Church of the Celibate Heron

Rules:

1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.

2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.

3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.

4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.

But they will no longer have to take the exhausting 35-minute hike up the hillside thanks to a massive, outdoor escalator constructed by the Colombian government.

I regularly use a program that doesn’t follow this rule. The program allocates a lot of memory during the course of its life, and when I exit the program, it just sits there for several minutes, sometimes spinning at 100% CPU, sometimes churning the hard drive (sometimes both). When I break in with the debugger to see what’s going on, I discover that the program isn’t doing anything productive. It’s just methodically freeing every last byte of memory it had allocated during its lifetime.

The album was conceived as a concept album, taking the Earth from Creation through Judgement Day. Obviously such an ambitious undertaking would be difficult to do well in a single disc, and it isn’t really fully realized.

Within the mammals, there is variation in how deeply the fetus sinks its placental teeth into the uterus. […] And others, the most invasive, are hemochorial, and actually breach maternal blood vessels. Humans are hemochorial.

Here’s the crazy part: when I am actually using the 4G network for tasks — such as turn-by-turn navigation or video streaming — it will drain 1-percent or more of battery life per minute.

In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion.

She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”

American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read.

It’s wholly acceptable in parts of the Middle East to chop off the hands of thieves but we wouldn’t tolerate it here and it’s just the same when it comes to racism.

biologists in Kyoto University in Japan have turned the shell of a (dead) crab completely transparent

I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a penis?” The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If there is just a slight hesitation, then it probably does look like a penis.

Instead, I’d just like to plead with my fellow developers. Before you decide to roll your own, please see if there is an existing project you could help improve instead. Consider it a way of repaying for all the open source work you have benefited from. Paving the road for others, like others have paved it for you.

node.js suffers from the same kind of “cowboy developer” ecosystem that blights ruby. Perl seems to have mostly escaped by standardising on a few core modules that almost everyone uses - maybe the node.js community should collaborate on a page listing the most popular libraries.

“Writing a web service: connect”, “Compressing your source: compressor99”, “Talking to … Redis: node-redis, MySQL: node-mysql-carp”, etc.