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Mr. Met

Mr. Met
Originally uploaded by Lizzy Vegas.

Thank you, Jen Chung.

This is Funny!

What I see is a Youkilis, a Yankee and a Philly trying to squash David Wright. I don't like it!

Autodidact's review of The Reasoned Schemer:

"I guess this book is OK, but it could really be written in all of about 5 to 10 pages of text with half a page of implementation code - in Haskell.

Main idea: use (potentially) infinite lists to represent (potentially) infinite streams of solutions to a problem. Have 'goals' as procedures that work on (partial) solutions, producing new lists (empty/singleton/plural) of (more complete) solutions for each solution processed. Have a mechanism of combining these solutions streams. Now AND is just a sequential combinator and goal applicator; OR is a sequential combinator for parallel application; OR/i (for interleaving) combines its result streams in an interleaving fashion.

It suffices to have these combinators binary, because any type of COND is anyhow broken down to these binary combinations, as in a typical COND rewrite with IFs - and that's what the book itself does too, in a somewhat complex Scheme macro syntax. Expressed in Haskell, the intent is clear and the meaning is immediately obvious...

I wonder what this poor soul did before Amazon reviews.

Blogging is the New Closure

I used the iPhone's "Kindle" app to purchase and enjoy My Revolutions, the first fiction I've read in a long time. I read a lot of scripting manuals (but do very little real development) and I read about 3000 pages of baseball predictions and notes a year (sadly, this is not an exaggeration). The book was excellent!

Once I settled on a font size (that sounds ridiculous) the text was very easy to read, at home, on the subway, or before going to sleep. I did have some pretty severe Kindle envy on the B train tonight, but I regained my focus quickly.

I have one major complaint: I found the act of finishing the book unsatisfying; after paging through 4393 "locations" (the Kindle doesn't entertain the conceit of page numbers) I missed the satisfaction of closing the volume one final time. The application resisted my impotent flicks, always returning to the final page.

Radio Free Europe

Saving the News

Baseball Prospectus on Remodeling the Media:

Even if all of the local papers die, beat reporters won't just cease to exist. As long as people want to read about Noah Lowry's elbow problems, someone will be there to report on it, but the economics of the process will obviously need to change.

Nice short article from Baseball Prospectus about the future of sports reporting & the media; subscription required to read the whole thing. Nate Silver's 538 is the breakout media story of the year (moreso than twitter or barackobama.com in my humble opinion), and there's an oft-repeated darling story about his cutting his teeth on election predictions with baseball statistics. The reality is that BP is a successful media company, selling both books and on-line subscriptions across multiple properties, and that was obviously a component in Silver's success this year.