Cabinet Magazine Online – Ethereal Body: The Quest for Ectoplasm
Author: Dotan Dimet
I’ve got a small number of computer games, and I play practically none; last time I verged on addiction was probably in University, when I stayed home for a day playing Civilization (that should date me). Which might explain why I like this article, Designing Games for the Wage Slave, which argues that game makers need to make games more playable for people with no time.
Categories
Coffee from Catshit
Nature: Cat droppings yield chic coffee
A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world’s most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak
… The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature.…
Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born.
“It was something I was just dreaming up,” he says. “Where else do we have coffee and the cat in a similar place?” In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International1, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the faeces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.
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Beowulf (I Am Deformed)
I’m listening to a bunch of mp3s by Momus, found via his LJ (I reached him through a link to his appreciation of David Bowie) . His voice is familiar from the Bran Van 3000 song, More Shopping (there was a video, but it went away. He wasn’t wearing an eyepatch in it).
Being a heroic fantasy geek, I perked up to an odd song about Beowulf (lyrics). Looking on the web, I find He Explains:
I have no idea where this one came from. I read Beowulf at university. I think the word looks good on the page, and I’m rather drawn to the, er, otherness of Nordic epic. But in my version the hero sent to slay Grendell the monster is deformed, a monster himself. It’s not surprising, really; you don’t tangle on a regular basis with the earth’s most vile and vicious bullies without sustaining some damage. The trouble is, our deformed hero can’t get people to take him seriously. They’re too busy laughing at his ‘helplessly flailing mutant apalling prosthetic thalydomide limb’ to realise that he’s Denmark’s only hope. Actually, this song probably relates to my experience this summer of returning to my home town only to have eggs thrown at me for looking ‘different’.
And if I’m putting links to songs, I am obliged to mention William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, with Joe Jackson on backing vocals (an excerpt, but it goes as far as the first chorus. WMA file). You may shudder, I wanted more (link from Neil Gaiman, although I saw it elsewhere earlier).
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Making Perl faster
When perl is not quite fast enough
Most modules are able to export lots of their functions and other symbols into your namespace to save you typing. If you have only one argument to use, such as
use POSIX; # Exports all the defaultsthen POSIX will helpfully export its default list of symbols into your namespace. If you have a list after the module name, then that is taken as a list of symbols to export. If the list is empty, no symbols are exported:
use POSIX (); # Exports nothing.You can still use all the functions and other symbols – you just have to use their full name, by typing POSIX:: at the front. Some people argue that this actually makes your code clearer, as it is now obvious where each subroutine is defined. Independent of that, it’s faster:
use POSIX; use POSIX ();
0.516s 0.355s
use Socket; use Socket ();
0.270s 0.231sPOSIX exports a lot of symbols by default. If you tell it to export none, it starts in 30% less time. Socket starts in 15% less time.