Monday, 16th November 2009
Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide.
10 Uses for Blocks in C/Objective-C. Part of the Cocoa for Scientists series, which is by far the best free Objective-C / Cocoa tutorial I’ve seen anywhere.
A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles, by James Bridle, concerning Charles Babbage, Heath Robinson, MENACE and MAGE. I didn’t go to Playful ’09, but I really wish I had.
How Grandmas May Give Kids an Evolutionary Edge. Absolutely fascinating: XY v.s. XX chromosomes mean that paternal grandmothers have a 50% chance of sharing an X with their son’s daughters, but a 0% chance of sharing an X with their son’s sons. A study on survival rates of 43,000 children found a corresponding correlation with the proximity to a paternal or maternal grandmother. Men: Dad’s Mum is out to get you!
Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again. Optogenetics is a rapidly growing field which uses viruses to implant genes from plants in to neurons and enable them to be controlled by blue and yellow light. In the lab it’s made mice run in circles without causing any apparent long-term damage, and the technology has the potential to provide a read/write interface to the human brain itself.