Sine and Cosine of Vectors
Turns out the formalism described in Integer Powers of Vectors makes it possible to define the sine and cosine functions for vectors through their power series:
This works because sine is based on odd powers (so it's vector-valued), while cosine uses even powers (so it's scalar-valued).
Any ideas where this might be useful?
The Hacker/Nerd Connection
Contrary to popular myth, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however, and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking.
For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label geek as a badge of pride; it's a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term 'nerd' used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when 'nerd' was a mild pejorative and 'geek' a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who aren't techies.
If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that's fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material.
If you're attracted to hacking because you don't have a life, that's OK too; at least you won't have trouble concentrating. Maybe you'll get a life later on.
From:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#nerd_connection
Gnomad
Ubuntu (11.04) + Gnome (2.32.1) + XMonad
A Beautiful Desktop Experience! It is fairly simple, risk free, and worth a try.
You will start using the keyboard more and the mouse less; this will cause a rise in productivity and a low of frustration. XMonad is a tile-based window manager which means that all windows are tiles, so in general there will be no windows behind one another. How will to manage all the mess then? I think about it like having a stack of papers (windows) on a small desk, versus having them all spread out over a big long desk.
Multiple desktops are already standard of most modern operating systems. However in the case of XMonad, multiple desktops are essential, and the need for them will show up intuitively as you begin to use it. In fact, it comes pre-configured to nine desktops for this reason.
Good and Evil
The JSON License This is the license of the original implementation of the JSON data interchange format. This license uses the Expat license as a base, but adds a clause mandating: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” This is a restriction on usage and thus conflicts with freedom 0. The restriction might be unenforcible, but we cannot presume that. Thus, the license is nonfree.
I absolutely love this for many reasons. It's a profound example of sticking to principles and acknowledging the complexity of human existence.
Integer Powers of Vectors
As a by-product of working on some Haskell code to manipulate expressions in algebraic geometry, I came up with a definition of integer powers of vectors in an inner product space.
When scribbling on paper, I started using a dot as an overloaded multiplication operator that does The Right Thing™ depending on context:
Multiplication between scalars: 
Inner product between vectors: 
Scaling in case of mixed types: 
Sadly, it is non-associative - watch your parentheses.
Aperiodic Tilesets and the Anisotropy Problem
There are many potential problems with cellular automata as a model of physical space and time [...] One of the simplest problems is just making the physics so that things look the same in every direction. The most obvious pattern [...] such as a fixed three-dimensional grid, have preferred directions [...]
Feynman had a proposed solution to the anisotropy problem [...] His notion was that the underlying automata [...] might be randomly connected. Waves propagating through this medium would, on the average, propagate at the same rate in every direction.
I have the feeling that aperiodic tilings might be a solution, but have yet to see if this is true. Compared to random tessellations, only a handful of different tiles are used, so the set of possible neighborhoods is finite, yet there is an infinity of locally indistinguishable tilings.
Facebook: Microsoft Reborn
Over the last 2-3 years Facebook has experienced a magnificent growth. Not only in the amount of users, but also in the amount of time its users spent on this website. I remember once reading that people were actually spending more time on Facebook than watching porn online. Today Facebook is really powerful, and many giants like Microsoft and Google have felt fear. Microsoft manifested this fear in buying stock; Google tried with Orkut, and some even consider Wave to be an attempt to dominate the social webosphere through innovation, which we have come to see that is one of the most profitable webospheres. All of this is fine: it is fair competition in a free market. However, what Facebook is doing is not right.