psychology dector

Photo credit:  Matt Mendelsohn Lately, I’ve been reading Daniel Mendelsohn, a cultural and literary critic.   His books have ample essayistic criticism, but also personal history and metaphor.   He brings sharp, intelligent, and often witty writing that is always insightful and interesting to read. Two particularly interesting pieces I found recently, one written by Mendelsohn himself , and the other, an interview with him posted December 25 th , 2012 at Lambda Literary:   Celebrating Excellence in LGBT Literature Since 1989 , demand careful examination. “A Critic’s Manifesto” posted August 28 th , 2012 on The New Yorker website, gives us both some personal history and Mendelsohn’s view of the role of the critic.   He learned his craft, he tells us, through reading.   Mendelsohn dreamed of being not a novelist or poet, but a critic, and he began his journey on the pages of publications like The New Yorker reading not just literary critiques, but those w...

Update 2013-12-30: New feature 32 bit floats pushes asm.js performance to 70% of native. More JavaScript engines support asm.js . The conclusion mentions LLJS as another asm.js source language. asm.js defines a subset of JavaScript that can be compiled to fast executables. It has been created at Mozilla by David Herman, Luke Wagner and Alon Zakai. According to the specification , “[asm.js] effectively describes a safe virtual machine for memory-unsafe languages like C or C++.” This blog post describes how asm.js works, it is based on the specification. Things that slow down JavaScript Current JavaScript is already quite fast, but a few mechanisms in engines limit its speed: Boxing: Floating point numbers (including integers stored as floating point numbers) are boxed , they have wrappers that allow them to co-exist with other values such as objects. Just-in-time (JIT) compilation and runtime type checks: Most JavaScript engines compile code in two stages. I...

Edge 2013 was a web development conference that took place on February 9, 2013, in London. Its approach was different from most conferences. Quoting the website : Edge is a different kind of conference, for developers with experience to share, who want to see and bring improvements to the web platform. Our emphasis is on creating a good environment for productive debate and discussion, rather than presenting the experiences of a single speaker. Each themed session is an hour long, and starts with a maximum 10 minute talk by an expert in that topic, outlining the current state of the platform in that area. [...] The remainder of the session will be given over to an open but structured discussion, with a professional moderator and a panel of seasoned developers who have in-depth knowledge of the subject. [...] Session participants will include [...] a notetaker to record the discussion so we can share it on the web later. Now the videos are online: Panel 1: Offli...

People are posting Internet Explorer usage statistics on Twitter, tagged with #postyourIEstats (link works without being logged in). Summary: IE6 is mostly dead, as it should be. IE7 and IE8 still see considerable usage, but it’s on the decline. IE9 is currently most popular. As of 2012-11-15, it is the oldest Internet Explorer still supported by Google. IE10 usage is still low.

This week, I stumbled upon a remarkable artist:   Sister Corita Kent .   She was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, but grew up here in Los Angeles.   At the tender age of 18, she entered the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary , a group of Catholic women who, among other things, ran the Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood (now the campus of the American Film Institute).   In the heady days following the Second Vatican Council , the sisters had the temerity to re-evaluate the way they prayed, ministered, and lived, which upset Cardinal James Francis McIntyre , the archbishop of Los Angeles.   Given an ultimatum to conform or disband, the women voted to become a lay community and a nonprofit organization.   Facing declining revenues and financial hardship, the college closed its doors in 1981, but Sister Corita had already made a name for herself in the art world.   Corita ran the college art department, and specialized in creating serigraphs, or silk sc...