Brain on Fire Tim McCormack, distilled.

If I fed you the same diet of (let's say) rice, lentils, carrots, broccoli, and cheese for every meal, every day, you'd soon get sick of it. You might start dreading mealtimes, knowing that the food will be the same. It's not that you specifically crave something else; you just want something different.

I get the impression that this "food boredom" phenomenon occurs in every culture, which would indicate a genetic rather than cultural basis. But what evolutionary advantage could there be to rejecting a perfectly healthy meal, just because it's the same one you had yesterday?

Using JSEXT, I can now run javascript as a server-side scripting language on my Ubuntu box!

The main awesome thing about JSEXT is that a javascript file can be run either client- or server-side. This means that much your data validation code and some of your business logic can be kept in the same language, instead of splitting it into (for example) PHP + javascript. Furthermore, there's only one file to maintain for any given bit of logic.

Here's a quickstart guide to get JSEXT up and running with Apache 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron:

I've been on an International Phonetic Alphabet kick lately (thanks to the linguistics class I'm taking) and have been contemplating the possibility of IPA Scrabble. As far as I know, it's never been done officially (by Hasbro or whatever.) Want to help make it happen?

Update 2008-10-25: Cascadilla Press may have something like this. Still looking into whether it fits the frequency and value model of Scrabble.

Update 2008-11-2: Cascadilla Press does indeed have a magnetic IPA Scrabble set. The rules are a little different (mainly to accommodate the difference between Latin-character English and IPA English) and the tiles are not designed for a regular Scrabble board, but the principle is there. They determined the tile values through gameplay, though it is skewed to work best for linguistics students, e.g. the less familiar symbols are worth more, and schwa is worth more to encourage multisyllabic words.

So today I talked with the Facilities guy who was installing mouse traps in the apartment. He explained what he was doing as he worked:

I set up my S5 on a tripod next to a mockingbird nest and left for 15 minutes. The camera captured one of the parents feeding them a mealworm (perhaps?) and a berry, as well as disposing of a fecal sac.