How will the Staffordshire Hoard impact our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons?

With all the buzz about the Staffordshire Hoard (see also the NYT article on the find), it’s no wonder that people are drooling at the potential for an exponential improvement in our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons. But were the Anglo-Saxons really a bunch of brutes because most people don’t recognize their artistic achievements? Does that say more about their situation or ours? The Dark Ages weren’t “dark” because of them, but because we just don’t know much about them.

The Online Photographer: The Worst Photograph Ever Made

From 12/12/08, Mike Johnston, in his blog The Online Photographer, calls this Annie Leibovitz photograph “the worst photograph ever made": [_picture taken from pdnedu.blogs.com (http://pdnedu.blogs.com/.a/6a00d8341ce76f53ef010536887d0d970c-pi_)] According to Mr. Johnston, “[the effort put into this photograph] was all done intentionally, front to back, top to bottom, money-no-object, by an army of the most talented professionals, from art director to stylists to make-up artists to baby-wranglers to lighting assistants to photographer to digital retoucher, all working assiduously in concert in pursuit of the utterly pointless.

Bottomless pit? Really?

via http://simplecomplexity.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/bottomless-pit-65-feet-deep-funny-sign.jpg

Quotations from Sontag's On Photography

I recently finished reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography [ISBN 0-312-42009-9; Picador, 1973] and, in the spirit of the book itself (which includes a collection of quotations from others), I decided to record some of the most interesting quotations. I intend to represent her points objectively and don’t necessarily agree with all her statements, but wanted to capture them here. In Plato’s Cave Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one – and can help build a nascent one.

Intro to The R Programming Language: For Programmers

As someone who’s new to R and curious about what it can do, one of the first questions I ask is how does it compare to Java, C#, Perl, etc. (Insert language-of-choice here.) Fortunately,John Cook has answered that question with his blog post: The R programming language for programmers coming from other programming languages. Take a few minutes to check it out and see for yourself why R is the up-and-comer.

Rosetta Code

One thing I’ve always enjoyed is learning something new, especially a new language. First it started with human languages, but over the past few years (well, more than a few!) I’ve enjoyed learning new programming languages. From Lua to REXX to Icon to Processing (which, technically, isn’t a language but more like an environment) and many others, I’ve loved tinkering with new languages. Now, I found a resource online that lets me compare the various languages.

F4: The Most Versatile Aircraft Flown by the US in WWII

Google's R Style Guide

I’m still pretty new to R, but find that Google’s using it in lots of places, like MapReduce. Google’s R Style Guide outlines the directions to R programmers. It’s an interesting read – very simple and efficient. (Thanks to the post on Revolutions blog for the link.)

New Logo Prototype

Just playing around after reading http://abduzeedo.com/creating-very-cool-folded-typo, I came up with the start of a new logo prototype: Just for fun… :)

10 Eclipse Navigation Shortcuts Every Java Programmer Should Know « The Curious Schemer

A very handy guide to Eclipse keyboard shortcuts: 10 Eclipse Navigation Shortcuts Every Java Programmer Should Know « The Curious Schemer. It always amazes me how dependent everyone is on the mouse, even old school Un*x programmers. For better or worse, I love the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts – it is easier to do something in the IDE if I can keep my fingers close to the keys, you know, how the code is typed in.