The Betacantrips Travelogue

Via Suzanne, who writes, "Shared for title". Wired on how chicken gender assignment works:

Unlike mammals, it’s not hormones that dictate a chicken’s sex. It’s a fundamental property of the cells themselves. But this only became apparent when biologists investigated several odd chickens that were half male and half female, as if a line were drawn down the center of their bodies.

This was hilarious three years ago. Juggalo News discusses Obama’s healthcare reform, circa 2010.

Seen via JWZ.

Seen via Planet Emacsen: the Land of Lisp.

It’s a Lisp book that is, in its own way, even crazier than the dearly-departed _why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. Check out this sample of the comic on their homepage:

Here’s one I found once a long time ago and keep thinking of randomly. jynx on Perlmonks explains what makes and breaks an Obfuscated Code entry. Does anyone still write Perl? Does anyone still write (intentionally) obfuscated Perl? Still, I really like the way he offers examples and counter-examples of each principle.

2) pack/unpack is not obfuscation

The reason i list the counter-example is because it is not unpacking anything like what you think at first glance. While the obfu itself does need some work, that is an acceptable use of unpack. On the other hand, looking at the example we see a fairly common use of unpack: get the string and unpack it, oh look the string is japh. While a packed string is line noise, it’s easy to see past it and note what the code is doing if it’s a simple obfu.

Seen on Tor.com: famous Batman villains, reimagined.

Cute nerd joke: Like, Python.

#!usr/bin/python
# My first Like, Python script!

yo just print like "hello world" bro

Seen on Planet Debian: ‘Can you get cp to give a progress bar like wget?’ The solution starts:

#!/bin/sh
cp_p()
{
   strace -q -ewrite cp -- "${1}" "${2}" 2>&1 \
...

The author notes in the comments:

If you feel the need to point out an alternative solution, then you have missed the entire point by a wide margin.

—lamby

Found this episode of Pictures for Sad Children pretty wonderful:

I think this is a great distillation of everything that Big Media stands for.

Thanks Suzanne for this picture, linked from Boing Boing:

Seen on Language Log: "John Cleese’s doubletalk neuroscience lecture".