The latest issue of National Geographic has a great article on Frederick Law Olmsted, an amazingly prolific landscape architect best known for designing Central Park with his partner, Calbert Vaux. Not mentioned in the article is his Bay Area work. For example, he drew up the first campus plan for UC Berkeley in 1866, which …
Author Archives: Jimmy Lin
9-year old African-American boy sings Chinese opera
Tyler Thompson doesn’t speak the language, but he sings it very well. Oakland: Boy, 9, a rising star in Chinese opera • San Francisco Chronicle Boy who sings in Chinese draws oohs, ahs • Oakland Tribune (link good until Feb. 20, 2005) (Chronicle link added on Febrary 16, 2006)
Symbolic links and hard links in Windows
I just found out that Windows 2000 and XP have hard links and symbolic links, just like Unix. But Windows doesn’t expose those features in the user interface. Dang it, I could have been using links for the past 5 years! Thankfully, some enterprising programmers have created utilities for creating and removing symbolic links (called …
Reading the entire Encyclopædia Britannica
As someone who read the World Book Encyclopedia for fun as a kid, I find the topic of the book The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World intriguing. It’s Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs’s humorous account of his quest to read the entire 2002 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, …
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Caltech math professor consults for CBS
I never thought I’d see this: CBS’ new series, NUMB3RS, is a drama where a math whiz helps his detective brother solve police crime cases. To make sure the math stays realistic, the head of Caltech’s math department, Gary Lorden, is consulting for the show. Also, the fictitious school in the show, “Cal Sci,” is …
Psychological traffic calming
Recently there’s been a bunch of articles about “second-generation traffic calming.” The basic idea is simple, but sounds crazy: remove all signs, traffic lights, and lane markings. Eliminate the curb separating the sidewalk from the street. This does several things. It emphasizes the street as a space to be shared between pedestrians and drivers. It …
Why Caps Lock is next to A instead of Ctrl
Recently my colleagues and I started to wonder why older PC keyboards have the Ctrl key next to the A key, while newer PC keyboards have Caps Lock there instead. It didn’t make sense: Ctrl is used more frequently than Caps Lock, so why is it now in a less prominent position? The most likely …
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Iron Chef America
I finally got a chance to watch the Iron Chef America specials that first aired on Food Network back in April. I really enjoyed it: it captures the atmosphere and the attitude of the original Japanese series. And it looks like a lot of people agree with me: it’s becoming a full series starting on …
The Onion was right again
Here is the top story for The Onion on January 17, 2001: Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over’ (screenshot) They had no idea how true that would become.
Happy new year
Can you believe it’s already the middle of the first decade of this century? Whew, where did the time go?