Link dump 000001

Here's a quick dump of a few interesting links I've stumbled across in the last week or so, in lieu of a proper entry for today:

• Brazilian American hacker Gustavo Duarte has a fascinating series of blog posts about computer internals and low level operation: motherboard chipsets and the memory map, how computers boot up and the kernel boot process. These subjects represent some of the greatest gaps in my understanding of computers, and these excellent posts went a long way toward plugging those gaps.
• The Ludwig von Mises Institute has a very interesting article on the political effects of the internet.
• As a former iaidoka I have a fairly strong general interest in anything related to swords, including the smithing process, so I quite enjoyed this blog post explaining recent scientific discoveries relating to the legendary Damascus blades of the Crusades.
• Peter Norvig, best known as co-author of a popular textbook on artificial intelligence, has a page of infrequently asked Python questions that I've somehow manage to avoid stumbling across until now. Some of the questions are odd or silly, but there looks to be a few genuinely useful ideas in there, and all the ideas, even the silly ones, are thought provoking and a good tour of the less well known corners of Python.
• Here's a positively fascinating video (and a surprisingly old one considering that I haven't heard of anything even remotely this cool happening in this field more recently) narrating the evolution of simulated block creatures in virtual environments. A more thorough version of this video, say 30 minutes long, would make a fantastic addition to high school education on the issue of evolution.

I am starting to feel pretty confident about Cherryblosxom's current state. A 0.1 supremely alpha release may very well happen this week. Stay tuned!