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Archives for August 2005
links for 2005-08-31
Silent Auction for Room Allocation
A friend of mine just rented a new apartment in Chinatown. It’s a two-bedroom unit and she has a roommate. For a number of reasons, both of them perceive one of the two bedrooms to be more desirable. As one might expect, they’re having a little difficulty deciding how to allocate the better room between them.
My suggestion is that they both write down the amount of extra rent they’re willing to pay for the larger room. The roommate with the higher bid gets the room and pays the specified premium on top of an equal share of the rent. Then the difference in total rent for the apartment would be paid by the roommate with the lower bid.
Can anyone think of a better way?
links for 2005-08-26
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Really inexpensive headphone amplifiers.
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A Cocoa-based open source image editing application.
And Don’t Invade Russia in the Winter…
In the 1840s, a frustrated civil service exam flunkee from a villiage near Canton fell in with a crowd of Christian missionaries from the West. They obviously made quite an impression on the young slacker–he became convinced he was Christ’s little brother sent by God to vanquish demons here on Earth. This happened well before the advent of modern psychopharmacology, so our would-be messiah did the obvious thing. He assembled an army of followers and established his own government.
The rebellion that ensued lasted from 1850-1864.
Despite what you may have believed to the contrary, mass-slaughter is not an innovation of the 20th century. Historians disagree somewhat on the particulars of the total body count, but by the time Hong Xiuquan’s “Kingdom of Heavenly Peace” ended in 1864, an estimated twenty to thirty million people perished in what we now call the Taiping Rebellion. By comparison, the American Civil War, which occurred at about the same time, only claimed roughly 620,000 lives.
Unless you took a Chinese history course in college, the odds are pretty good that you’ve never even heard of the Taiping Rebellion.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert that any time over, say, 5 million people die as result of a single event, there is probably an inherent object lesson that, at bare minimum, warrants at least one, if not several, days of discussion in a high-school history classroom. Study of the Taiping Rebellion would yield several such lessons, the most obvious being that you should think twice before joining that religious cult because things often don’t end so well.
The Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 killed far more people than World War I. Some estimates even place the death-toll as high as 100 million people worldwide. Yet the Spanish Flu usually only merits a few paragraphs in most high-school textbooks. The universal lesson of consequence is largely ignored. (In this case, “Wash your freakin’ hands. Yes, it really is a big deal.”)
As is too often the case, our education system fails to recognize that the scale of historical events often underscores the importance of the underlying lesson. Maybe we should be teaching history by death-toll instead of by region or chronology.
links for 2005-08-19
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Visualizations of how different sorting algorithms work.
The Panda Liberation Front
Until reading this article I was blissfully unaware that the new Panda cub at the National Zoo is actually the property of communist China, to which he will be returned on his second birthday.
We have to do something about this! We can’t just stand around and let little Butter Stick become the next Elian Gonzalez. He’ll end up working in some Red Army factory. Or worse, they could carry out bizarre medical experiments on him.
We need to start planning a tactical operation to liberate Butter Stick.
Who is with me?
links for 2005-08-17
links for 2005-08-16
links for 2005-08-15
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The best argument in favor of marriage neutral tax policy.
links for 2005-08-11
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Professional Archival, Conservation and Restoration Supplies for Books
links for 2005-08-09
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What would Nixon have said if the Astronauts couldn’t come back?
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How to get an authentic B&W film look from digital image files.
links for 2005-08-08
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Web application to generate packing lists based on travel plans.
links for 2005-08-03
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Very nice design portfolios.
links for 2005-08-02
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The system Leo Laporte uses and recommends.
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Dietrich Ayala’s class for integrating del.icio.us link information.
