This week I learned...

• This T-shirt claims that “Under extreme stress, an octopus will eat its own arms.” According to Wikipedia, this is a “common belief”, though I'd never heard of it. I'm suspicious.

• Thanks to johnath, I now know that self-actualization tops Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

  The Internet, incidentally, is all about self-actualization. Depending on my mood, this strikes me as either dumb or moderately profound.

• Good Lisp compilers, I'm told, do fancy escape analysis on closures, so they can detect when the upward funarg problem doesn't occur and in those cases stack-allocate the captured variables. Nice one. In Python, by contrast, all captured variables become heap-allocated “cells”. I hear SpiderMonkey still keeps the whole activation record alive. I had thought that practice was long dead; I know I've seen it characterized on Lambda the Ultimate as “stupid”.

• I knew this was there somewhere. In gdb, the commands command lets you specify debugger commands that run when a breakpoint hits. For example, you can have gdb print some variables and continue. Useful.

• Also in gdb: set scheduler-locking on prevents other threads from running while you're stepping in a thread. Not available on all platforms, apparently; but this is the only sane way to debug a multithreaded program.

• Also in gdb: thread apply all runs a debugger command on every thread in the process you're debugging. I have yet to use it without crashing gdb, though.

• Even in a very simple 3D model, physics is very hard to get right. I think faking it using an easing function would get better results. Kind of sad.

...and more about static single assignment form, but I have much more to read there.