purplemass.com

There are only two coding skills which mostly people who are completely self-taught as a programmer miss out on: proper encapsulation, and unit tests. For proper encapsulation, you should organize your code so that changes which require modifying code in more than one module are as rare as possible, and for unit tests you should write them to be pass/fail so that all unit tests can be run as a comprehensive suite. And now you know everything you need to about those two things. Anyone who is taught the above guidelines, and decides they really want to learn those skills, will with sufficient practice become good at them.

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A book recommended here is Introduction to Algorithms which you can buy from Amazon.

Some cigarettes have a “kick” containing 35 times more “freebase” nicotine – the most addictive form – than others, researchers have found. The findings could help rate the addictiveness of different brands, they say.

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Unbeleivable stats about how the Fins fared against the Russians in 1939.

Link

Very good site for beginners in programming – uses the Visual Basic component of Excel which comes free with MS Office. Contains some great examples too!

visualbots.com

BBC News is reporting that a French company has developed a pollution-free car which runs on compressed air. India’s Tata Motors has the car under production and it may be on sale in Europe and India by the end of the year.

The air car, also known as the Mini-CAT or City Cat, can be refueled in minutes from an air compressor at specially equipped gas stations and can go 200 km on a 1.5 euro fill-up — roughly 125 miles for $3. The top speed will be almost 70 mph and the cost of the vehicle as low as $7000.

A partial list in no particular order by Eric Zorn.

Very geeky but hey ho.