This one comes with a comment!
* * *
If we're on the island of unwanted toys
We'll miss all the fun with the girls and the boys
When Christmas Day is here
The most wonderful day of the year.
(Yesterday's was "Let it Snow", by the way.)
* * *
Between calls I have been amusing myself by turning Christmas carols into pseudo-code.
WHILE [Figgypudding=FALSE] DO WE_WISH_YOU_A_MERRY_CHRISTMAS
...and I actually wrote a BASIC program to generate "Twelve Days of Christmas". Getting the logic for adding "and" before "a partridge in a pear tree" on every repetition but the first was not nearly as hard as remembering what all the gifts were. Once I get past "nine maids a-milking" I kind of lose it.
It makes me want to look up a BASIC interpreter, though, and try it out.
* * *
News from Arse Technica: The Global Warming Resource!
...I am told that a zombie apocalypse is less likely than World War III. It's like these guys have a crystal ball or something!
* * *
Relativity: it works, bitches. Using gravitational lensing to see a supernova in a distant galaxy several times over--that's cool, and they expect to see it happen again in 2016.
* * *
Big surprise that NASA is wary of private industry moving into space. If private industry finds a way to make space exploration profitable NASA loses its entire raison d'etre and--more importantly!--it's bailiwick.
The last thing any government bureaucracy wants is for private industry to move in, because the corporate sector expects results and has to make a profit--and so it functions infinitely more efficiently than government does.
* * *
I now have three days off in a row. Win.
