Drinkable Chicken

Apparently the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie will be split in two parts. Not sure how this makes sense; if there is one book (other than the first two) that could be condensed into one movie, it’s book seven. After all, it’s fairly straightforward: find Horcruxes, with a lot of pointless running around in the process. And they do this after cutting out large parts of the previous books? The mind boggles. =/

For the past 2-3 months or so, I’ve been tinkering with a Lisp dialect called Liquid. Current prototype is in Python, but the idea is that I will eventually port this to a different platform; maybe the JVM, .NET, or Actionscript. (I should probably write a separate post discussing these choices.)

The prototype works, to some extent, and can be played with, for those who like this kind of stuff. (Just run the liquid script to get a REPL… error handling etc isn’t too good, but this should be better in future versions.)

Constructive criticism and ideas welcome (but keep in mind that this is just a prototype and that I am not an old Lisp hand :-).

• The last good time: This is a great parody. … Or is it?
  “Edwardian Science and technology was the last time we actually had real progress in science and technology. People think I’m crazy to say this but it remains objectively true. Name the great invention of the last 10 years! Name the greatest invention of the last 30 years! What is it? What, invented in the last 40 years can compare to the magnificent earthquake that was the internal combustion engine or the aircraft?”

• Sugar on a Stick: Try the “Sugar” operating system on a non-OLPC computer. Have to take a look at this, probably today… I happen to have a few old computers sitting around… ^_^

• Yomi Fighting Card Game: Also on my list of things to take a closer look at. Apparently the cards can be used as a regular deck, or to play the Yomi game. Has rules, sample card sheets, FAQ and an article about the game’s design.

• GP2X Wiz: Linux-based handheld. Apparently supports a number of emulators.
  (I would get one, but I need a job first… Of course, once I have the job, I may not have time to play it… And right now, I have lots of time but I cannot afford it. I must be doing something wrong… )
  (Update: Here‘s a video showing some of the emulators and games.)

Potion, a short pamphlet. Potion is a new language experiment by _why (known from The Poignant Guide to Ruby, among other things).

I love stuff like this… but then again, I have a thing for obscure and unusual languages. Some ultra-quick impressions:

• So far, it looks minimalistic and flexible.
• Borrows more than a little bit from Io. (Not that that is a bad thing…)
• Not sure I like the “licks”, but I will withhold my judgement until I know the language better. You’d think that in a language as dynamic as this, special syntax would not be necessary… but as the article points out, there may be problems with that.
• Apparently “monkey patching” is allowed, much like Ruby and Io. Dangerous…
• Interestingly, variable names can contain arbitrary UTF-8 characters. I can think of a few problems with this. On the other hand, it seems refreshing to be able to break out of the tired (letters, digits, underscore) set of choices.

I tried to build and install Potion before on OS X, but ran into some issues… will need to try again sometime.

According to this Dutch article, “two thirds” of Americans are overweight… Yet another article, while agreeing that US obesity rates are on the rise, claims the percentage is “more than one in four adults”, with the highest rate at 32.5% (for Mississippi).

Apparently different standards for “overweight” and “obese” are used here, but unfortunately neither article mentions what they are. (Or, if you’re slightly paranoid, you might think that Dutch media enjoy portraying Americans negatively. :-)

In related news, I just got my Weight Loss Coach for Nintendo DS today. (Thanks Childy! ^_^)