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The traditional method, which admittedly works better on a group-project basis, is to try some. If you throw up, get convulsions, or die, it’s poisonous. The scientific method, as explained in the U.S. Army Survival Manual, is to memorize the local edible plants prior to getting marooned. Too late for that? The implicit message of the manual is: soldier, you’re hosed. However, it does offer a plan B, namely the 13-step Universal Edibility Test. This boils down to cautiously trying whatever potential edible you have a lot of and seeing if you throw up, get convulsions, or die.

Don’t you feel better now? I know I do.

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Whoda thunkit?

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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We have the technology.

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Geek chic. If you find this article interesting (as I did), you probably need to Get A Life.

If you work with text files in any capacity — and what programmer doesn’t — you should know that not all newlines are created equally. The Great Newline Schism is something you need to be aware of. Make sure your tools can show you not just those pesky invisible white space characters, but line endings as well.

Indeed — got bit by that just yesterday; if you’re doing any kind of text matching, that can be one of the hardest bugs to track down because all that crap looks like a space in your normal viewing tools but it’s not a space.

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Your shoelaces will never be the same.

Of course you could do what I do, and not wear shoes with laces. But that’s me.

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Well, they’ve got to do something – it’s not as if the world’s navies are doing squat.

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Venus to follow presently?

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Everything bad is good for you.

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It’s time to get rid of a meaningless number.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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The recent news that Conan O’Brien will be replaced by Jay Leno has caused white people to erupt with rage and hostility. You might even expect them to lash out and do something about it like take to the streets or write a letter to NBC to voice their dissatisfaction with the network. But no, white people will solve this problem the way that they solved the election crisis in Iran – through Facebook and Twitter status updates. In 2009, millions of white people took 35 seconds to turn their twitter profiles green, and consequently sent a very powerful message to the leaders of Iran. Their message was that they wanted their friends to know that they would stop at nothing to ensure freedom and democracy for the Iranian people. Thanks in large part to that effort Iran is now completely democratic. With that issue settled, white people are launching a similar campaign for Conan that is sure to have similar results.

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Taylor has read the evidence with scrupulous care, absorbed all the most recent scholarship, and written a clear, well-documented narrative that follows Joan closely through the different stages of her short existence. Taylor evaluates the various controversies judiciously, and comes to balanced, sensible conclusions. (She makes a good case, for instance, for trusting the Latin trial record). The book is the most accurate, up-to-date account we  have of Joan, and it will likely remain the standard critical biography for some time.

A bit of cheek from the Telegraph in London.

An informative chart.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

A Useful Table.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Columbia University is one of New York’s largest landowners, and perhaps the one with the most to gain from the city’s power to seize private property. But in a surprise ruling in early December, a state court struck down the city’s attempt to take private land in West Harlem and give it to the university. Now that case is becoming an important beachhead in the fight over eminent domain.

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A 13th-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope is among a collection of documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives that has been published for the first time.

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If it works.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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It’s as I always say: Rodents get all the good stuff.

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Very cool.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Macworld.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was. (Sounds more like the name of a multi-national engergy conglomerate, doesn’t it?)

Of course, this just might be hot air, considering how low Wikipedia’s rep has gotten lately. But it makes an interesting story.

Truth.

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We have the technology.

(Roy, this Bud’s for you….)

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The gadget teardown experts at iFixit have decided to make the firm’s entire catalogue of gadget repair guides available to all – and for free.

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This phone is more responsive than many of the girlfriends I had in college. We have the technology.

There are four categories of edible substances:

1. Food (anything that once had a face)
2. What we get from food (e.g. eggs, milk, butter)
3. What food eats (e.g. salad, sushi)
4. What we get from what food eats (e.g. spuds, fruits, vegetables)

Note that category 3 was designated by God for herbivores (i.e. ‘prey’) and is not properly part of a human diet. If you see a creature that appears human but is eating salad, it is an impostor. This is why certain entities are designated ‘vegan’, denoting that they came from the star system Vega. Feel at liberty to tell them to go back where they came from if they don’t want to be eaten.

My thanks to Glen Wilkerson for this convenient and elegant conceptual framework.

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Try that with your Kindle.

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Barnes & Noble might be pitching the Nook to the literary set, but it turns out the Android-based dual-screen reader is pretty hacker-friendly as well: both the OS and filesystem are stored on a microSD card. That means the newly-formed crew at nookdevs has already managed to root what they describe as the “generic” Android 1.5 build that’s hidden under the Nook’s navigation UI, and they say the device can do “everything a rooted Android phone can do.” That’s certainly intriguing, especially since the Nook has a data-only AT&T 3G modem and WiFi to go along with that capacitive touchscreen and E Ink display — can you say “potential”?

Read i

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Learn a new language though games.

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The Crocodile Keyboard’s triangular keys have significantly more ‘dead space’ around them than you’ll find on a standard rectangular-key Qwerty layout. The result, claimed David Baker, Managing Director of Crocodile Keyboard Ltd, is that users are more likely to press the correct key each time they tap.

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A bit late to the game; Congress has been doing that for years.

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This is pretty slick. Wouldn’t mind having a Real Computer with this form-factor.

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Men prefer the smell of petrol and frying bacon to that of a newborn baby, a study has found.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know….

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That could be useful.

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Gives you some idea of what America will be like if the Democrats have their way.

(Bitter? Who’s bitter?)