padren

This guy cracks me up on a regular basis, always has good sciencey humor.

If the skin's interior was appropriately insulated from electrical discharge, could it be filled with a small number of highly like-charged particles to equalize the pressure through the repulsive effect, while only trivially increasing mass? Personally, I am pretty sure that even if a solution could be found for the "vacuum balloon" crushing issues, the end result would be a total apparatus that was less efficient than using light air or gasses, just due to the extra weight involved in trying to engineer a viable solution. The mass of the air being displaced only weighs so much, and naturally the mass of hydrogen/helium/hot air is even less - so any solution that adds more mass than the mass of the classically used lighter-than-air gasses is going to be less efficient despite being more mechanically complex. It's not exactly as bad as perpetual motion, but there are some hard limits on maximum lift and minimum outer pressure that make it really difficult (barring new materials) aren't likely to be overcome. If they are, they most likely will be "proof of concept" only solutions but still be less efficient than the traditional methods we already use.

Another funny one:

Okay, this is too funny not to post: http://www.mobot.org/gardeninghelp/plantfinder/Plant.asp?code=A896 The real question is if it makes a decent tea, which could be nice at parties.

Best I've heard addressing this event where Obama had a book thrown at him at a rally. "The guy missed because Obama was further right than he expected." The photo actually supports this.

I know the guy that does these, so technically it's a plug but I thought it was pretty funny and clever: Don't Ask, Don't Care

It's Penny Arcade, mostly gaming humor but it does fit with the frustration towards BP

Well this made me laugh:

What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter? PUMPKIN PI

I have to say I liked these:

I have to share this, especially here: http://xkcd.com/585/

This is too funny not to post: From The Onion: "Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars"

Fair enough, I suspect that I may be jaded on anything that allows for more "relaxed" definitions because of the amount of time I spend working with existing code bases - open source projects that choke any IDE's ability to deduce class types due to poor standards or strange techniques by the original programmers. What do you recommend for an IDE when working with Python? Which is fair. I drew the Perl comparison because it reminded me of that on the surface, but I haven't delved into Python enough for a real investigation. It depends on the project. I find java is the easiest to understand when I have to jump into something that was coded by a dozen monkeys that used a copy of "design patterns" to line their habitat and started banging on keyboards. Java is excessive on boilerplate and definitely makes you jump through a lot of hoops to do what is generally simple in a lot of languages. The template syntax is very complex - a lot more so than I like to deal with, but it is a pretty powerful feature that makes a lot of things possible. Do you find that using templates is terrible (the way they designed templates) or the STL code base itself? When it comes to grammar I like simpler ones but accept additions if they improve the power of the language, but find it often gets cluttered with what ends up being hardwired function calls. I'll have to play with it to learn more. I do want to try new languages that break from the classical mold (expand how I think in terms of programming) but I also don't want to just learn an idiosyncratic way of doing the same thing in something else. Is Python a good language for that? If so, what "philosophy" should I approach it with? You've mentioned some languages in the past with novel approaches to issues such as concurrency, is Python primarily a novel approach to code reduction in terms of reducing the need for loops, strong typing and other boilerplate code? I just want to investigate it without "missing the point" by just trying to learn it as "another C++/Java/Etc" and miss the goals of the language.

I'm curious about Python, but I've been skeptical so far - what does it do that is difficult in other languages? From what I can tell, it appears to have a lot of keywords and built in functions to handle various complex data types and has short hand syntax to perform tasks you would use functions for otherwise - but nothing you couldn't do with a library if so inclined. So far it sort of reminds me of Perl, which is great for writing short crypto-code but for the most part is just an idiosyncratic way of doing with syntax what function patterns would do generally. Personally, I have been drawn to languages with the fewest possible keywords and syntactic rules and puts most of the functionality in well designed libraries written in the language. I will say syntax does make a difference (passing functions as parameters for instance can't be overcome with a library) but how does python make a difference? I am genuinely curious because I've heard it recommended many times. On the surface it looks like an obscure syntax structure with a lot of top-level datatypes that would be suited to an STL implementation.

I still like Java as a language to start with when learning. It covers a lot of the core concepts, and has a similar syntax structure to C++ on which a number of languages are based. It's simplified in terms of memory management, but gives you a decent foundation in OOP, multithreaded applications, and primitive datatypes. The APIs seem "over engineered" somewhat, but the documentation is all quite excellent. It's a fairly strict language (enforces specific rules one way) but that can help when you are learning a new language, because you don't have 10 different flavors of "shortcuts" to absorb while reading example code and trying to master the basics.