Halloween Candy Roundup

There's two approaches for buying Halloween candy. You can buy candy you don't like—I'm thinking of you Bit-O-Honey—in which case you can buy it far in advance of Halloween, or you can buy candy you like, preferably on the day of Halloween so that you don't have to buy more candy once you've eaten it all.

In addition to a variety of chocolate candies for everyone in the house, I bought a bag of Sweetarts, Nerds, and Laffy Taffy:



This year's Skulls & Bones Sweetarts consisted only of lemon, grape, and cherry flavors, my favorites. Blue punch and green apple, which I don't particularly care for, were missing.

I love Nerds of any flavor, but after breaking a crown on one I limit myself to a couple of small boxes on Halloween.

I also haven't met a flavor of Laffy Taffy that I wouldn't eat, but this year's Halloween themed caramel apple is not one of my favorites. For some reason (maybe too much heat) the wrappers and taffy were fused in the few I tried making it very difficult to eat the candy. I'll definitely be passing these on to the trick-or-treaters.

As always, the Halloween Laffy Taffy has themed jokes:

Q: What type of witch makes the best lunch?
A: A sand-witch.

Q: What kind of car does a ghost driver?
A: A Boo-ick (Buick).

Q: Why do witches fly on brooms?
A: Because vacuum cleaners are too heavy!

Q: What did the trick or treat bucket say to the candy?
A: Hello sweet thing!

Q: Why did they carve a big mouth into the pumpkin?
A: So he could scream and howl!

Q: Why didn't the skeleton cross the road?
A: Because he had no guts.

Q: Who mans a ghost ship?
A: There's a skeleton crew.

Q: What do ghosts add to their morning cereal?
A: Boo-berries!

Q: What kind of music do mummies listen to?
A: Wrap!

Q: How do you fix a Jack O'Lantern?
A: With a pumpkin patch.

Q: How does a girl vampire flirt?
A: She bats her eyes.

Q: Who did Frankenstein take to the prom?
A: His ghoul friend.

Q: What is a ghoul's favorite flavor?
A: Lemon-slime.

Q: What do you call a skeleton who won't work?
A: Lazy bones.

Q: What do you get when you cross a vampire and a snowman?
A: Frostbite.

Esoteric Language Resources

The internet is an amazing resource for programmers. This is particularly true for programming languages in widespread use. The following graph shows the number of questions on Stack Overflow with a tag for some well-known languages.



There's a huge disparity between mainstream programming languages such as Java and C# and languages associated with artificial intelligence such as LISP and Prolog.

An even greater disparity exists between mainstream languages and expert system languages (that aren't even perceptible on the prior graph unless one zooms in on the far right):



I think this is one of the tallest hurdles to jump for users of esoteric languages. The presence of resources on the internet (discussion forums, documentation, tutorials, examples, etc.) have not reached the critical mass needed for widespread use.

{} vs. ()

People who like C dislike CLIPS because it looks like LISP.

People who like LISP dislike CLIPS because it's not LISP.

Fear the Walking Dumb

One of the things I like about Aliens is that the protagonists are cocky going into their first encounter with the xenomorphs ("Is this going to be a standup fight, sir, or another bughunt?"), get schooled ("Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events; but we just got our asses kicked, pal!"), and then quickly start making intelligent decisions ("I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."). It's a series of events that plausibly place the characters in jeopardy.

So is it too much to ask that the main characters in zombie stories aren't all Darwin Award winner wannabes? I'm not saying that the stories need to directly acknowledge and address the large body of zombie apocalypse tropes from movies, TV, comics, and books (á la Scream or The Cabin in the Woods).

But when a character is repeatedly attacked by mute, slow moving family, friends, and acquaintances, maybe it's time for that character to show some caution and foresight around people who, you know, look dead.

Just saying'.