I think I understand what he's talking about, but I still don't care.

At the risk of further alienating my non-nerd readers, though they must number in the hundreds of thousands, I will share this link to an indie gaming blog:

http://tigsource.com

It is excellent, and browsing the archives has led me to gems such as You Have To Burn The Rope, Rose and Camilla, and Iji.

Holy crap! Episode 2 of "What the fuck is Casey talking about?" is out!

It happens to all of us... You're writing some Haskell, minding your own businesses... When all of a sudden, bam! The looming horns of a dilemma, threatening to impale you: do you use pattern matching to decompose an argument to a function? Or do you decompose it otherwise, so you can refer to the intact argument by name? A tough question, to be sure...

Lets say we want to duplicate the first element of a list. We could do it in one of two ways:

dupHead a     = head a : a
dupHead (h:t) = h : h : t

Woah, cowboy! These functions are way too long. Instead, let's use an 'as-pattern' so we can have our cake and eat it too:

dupHead a@(h:_) = h : a

Cryptorific!

I don't know anything about linguistics

But I like to think about it anyways.

One of the ways in which I've noticed that languages differ is in how 'interlocked' their utterances are. For example, if you take the English sentence "My car is red.", and interchange 'red' with any other adjective, without changing the rest sentence. However, if you wanted to change 'car' to something plural, 'are' would have to become 'is'.

However, in Swedish (you know, for instance) "My car is red." would be "Min bil är röd." and if you wanted to change 'bil' to 'hus', an neutral-gender word, you would have to change 'röd' to 'rött' and 'min' to 'mitt'. To change 'bil' to a something plural, you would use 'röda' and 'Mina'.

There are also other good examples, like noun cases. One of the hardest features of icelandic is that it possesses a complex system of noun declination for many cases that don't exist in English, like the dative and ablative.

So, I've been thinking that it might be a good idea to just fuck all this Esperanto shit where we try to create new languages that are as simple as possible. Why not just create a language of complete and utter jaw-dropping complexity? So, that's what I'm going to do.

Of course, every good language needs a name, so it will be called Rezignanto, which means "one who gives up" in Esperanto. You're welcome to help out!

I think that the eventual goal should be that, given an utterance, one must change nearly every syllable in the utterance to swap a single morpheme.

Some ideas:
• complex vowel and consonant harmony rules -- like in Finnish or Turkish
• a baffling variety of cases -- we should integrate at least every one found at the bottom of this • wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case)
• rampant agglutination
• at least a dozen tones
• 5 completely arbitrary genders
• nouns declined for number, case, definiteness, gender
• number declinations include one, one or more, zero, zero or more, and more than one
• variations of the relative speed of syllables can change the meaning of an utterance

Do you have any other ideas for good language features that would make it wor... better?

Today on cops,

which my Swedish roommates watch with great amusement, a perp was asked if he had any warrants. He answered, "I don't think so." I mean, Herregud, how disorganized do you have to be?

There is this great blog from Russia that you should know about.

It is called drugoi, or maybe that is the name of the person that writes it.

I cannot say, for it is in Russian!

There have been some pretty good posts recently:


display of military might in an asian country



Vladimir Putin is apparently the baddest man in the world



somewhere, there was a house that was on fire, and it was extremeley photogenic for a moment




and for a change of pace, enjoy these pictures of an airport in norway


It about everything, although you'll notice that recurring themes include Russia, Norway, and weiner dogs. Also, I am almost certain that it will make you feel cool and international when you read it.

And now for another exciting episode of "What the fuck is Casey talking about?"

I just wrote the best quicksort in the history of time! Who cares that it can only exist in a highly inefficient garbage collected system with so much crazy hand-waving that we can only cross our fingers and silently entreat god that our nice Θ(n log n) algorithm is not overwhelmed by the torrential flood of fall-of-Rome-style extravagance in which we are awash!

import List

quicksort (pivot : rest) = quicksort lessThan ++ [pivot] ++ quicksort atLeast
 where
 (lessThan, atLeast) = partition (<  pivot) rest
quicksort [] = []

My life is hard. Such a hard life.

It just hit me how profoundly easy my life in Sweden is.

Every day of the week, I wake up at around 11:15. I shower and dress, and then cycle to a nation for lunch. A nation is like a fraternity, but better in every way. Lunch is 30kr ($4.50 US and falling) and includes coffee and desert. Then, if it's one of the two days a week that I have class, I bike there and listen to someone talk about vikings for a couple of hours.

There are parties 4 nights a week, cheap pinball in the math building, mentor group activities, and people at DF to waste time with.

Of course, things are going to change next week when Swedish classes resume, but probably not that much :-)