Do not do a Google image search on "atari breakout"... unless you have a lot of free time.

When you're done with that, it's time for a history lesson:

They had an idea to turn Pong into a single player game, where the player would use a ball to deplete a wall of bricks without missing the ball on its rebound. Bushnell was certain the game would be popular, and the two partnered to produce a concept. Al Alcorn was assigned as the project manager, and began development with Cyan Engineering in 1975. The same year, Alcorn assigned Steve Jobs to design a prototype. Jobs was offered US$750, with an extra $100 for every chip fewer than 50. Jobs promised to complete a prototype within four days.*

Jobs noticed his friend Steve Wozniak—employee of Hewlett-Packard—was capable of producing designs with a small number of chips, and invited him to work on the hardware design with the prospect of splitting the $750 wage. Wozniak had no sketches and instead interpreted the game from its description. To save parts, he had "tricky little designs" difficult to understand for most engineers. Near the end of development, Wozniak considered moving the high score to the screen's top, but Jobs claimed Bushnell wanted it at the bottom; Wozniak was unaware of any truth to his claims. The original deadline was met after Wozniak did not sleep for four days straight. This equated to a bonus, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak, instead only paying him $375

Always the hustler.

Not entirely surprising, given that the Dept. of Defense spends one billion dollars every 17 hours.

Roomba's Fighting Cousins

Birds and Dinosaurs

Ian's Shoelace Site

I'm doing some research on approximate dictionary matching algorithms. Everyone is familiar with at least one of these: the spell checker. You give it a word, possibly misspelled, and it tries to find the best match it can from a list of entries. I'm not writing a spell-checker, but the concept is similar: input might be misspelled, but I need to look for acceptable matches in the reference data. The problem is, as always: the naive methods are simple but unacceptably slow. So, it's off to the world of academic papers.

As always with this kind of research, the papers are so abstract as to be almost opaque. I try to understand them, but they just crush my head. So, for a given paper, I usually end up using Google to see if anyone has written code to implement the algorithm the paper describes because it's almost always easier for me to read source code, even in languages I don't use, than it is to read academic papers. I rarely get good results because this stuff is always esoteric and people don't like to share their hard work. But it does work sometimes.

So, I type the name of the algorithm from the paper into a search box. Google looks around, using its own approximate dictionary matching algorithm, finds only a few results in obscure places, and concludes that I misspelled my query. So it gives me results for what it thinks I meant - which are irrelevant to what I asked for.

It's like Google is defending itself, trying to stop me from finding out how it works. Which is kindof what I'm doing, actually. Except for the irrelevant results, of course.

Movie director Robert Altman hired Johnny Mandel to score his 1970 satire M*A*S*H. The first scene up was a fake funeral, and Altman needed a song for it.

" 'It should be the stupidest song ever written,' " Mandel recalls Altman saying. "I said, 'Well, I can do stupid.' He says, 'The song should be called 'Suicide Is Painless.' "

Altman took a stab at writing the lyrics, but it just wasn't stupid enough.

"[Altman] said, 'Ah, but all is not lost. I've got a 15-year-old kid who's a gibbering idiot. He's got a guitar. He'll run through this thing like a dose of salts,' " Mandel recalls Altman saying.

Mandel went home and wrote the melody. And the director's young son, Mike Altman, wrote the lyrics.

A brave man once requested me / to answer questions that are key / 'Is it to be or not to be' / And I replied, 'Oh, why ask me?' — "Suicide Is Painless"

Robert Altman later said his son made more than $1 million from the song, whereas he got just $70,000 for directing the movie.

And now you know.

How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars …

Cheese and Onion Chocolate Bar