Quadrant Z, Rules

Late Thursday night I discovered Quadrant Z, an elaborate "paper and pencil game of galactic warfare." Against a buzzing background of midnight frogs and palmetto bugs I leaned forward in my chair and emptied the last dregs of coffee from my long since cooled mug. The rules can be difficult …

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Essays in Idleness by Kenko

1283-1350 Japan. Imperial Court. Poet. Buddhist monk in 1324.

He developed the Japanese aesthetic: beauty is indissolubly bound to its perishability. He wrote, "If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in this world …

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Concurrency and Painting

This metaphor comes from Herlihy's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming; maybe in the future I'll extend it.

Multiprocessor synchronization and Concurrency is painting a house. You have four workers, two brushes, one roller, one ladder, and one giant can of paint. The goal here is to paint the house as …

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iTunes 11 and mp3 files

"I can't import mp3 files into iTunes 11" you say. I hear your pain.

Disclaimer, I am not importing music from audio CDs. If you're looking to do that look at the apple documentation here.

Attempts

There are various ways of 'importing' an audio file into iTunes. You can drag …

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Farnam Street Blog Misc.

Source

Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. Melvin Kranzberg

Harris argues that there was a moment weirdly similar to this one: the year 1450. That.s the year when Johannes Gutenberg managed to invent a printing press.

a scholastic world that was initially scattered began to …

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First Law of Geography

Waldo R. Tobler's First law of geography, an informal statement that "All things are related, but near things are more related than far things."

Found this when researching Distance Decay on Wikipedia

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Seneca, brevity of life

Men do not suffer anyone to seize their estates, and they rush to stones and arms if there is even the slightest dispute about the limit of their lands, yet they allow others to trespass upon their life—nay, they themselves even lead in those who will eventually possess it …

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