Often you'll see a book mentioned on a website with a link to buy it on Amazon.com. The website owner has an account with Amazon and gets a commission when someone uses the link to buy the book.
A bit of perspective I found shocking - the website owner earns as much as the author of the book.
I can't decide if it's magic or a rigged demo, but certainly the coolest thing I've seen in a while - a way to resize images without cropping or distorting the important details, by changing the amount of background. He even explains how it works.
Content-Aware Image Sizing on YouTube, if you can't see it below.
Was digging through an old server looking for something, and ran into a weird array of stuff
But the weirdest thing, that I don't remember a word of, but must have written because google's never heard of it:
I am the very model of a mildly tricky integral So easy to approximate on any given interval But general solutions need a stroke of ingenuity To find a strategem which rectifies discontinuity. You'll try the things you learned in class but never gain much traction With your clever substitutions and techniques of partial fractions In short, your simple methods fail against one so formidable, I am the very model of a fairly tricky integral. Combining basic processes in any way conceivable Still fails to make the answer appear any more achievable Rewriting points in polar form pre-partial integration Does not subtract, but adds, to the solution's complication. There seems to be no way to find a formula constructively And thus no proposition one can try to prove deductively The Riemann sum's don't simplify when working from first principles I am the very model of a rather tricky integral. I stood almost unchallenged for the best part of a century And people wondered if my answer's even elementary Professors thought they'd solved me and they harboured animosity When refutations flooded in with frightening ferocity. And then one day a student who, for rhyme's sake, will be Asian Was trying hard to visualise the shape of my equation The integrand examined, the identity, though difficult, Did give the model answer for the very tricky integral. (So while it seems that "reader's exercises" should be trivial, Sometimes it's just a reason not to solve some tricky integral)
You know when you see an unfamiliar word in an essay or such, and you look it up, and all of a sudden it's everywhere? It's clearly not a new word and maybe everyone was using it before without you noticing, but it still seems to have turned up overnight. It's essay molasses I guess.
Anyway, the word of the week is xkcd.
Maybe I read too much wikipedia.
It seems that every Monday morning when I get into the office — not on time as such, but 'morning' is usually accurate — there's already an email saying they're having some problem or other with the phone system. A weird but harmless error message, calls randomly connecting to the wrong phone, bizarre error messages, whatever.
Backhanded compliment though, I bet even Simon doesn't have a weekly inaccessible telephone number!
Yeah, you got me. I signed up for the thing. I posted an impassioned disclaimer-rant about how Facebook struck me as potentially flaky and devoid of content. I came back ten minutes later and edited it to complain about the markup mangling, and went to bed.
Today it's gone.
I can't write coherently at the best of times, and I'm out of practice, so it's no great loss to the world. Flaky isn't the word though. I tried to post a note mentioning it (not a fast learner, you see) and among other error messages:
Accompanied by a handy tip: You can write your own or find more friends. Ouch.
I haven't played with the other standard apps yet, are they any better?
edit And it's back again. I think I've learned my lesson though.
