A380 cockpit

Here's a controllable panoramic view of the cockpit of Airbus's monster A380 airliner

RIP, WFB

The great and good William F Buckley died today at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.

Lileks on Roosevelt

Lileks nails Roosevelt and his cult of Great Leader worship. That's the evil Roosevelt, of course, not good old Teddy.

Googling the past

• Google, 1924
• Google, 1960

6.0.2 is out the door

Here's Peter Overmann's summary of what's new in Mathematica 6.0.2. Meanwhile, back to excelsior as usual.

Immersion

Coming soon: two weeks of deep immersion in Mathematica at the Advanced Mathematica Summer School.

I'm pancakes

Hat tip: Rosamundi.

Letters of John Q Adams

Nine letters to his son on the Bible, collected & published shortly after his death: Letters of John Quincy Adams to His Son, on the Bible and Its Teachings. And here's a collection of works by and about John Adams (JQ Adams' father) at live.com/archive.org.

Hat tip: TSO.

I'm so old...

I've never used an IM client, til this morning. My boss has us im'ing for quick meetings, and after much gyration with vpn and pidgin, I'm connected from home. I never thought I'd be able to change a poopy diaper during a work meeting.

Dystopias!

Here are some handy lists of top dystopian movies, a delicious genre:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_films
• http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/the-top-50-dystopian-movies-of-all-time/
• http://www.amazon.com/best-list-DYSTOPIA-movies-part/lm/7L6LEQ6XSHDG
• http://www.amazon.com/best-list-DYSTOPIA-movies-part/lm/191696YHYZJC

I suppose one attraction of dystopian stories is that the entire story of man since the fall is a dystopian adventure.

A note to proprietors of restaurants

If you serve coffee at your restaurant and you cannot guarantee that the waitress will be by once a minute or so, simply give me an entire pot of coffee and some mechanism to keep it warm.

Your well-tipped waitress will thank you.

The story of Corona mission #1005

Or, Venezuelan farmers find a high-tech American spy satellite in 1964.

Bubba's Book Club, Issue 9

Neil Peart has a new set of book reviews up at Bubba's Book Club.

Book idea

Someone needs to write a rigorous biography of Donald Knuth while he's still around to contribute.

A Catholic miscellany

Some Google Books I'd pick up if I found them in a used book store:

• The Conversion of Europe, Charles Henry Robinson
• The New Raccolta: Or, Collection of Prayers and Good Works, 1903
• Three Catholic reformers of the fifteenth century, Mary Helen A. Allies, 1878
• St. Vincent Ferrer, his life, spiritual teaching, and practical devotion, André Pradel, 1875
• Virtues and Spiritual Doctrine of St. Vincent de Paul by Michel Ulysse Maynard, Louise de Marillac, 1877
• Albert the great, of the Order of friar-preachers: his life and scholastic labours, Joachim Sighart, 1876
• Sacred and Legendary Art by Anna Jameson, 1895
• The immaculate conception of the Mother of God, an exposition by William Bernard Ullathorne, 1855

Moving mountains

This week I'm revisiting the very first thing I wrote in Mathematica, a documentation testing package. A quick initial survey revealed a vast panorama of tottering kluge towers built high atop mountains of cruft. It's been very pleasing to retain the odd little working pieces and utterly trash the rest of the infrastructure in favor of a tidy little routine that handles more in a dozen lines of code than what I initially squeezed into 600 lines of bizarre rigamarole.

Here it is, all boiled down to the uttermost simplicity:

RunTests[dir_String, tests_List] :=
  Module[{manifest, res},
    manifest = FileNames[{"*.nb"}, dir, Infinity];
    res = Reap[Module[{nb, nbExpr},
      nb = #;
      nbExpr = Quiet@Get@nb;
      Module[{test},
        test = #;
        If[DocumentationCheckQ[nbExpr, test] === False, Sow[nb, test]];
      ]& /@ tests;
    ]& /@ manifest, _, Rule][[2]];
    (* return results sorted from most failures to least *)
    Sort[res, Length[Last[#1]] > Length[Last[#2]] &]]

Copy the current buffer name

At least once a day in emacs I need to get the name of the file visited by the current buffer and paste it somewhere. This bit of code puts the current buffer's filename at the top of the kill ring, ready for yanking:

(defun copy-current-buffer-name ()
  "Copy the name of the current buffer into the kill ring, ready
for yanking."
  (interactive)
  (let ((name (buffer-name (current-buffer))))
    (kill-new name)
    (message "%s" name)))

(global-set-key "\C-ch" 'copy-current-buffer-name)

I'm using the less-than-obvious C-c h since my C-c keymap is just about full.

That was cold

The kids noticed last night that the warm air from our gas furnace in the basement suddenly smelled hot, then it smelled disturbingly hot, as if things were going south in a real hurry. I killed it at the thermostat & went downstairs to cut the main power to the furnace and found water swirling around it - most of the county is flooded and yesterday's thunderstorm/sleet/blizzard/&c was the last straw. Water was coming in steadily through the ancient brick wall on the north side of the basement and heading straight down the old coaling area towards the furnace.

The websites I found said you should have a gas furnace checked by a technician after flooding, so I got in line with the local contractor and tried to work in the 54F downstairs library shivering in two flannel shirts, a jacket and sweat pants. Fortunately we have a separate heating & power system upstairs so the kids spent most of the day up there staying warm.

The contractor came by about 5 this evening - since 6:30 last night he's done nothing but climb down into flooded basements and check furnaces & hot water heaters. Some families lost the computer card that controls the furnace, one had a fire; we were mighty lucky - nothing was damaged, so now it's blasting blessed heat again.

The ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James

I'd never heard of M R James, but apparently he's well-known for his ghost stories and his catalogs of old university library holdings and whatnot. At Google Books.

Norman A. Love, 1923-2008

Lisa's grandfather died Thursday morning; obituaries here and here. In 1944-45 he was a cook in Patton's 3rd Army in its drive across France to knock the uppity Krauts on the head yet again, and in later years he was beloved among his grandchildren for his delicious breakfast cooking.

Santa Anna's leg

A bit of local history from the Champaign News-Gazette:

The most controversial Central Illinois [museum] item is the leg of a certain Mexican general, the conqueror of the Alamo.

Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna lost his leg in the so-called French Pastry War, fought between France and Mexico in 1838. In 1847, facing the United States at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in Mexico, he lingered over a roast chicken.

Illinoisans charged the camp, ate the general's chicken and carried off his cork leg. They memorialized the victory by naming a Piatt County town after the battle.

The leg has been stored at Camp Lincoln's Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, but in recent years the Mexican government has requested its return.

More details in an earlier News-Gazette article here.