links sans commentary

[jazzfish]

10 years.

Via prog, Gender is a text field.

House hippo.

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations. (Found in the comments to james_nicoll's An Open Letter to Every Writer Planning to Use Lighter-Than-Air Craft in Their Fiction, which also provided an explanation for how it is that the gas balloons in the zeppelins on the cover of so many steampunk books are far too small to possibly provide sufficient lift: "They're just using compressed helium! All the lift in a smaller space!")

---

Watched TRON (the original) and the ninety-minute Making Of in good company on Friday night, and had some fine gaming on Satyrday plus a very brief, very kind letter from an old friend, and had Sunday to laze around. Also, there were delicious cupcakes, courtesy tam_nonlinear.

It's good to be reminded on occasion that I've managed to fill my life with awesome people, and that less than five years ago I didn't know many of them.

Comments

[rbandrews]

Along the same lines, I don't believe in doing any sort of validation or parsing on name fields, even to the point of not separating them into first and last name. People who assume that all names will match /^[A-Z][a-z]+$/ are douches.

It makes me sad that Tron Legacy is only showing in 3D at the Drafthouse. I want to see it in two dimensions.

[tam_nonlinear]

Have you seen Falsehoods programmers believe about names? (it is entirely possible that I originally saw the link here and I am being redundant).

[jazzfish]

YES. Very much. Elsewhere today I was reading about the difficulty in finding O'Learys in census databases: you get OLeary, O Leary, Oleary, and sometimes just Leary...

Tron is one of those movies that I expect will benefit from being in 3D. At least, I'm willing to pay the premium to find out.

[rbandrews]

I once went off for about 20 minutes in an interview about this exact thing; I had a girl in my second grade class whose first name was Rae Lynn. And, my grandmother's name is Betty-Ann.

It's not the premium; I wear glasses. Wearing two pairs of glasses doesn't work right at the best, and gives me a headache / makes my eyes water at worst.

I'm afraid I'm going to allow the future to pass me by as far as the third D goes.

[jazzfish]

... aw, crud, I didn't even think about that. The only other thing I've ever seen in 3D was Muppet*Vision at Disney World, and I was still wearing contacts then.

I'll let you know how it goes.

[tam_nonlinear]

I blame the link to "gender is a text field" for the fact that I'm seriously considering starting an argument on the notice board in the pantry about the difference between sex and gender with regards to pushpins.

(despite this very frivolous reply, I thought it was an excellent post and a good discussion.)

[jazzfish]

Oh, excellent. I eagerly await the reports.

And, no worries! "It wouldn't be the Way if there weren't jokes about it." (Which, bleh, actually comes off as kind of condescending in context. I prefer to think of it in the same light as "How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?" "THAT'S NOT FUNNY!")

[tam_nonlinear]

Someone has written that all the pushpins are male on the pushpin beauty contest and I want to defend the pushpin's right to self-identify and that sex isn't the same as gender and have they even asked the pushpins and clearly I have had entirely too much caffeine lately.

[jenwasdex.livejournal.com]

Thanks for letting me be a part of Tron night and get to know you guys a bit better, sorry I had to show up late. Also I agree, the cupcakes were fantastic.

[jazzfish]

Oh, you're most welcome-- happy to have had you along!