand why.
Nik Olendzki, a good friend and fellow Aikidoist at Carleton, introduced me to Carbon Leaf. It was a regular part of the soundtrack at The Quad of Flying Daggers–I remember it echoing from beer-encrusted laminate flooring as you rounded the top flight of stairs, still bundled up in winter coats. The first time I heard it everyone in the room stopped and listened, for a minute, just to reflect.