Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.

According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags—especially American ones.

[...]

“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,” says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.”

So how do they explain this?

I think I may have sunk to new lows of geekiness.

Webmonkey stopped producing new content in the early 2000s and was sold by Wired to Lycos, I think, but much of the old content remained, such as the special characters reference, which I consult occasionally. Now the site has been re-purchased by Wired, which has decided to re-publish the tutorials on a wiki. That’s probably the best approach if you can’t spare the staff to manage the old content, but the historian in me is bothered that Thau’s JavaScript tutorial is gone, replaced by something generic. Why couldn’t Webmonkey have kept the old articles intact, perhaps with a notice suggesting that a piece might be outdated and a link to the new wiki? That’s sort of what PPK does at Quirksmode; he separates articles into “active” and “archived.” I’m sure we can live without knowing how to code for Netscape Navigator 4, but it’s good to remember where we’ve come from, to remember how and why things have changed since then.

However, Webmonkey promises to start creating new content relevant to today’s web, and that will be good news for those starting into web development.

A new Gallup poll (HT: Tempus Fugit) suggests that we’re both wrong to a degree: Islamic radicals don’t cite religious motivations, but they’re not economically downtrodden, either.

to

sed cycles through each line of input one line at a time, so the most obvious way to match a pattern that extends over several lines is to concatenate all the lines into what is called sed’s “hold space,” then look for the pattern in that (long) string. That’s what I do in the following lines:

A more compact version:

As far as I can tell, that’s the most efficient way to match general multi-line patterns. I initially thought it might be more efficient not to keep the complete input in the hold buffer, so I modified the algorithm to print out the string whenever a match is found:

In the last example, sed concatenates lines only until it finds a match, and then it prints the line (after substituting the text). Then, it starts again to concatenate the following lines.

However, that approach is usually massively inefficient, as the regex work increases logarithmically. Unless a sed guru can point out a better way, I’m going to continue using the first approach.

I’ve put the following script, which I call “sedml,” for sed multi-line, in my bash path.

So I can replace multi-line patterns in multiple files like so:

I think what they mean is that you can jump six times as high on the Moon.

In case you were wondering, that’s because the surface gravity of the Moon is 1/6 that of the Earth’s. It’s not because the moon has 1/6 the mass or the diameter of the Earth, as you might suspect. In fact, as you can see here, the mass of the Moon is 1.23% of the Earth’s, and its radius is 27.25%.

Surface gravity can be expressed like so:

( Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth ) = ( Mass of Moon/Mass of the Earth ) / ( Radius of Moon / Radius of Earth ) 2

Plug in the numbers, and you get the following:

( Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth ) = ( 0.07349 x 1024 kg/5.9736 x 1024 kg ) / ( 1738.1 km / 6378.1 km ) 2

Which ends up as Surface gravity of the Moon/Surface gravity of the Earth = 0.1656 ~ 1/6

There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because they ‘give a false picture of life’—in other words, deceive their readers.

I trust that what has already been said about egoistic castle-building [i.e. the reader lives vicariously as the hero of the story] forearms us against this error. Those who wish to be deceived always demand in what they read at least a superficial or apparent realism of content. To be sure, the show of such realism which deceives the mere castle-builder would not deceive a literary reader. If he is to be deceived, a much subtler and closer resemblance to real life will be required. But without some degree of realism in content—a degree proportional to the reader’s intelligence—no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth. The unblushingly romantic has far less power to deceive than the apparently realistic. Admitted fantasy is precisely the kind of literature which never deceives at all. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science fiction; they can be deceived by the stories in the women’s magazines. None of us are deceived by the Odyssey, the Kalevala, Beowulf, or Malory. the real danger lurks in sober-faced novels where all appears to be very probable but all is in fact contrived to put across some social or ethical or religious or anti-religious ‘comment on life’. For some at least of such comments must be false. To be sure, no novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary his disbelief and (what is harder) his belief.

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 67-8

The last part makes it clear that he does think some literature is dangerous; but it’s dangerous in ways different from how many people imagine.