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Attention: Henceforth Facebook shall be referred to by its new and proper name, “Facey-Bee.” Alternatively, “th’ ol’ Facey-Bee” will also be accepted. Thanks for your attention to this urgent matter.

A forty-six page comic-strip explanation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

I was attempting to sign up for a housing-swap website today, when I came across this gem:

The only thing that would make Hank Williams’ I am so sick of social better would be if he actually used fuckin’ instead of friggin’ and damned instead of darned. Anyway, that’s all from me for now; I have to go to a social meeting soon.

The Assembly of European Regions has produced this map of European regions - a very unfamiliar perspective on a very familiar landscape.

Coding Horror presents another way to think about the browser side of web apps as underlyingly MVC in Understanding Model-View-Controller. It’s interesting, but I still prefer my analogy for primarily AJAX web apps; when the data comes in primarily through XMLHTTPRequest, it doesn’t make much sense to think of anything but the JavaScript that handles XMLHTTPRequest responses as the model.

R. Stanley Williams at Hewlett Packard, in an article published in Nature, appears to have invented the memristor. And according to Professor Leon Chua of UC Berkeley, this represents more than just a nifty new chip component; it’s a total paradigm shift:

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years — voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. The situation is analogous to what is called Aristotle’s Law of Motion, which was wrong, because he said that force must be proportional to velocity. That misled people for 2000 years until Newton came along and pointed out that Aristotle was using the wrong variables.

Chua, in the Information Week article, goes on to explain that this will have major ramifications for neural-net processing and power consumption. If this is all for real, it means we’ll someday be looking back on computing equipment produced in the last forty years as not just slow, oversized and outdated, but hopelessly primitive because it was designed based on faulty assumptions and is missing whole categories of useful functionality. How exciting.

Steve Hazel’s Debugging Science puts the science back in computer science by pointing out the deep similarities between the empirical/scientific method and the best debugging practices.

From this point of view, the open-source call to arms “with enough eyes, every bug is shallow” even turns out to be a similar kind of parallel “processing” as modern academia’s “multiple camps in support of divergent theories.”

read the PingER research paper here.

Ryan Tomayko’s The Thing About Git is the first thing I’ve read that has made me think “Wow, I really have to try out Git sometime” rather than “yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been doing that with Codeville for years.”

Plus, Git has the benefit of actually having, you know, a community of developers and stuff. Nifty.