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Category Archives: Development
last for today
From mendel, this SciAm article about how children perceive is worth reading through, even if it gets a bit dry. My favourite quote:
By 18 months, babies have come to appreciate that a picture merely represents a real thing. Instead of manipulating the paper, they point to pictures and name objects or ask someone else for the name. Melissa A. Preissler of Yale University and Susan Carey of Harvard University recently provided a good example of this development. The two researchers used a simple line drawing of a whisk to teach 18- and 24-month-olds the word for this object that they had not seen before. Most of the children assumed the word referred to the object itself, not just to the picture of it. In other words, they interpreted the picture symbolically–as standing for, not just being similar to, its referent.
In other words, children are call-by-value, adults are call-by-reference. No wonder I preferred BASIC to C when I was 10…
Edit One last addition: Jonathan Coulton‘s Mandelbrot Set rules. Listen and buy his music! And ignore his misspelled name on Metafilter.
synced again
For those of you on LiveJournal, this latest hack to my blog should have me simultaneously updating both journals. Let’s see if it works…and, for my friends on LJ, glad to have you back! If you want me to see your comments, please post them to my website directly, not to my LJ.
Next up, mass import of my LJ to my own site. ;)
bondage MIDI cable
I found it — my bondage MIDI cable! Back in the old days of PC sound cards, a special cable shipped with your Sound Blaster. This cable sported 2 MIDI plugs and connected to the joystick port. It also had a passthrough connector for a joystick.
It turns out that you can screw the passthrough plug into the joystick plug, and then screw it closed. You can do this around someone’s neck (if they’re particularly anemic). Then, the MIDI portion makes a GREAT leash.
I kid you not. Jalapeno and Tolim and I had hours of fun leading tsk around the NJ apartment with one of these. He was such a good little….never mind. ;)