Ted Carnahan

Anyone who is interested in biology or chemistry has got to check out The Inner Life of the Cell, a Harvard project to visualize the inner workings of a cell. It’s an incredible video. They admit that they had to sacrifice some scientific accuracy for the sake of a good presentation, but it’s surprising how many things are so identifiable. I kept thinking “Hey look, DNA assembly!” or “That’s a ribosome!” This is an awesome combination of science and art.

Who says that Microsoft doesn’t have a sense of humor? Well, pretty much everyone - but apparently they are wrong. Enter Ms. Dewey, the strangest search engine to date. This is the first and only search engine that I have actually watched, as opposed to used. In the past five minutes, I have been heckled, treated to disco dance moves, and been ‘lasso’d’ by this megalomaniacal woman.

Beyond the eye-candy factor, this is just a wrapper around Windows Live Search - and a pretty useless one at that - so this has got to be proof that Microsoft does in fact have a sense of humor!

Cory Foy happened upon what is, quite possibly the coolest toy ever. It’s too bad he didn’t buy it for Anabelle - just imagine the fun! “Oh no! The nasty wormies are attacking the mail server! Ahhhh!”

Plus, because it’s for ages 3+, it’s fun for the whole family… especially for those of us who have computer science degrees… nevermind.

As I was enjoying a “Brown Cow” (basically Kahlua and milk) one evening, I remembered that Kahlua is coffee liqueur, and I am very sensitive to caffeine before bed. After perusing the Kahlua website, I couldn’t find anything about caffeine content, and an extensive Google search turned up nothing. So I emailed them, and got this response:

Kahlua actually has very low levels of caffeine, (approximately 4.85 mg in each 1.5 oz drink).

One cup of coffee contains about 100mg of caffeine, so if we’re looking at 100ml of Kahlua there should be about 10 mg of caffeine. (1/10 of a cup of coffee).

So it looks like I can relax - a little Kahlua won’t keep me up after all.

Jennifer and I participated in a small group at Truman while we were engaged about relationships. One evening we heard the abridged, spoken version of Ravi Zacharias’ book on marriage I, Isaac, Take Thee, Rebekah: Moving from Romance to Lasting Love. This was my first exposure to Ravi, and I really enjoy his thoughtful, rational approach to theology.

He has daily podcasts available for your perusal. Just add these links to your podcast program (e.g. RhythmBox on Ubuntu Linux):

Just Thinking - http://rzim.org/includes/rss/jtPodcastRSS.php
Let My People Think - http://rzim.org/includes/rss/lmptPodcastRSS.php

I recently needed to do a graph traversal using the excellent perl Graph library, but I needed to determine the order for visiting new nodes in the fringe myself. Graph::Traversal provides a next_successor attribute which takes a code ref so that you can specify this behavior yourself. Unfortunately, in version 0.80 that feature isn’t well documented, and if you try to use it, you get an “unknown attribute” error. I’ve submitted a patch to enable, document, and test the feature. Now, if you want (for example) to do a breadth-first traversal, but visit the nodes in reverse alphabetical order, you can do this:

Graph::Traversal::BFS->new(
    first_root => 'a',
    pre => sub { print $_[0]; }
    next_successor => sub { (reverse sort keys %{$_[1]})[0]; },
)->bfs;