“Hot market you raise money/sell, down market you don’t sell/you build.

“Many of the test cases in the original language shootout involved calculation or large values in loops, which would cause Perl and Python (and even C, Java, and C++) to chug merrily away burning cycles so that I could measure the timings in seconds, rather than microseconds. Then along came GHC, and the lazy nature of the evaluation threw out the unneeded calculations, handing over the final useful result without breaking a sweat.

Consequently, we had to revise many of the tests to force the programs to perform real work. With those changes, Haskell began to fall back in speed to more moderate levels. However, in the last few releases, GHC has approached native C in performance overall.

The performance is also consistent across platforms. [For example] While Java’s HotSpot compiler makes a good showing on Intel, my AMD test machine yields consistently worse results. However, GHC performs equally well on both systems. This is great because applications written in Haskell can be reasonably expected to yield good performance on all of the common x86 platforms without customizations.

“Pyro demonstrates a new breed of applications we call site-specific browsers—apps that are about making a browser-based application better with client-side technology while keeping the user interface intact.

“Roll forward with the scroll wheel while in a Google map and you’ll zoom in on the spot your mouse is over. Yahoo [and local.live] only zoom to the center of the map.

“On a big news day, Wikipedia functions like a massive, cooperative blog — except that where most blogs’ function is to sieve news accounts through the filter of strong opinion, Wikipedia’s goal is the opposite: it strives to filter all the opinion out of it.

“I can watch a Lifetime movie with a cast full of white people and cry because I’m conditioned to relate to you. But you are not conditioned to relate to me. You, especially this group who thinks you’re so politically correct, you cannot watch a movie with people with brown skin and see yourself.

“500 to 1000 different species of bacteria live in the human body. Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are about ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body.

“Duane LeGate arranges quick sales for home owners in distress. He claims he can predict where markets will go bad by looking at the traffic on his Web site.

“Using the camera frame as the “stage” was an innovation of the Muppets. Previously on television, there would typically be a stage hiding the performers, as if in a live presentation.

“Now that Warne is retired from the international scene and the media seem content to let him lead a peaceful existence, it’s become obvious his celebrity was mostly related to his genius as a cricketer.