i.justrealized

On the increasing usage of improper English, Joan Acocella of The New Yorker notes:

English is a melding of the languages of the many different peoples who have lived in Britain; it has also changed through commerce and conquest. English has always been a ragbag, and that encouraged further permissiveness. In the past half century or so, however, this situation has produced a serious quarrel, political as well as linguistic, with two combatant parties: the prescriptivists, who were bent on instructing us in how to write and speak; and the descriptivists, who felt that all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what the current practice was.

But the most curious flaw in the descriptivists’ reasoning is their failure to notice that it is now they who are doing the prescribing. By the eighties, the goal of objectivity had been replaced, at least in the universities, by the postmodern view that there is no such thing as objectivity: every statement is subjective, partial, full of biases and secret messages. And so the descriptivists, with what they regarded as their trump card—that they were being accurate—came to look naïve, and the prescriptivists, with their admission that they held a specific point of view, became the realists, the wised-up.

Source: New Yorker

I guess that will make me closer to a descriptivist since I think there’s nothing wrong with Singlish.

Excerpts from paper by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson

If money doesn’t make you happy, then you probably aren’t spending it right

The relationship between money and happiness is surprisingly weak, which may stem in part from the way people spend it.

We suggest that consumers should

1. buy more experiences and fewer material goods;
2. use their money to benefit others rather than themselves;
3. buy many small pleasures rather than fewer large ones;
4. eschew extended warranties and other forms of overpriced insurance;
5. delay consumption;
6. consider how peripheral features of their purchases may affect their day-to-day lives;
7. beware of comparison shopping; and
8. pay close attention to the happiness of others.

On point 2, use their money to benefit others rather than themselves:

Choosing to give money away—or even being forced to do so—led to activation in brain areas typically associated with receiving rewards (Harbaugh, Mayr, & Burghart, 2007).

On point 5, delay consumption:

…there is a second reason why “consume now, pay later” is a bad idea: it eliminates anticipation, and anticipation is a source of “free” happiness. The person who buys a cookie and eats it right away may get X units of pleasure from it, but the person who saves the cookie until later gets X units of pleasure when it is eventually eaten plus all the additional pleasure of looking forward to the event.

Source

A thought struck me lately — I’ve been reading too much, writing too little. Similarly, I’ve been over consuming and under producing.

I’ve been thinking about the times that I could otherwise be spending in building, what I would describe with my limited vocabulary, a lasting pleasure. I have been distracted and once in a while I will wake up realizing people are ahead of me.

It has been a long dream, and it is about time.

Evacuated Tube Transport is an airless, frictionless, maglev-like form of transportation which is safer, cheaper and quieter than trains or airplanes. Six-person capsules travel in the tubes and can reach a maximum speed of 6,500 km/h, and provide 50 times more transportation per kwh. A tube can travel from New York to Beijing in two hours, and make a round-the-world trip in just six hours.

Evacuated Tube Transport could take you around the world in just 6 hours

This would be so awesome if it becomes a reality.

This is just not sensible to me. This is, perhaps, a result of an overly-conservative interpretation of religious doctrines.

Execution of web programmer in Iran may be imminent

A computer programmer from Canada faces imminent execution in Iran for the actions of another person, which he had no control over, a human rights group says.

Saeed Malekpour wrote a program to upload photos to the Internet, an accomplishment that could cost him his life, Amnesty International reported Friday. Authorities in the Islamic Republic claimed his program was used by someone else to upload pornography and charged him with “insulting and desecrating Islam.”

Source: CNN

Perhaps as a web programmer I feel more for him.

This is quite hilarious:

Iron Sky Official Theatrical Trailer [HD]

I hope this comes to Singapore. Iron Sky is a forthcoming science-fiction comedy film directed by Timo Vuorensola, scheduled to be released on 4 April 2012 in Finland.

I assume you already have PEAR/PECL available. I am using the CentOS’s stock PHP. First you need to update your channels:

Continue reading “How to install PHP GeoIP in CentOS” »