DSD

[Update 7/7/09: WP-Typogrify has now merged with WP-Hyphenate, and is com­pat­i­ble with cap­tions out of the box.]

Hamish Macpher­son’s WP-Typogrify is one of my favorite Word­Press plu­g­ins. I started using it espe­cially for the Smar­ty­Pants func­tion­al­ity, which fixes “dumb quotes” and poor man’s apos­tro­phes, among other things.

How­ever, I was dis­ap­pointed to find that this func­tion­al­ity breaks Word­Press cap­tions (intro­duced in WP 2.6), which I’d rather not live with­out. Devel­op­ment on WP-Typogrify seems to have slowed — there hasn’t been a new ver­sion in a while, so I’ve taken the lib­erty of hack­ing ver­sion 1.6 to fix this incom­pat­i­bil­ity, at least so I can use Smar­ty­Pants until an offi­cial fix comes out. The adjust­ments I made are sim­ple, and I have no idea whether they’re max­i­mally robust. But feel free to

and use at your own risk. Con­tinue reading…

Intro­duc­ing Stats­Feed, a Word­Press plu­gin that pro­vides an RSS feed of your blog stats, so you don’t have to keep log­ging in and check­ing your Dash­board (which, before writ­ing this plu­gin, I did obsessively).

Down­load the Lat­est Version

Instal­la­tion:

• Down­load statsfeed.zip, and either use WordPress’s Add New Plu­gin browser, or unzip statsfeed.zip and upload the stats­feed folder to your plu­g­ins direc­tory /wp-content/plugins/
• Make sure you have the WordPress.com Stats plu­gin already installed.
• Acti­vate Stats­Feed. Con­fig­u­ra­tion is not nec­es­sary, but you may choose an update sched­ule (other than every 20 min­utes, the default) in Set­tings, under StatsFeed.
• Sub­scribe to your Stats­Feed at

  <your blog url>/wp-content/plugins/statsfeed/index.xml

Con­tinue reading…

My sis­ter Selena had her on-air debut on NPR Morn­ing Edi­tion yes­ter­day, as the trans­la­tor voice of a Chi­nese woman whose fam­ily recently sought asy­lum in the United States. Lis­ten in at about 0:55.

Where did she get that excep­tional radio voice? It couldn’t have been here. Or here. Hmm… It must have been here:

This is Canine Pub­lic Radio Morn­ing Edi­tion, I’m Tasha. Grrr… Ruff. Achoo! That’s my bone!

Con­grat­u­la­tions, Selena! You’re fol­low­ing in Tasha’s foot­steps. And you’ll pull ahead as soon as she stops to sniff something.

Tonight I had the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence of singing a con­cert with Blue Heron, one of the pre­mier early music choirs in the country.

I had an unusual week, attend­ing lec­tures on topo­log­i­cal field the­ory and writ­ing about neu­tri­nos by day, get­ting into the 1430’s groove in rehearsals by night. And the music wasn’t easy. Many of the pieces were thick with cross-relations, rhyth­mi­cally com­pli­cated, and gen­er­ally funky. I’ve had a few night­mares where I stop con­cen­trat­ing, and either I sing an incor­rect B-flat, or the see­saw mech­a­nism stops work­ing. Con­tinue reading…

Wired Mag­a­zine has an inter­est­ing arti­cle about redesign­ing North Amer­i­can flight paths to improve effi­ciency. (via Rachel Mad­dow)

It’s sort of what you’d expect: flight pat­terns were orig­i­nally drawn up decades ago, and have been added to hap­haz­ardly and chaot­i­cally since then, like the streets in Boston.

The redesign cre­ates a kind of air­borne sub­ur­bia, paving the skies far out into what was the coun­try­side. The idea is that the con­trollers can get planes off the inter­city high­ways sooner, keep­ing them clear for through-traffic.

Con­tinue reading…

On a 5 minute break (read pro­cras­ti­na­tion vaca­tion) from prepar­ing for my oral exam next week, I came across the inter­est­ing YouTube Sym­phony: “The world’s first col­lab­o­ra­tive orchestra.”

YouTube explains:

We have invited musi­cians from around the world to audi­tion for the YouTube Sym­phony Orches­tra. The video entries will be com­bined into the first ever col­lab­o­ra­tive vir­tual per­for­mance, and the world will select the best to per­form at New York City’s Carnegie Hall in April 2009.

Musi­cians “audi­tioned” by post­ing on YouTube a video of them­selves play­ing one of a few des­ig­nated audi­tion pieces. From there, YouTube picked a few dozen final­ists and has invited us view­ers to vote on the ones we like (or give thumbs down to the ones we don’t). Con­tinue reading…

I should prob­a­bly doc­u­ment the real ori­gin of the The­o­rem of the Day and Phi­los­o­phy of the Day. Cof­fee and Henry David Thoreau are per­haps less involved than orig­i­nally indicated.

The the­o­rem gen­er­a­tor was writ­ten by a good friend of mine, Matt Gline, as a project for CS51: Abstrac­tion and Design in Com­puter Pro­gram­ming, which we took together as freshmen.

The assign­ment was to use LISP to imple­ment a con­text free gram­mar — basi­cally a set of rules for computer-generated mad libs. The sub­ject was what­ever we wanted. Good ones from past years include computer-generated mys­tery novel­las, course-guide reports, and per­for­mance art direc­tions. Every year there’s a con­test, and Matt’s the­o­rem gen­er­a­tor was hys­ter­i­cal enough to win him lunch at the fac­ulty club. Con­tinue reading…

New Phi­los­o­phy

Con­tinue reading…

On Jan­u­ary 13, 2008, the won­der­ful web­comic xkcd posted this car­toon.

Within hours, the comic ren­dered itself spec­tac­u­larly inac­cu­rate. Rec­og­niz­ing that it’s impor­tant that the pub­lic prop­erly under­stand the dan­gers of this mod­ern world, we pro­vide here some more recent research. Con­tinue reading…

This is the story of how Honda engi­neers screwed up a big expen­sive project with a sim­ple arith­metic mis­take, tried to fudge their result with sound edit­ing soft­ware, and con­grat­u­lated them­selves for being totally awesome.

When I was a kid, my fam­ily used to drive up to The Pin­ery in Ontario, a beau­ti­ful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour out­side of the park. To dis­cour­age reck­less Cana­di­ans from bar­rel­ing past the houses and barns, the local gov­ern­ment carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.

My Dad is a musi­col­o­gist, with a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in tun­ing. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to exper­i­ment with this instru­ment. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descend­ing scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncom­ing traf­fic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascend­ing scale as we sped up. Con­tinue reading…