In the pre-dawn hours of March 18, 1990, following a festive St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, two men dressed as police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and walked off with an estimated $500 million in art treasures. … Read more
The camera zooms in on the person’s arm to reveal the cells, then a cell nucleus. A DNA strand grows on the screen. The camera focuses on a single atom within the strand, dives into a frenetic cloud of rocketing … Read more
2022-12-16 :: lisp My friend Zyni pointed out that someone has been getting really impressively confused and cross on reddit about empty lists, booleans and so on in Common Lisp, which led us to a discussion about what the differences … Read more
One morning last week, two hundred laborers in hard hats and safety vests swarmed into the iconic, I. M. Pei–designed Energy Plaza skyscraper in downtown Dallas, continuing their summer’s work of gutting the building’s insides. The 49-story office tower, once the … Read more
Yesterday’s post about “pipefail” also involved some systems which treated an empty file as a valid file. This turns out to be surprisingly common. I think people might be shocked at exactly how much you can get away with, and … Read more
What Is Bullshit? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, bullshit is an informal vulgar term which means ‘to talk nonsense, especially with the intent of misleading or deceiving’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines bullshit as ‘to talk nonsense or rubbish’ and … Read more
Most C++ programmers rely on “STL” for their data structures. The most popular data structure is probably vector, which is just a dynamic array. The set and the map are other useful ones. The STL data structures are a minimalist … Read more
About this series This series documents the development of the EmptyEpsilon scenario Beacon of Light, which is included with the game. EmptyEpsilon uses scenarios scripted in the Lua scripting language, which allows for many types of scenarios: basic sandboxes, story-driven … Read more
On February 25, when a photo of a For Rent sign in the window of S. W. Welch was posted on Twitter, shock spread across social media. The used bookstore, owned by Stephen Welch, had been a mainstay of Montreal’s Mile … Read more
In the summer of 2020, Daniel Beunza, a voluble Spanish social scientist who taught at Cass business school in London, organised a stream of video calls with a dozen senior bankers in the US and Europe. Beunza wanted to know … Read more