Monthly Archives: January 2009

The more you know: Yoshi’s Island had hardware 3D acceleration

Yoshi’s Island (one of the best platformers ever made, one of the best games on the SNES) included the Super FX 2 3D graphics processing chip. Somewhat confusing, as it looked a lot like Super Mario World. Link.

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Eric Foner waxes cantankerous on Fresh Air

This is a pretty good Fresh Air interview with historian Eric Foner. He basically talks about historical analogies to the Obama election and inauguration (the title and copy on the NPR website is wrong; he hardly talks about “post-Civil War … Continue reading

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Singapore, Retro Arcades, The Domestic Transformer, and the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis: my recent Metafilter activity

(please excuse junky styles) De la démocratie en Singapore Economist Bryan Caplan is author of the best contemporary critique of democracy and democraticness (previously), and therefore the person I’d most like to visit Singapore and share his thoughts. He recently … Continue reading

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Read recently: Everyman, The Diving Pool, Out.

Book links: Everyman, The Diving Pool (collection of novellas), Out. I think I’m forgetting something . . . don’t know what it could be.

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Is the “withdrawal method” of birth control immoral? Questioning the action-inaction distinction as a way of differentiating among potential lives

(This post is nominally about the “withdrawal method” of birth control but is actually intended as an examination of some common pro-life arguments.) People who believe abortion is wrong often adopt a potential life theory, e.g. that it’s wrong to … Continue reading

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Annoying Macbook Pro issue: left USB power

Contrary to spec, the left USB port on the (early-gen?) Macbook Pro notebooks is unpowered, or under-powered. Many devices will only work in the right port (I have an external HDD which emits a “low power” beepcode in the left … Continue reading

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Obama

Obama had the following line in a primary speech: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” I realized that this translates very neatly into Internet cliche: “All our base are belong to us.”

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Dogs on God

Prints here. Many of the best New Yorker Cartoons are about dogs.

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