Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 28 July 2002

# 4:35 AM

exploratorium

I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco today, with Shweta, Nathaniel, and about fifty of Shweta's students from Cognitive Science 1. I'd been last year too, and a lot of it was familar, but they had enough nifty new exhibits to make it still interesting. For instance, they'd expanded their seeing collection with a demonstration of change blindness, a selective attention demo (watch these people play basketball, count how many times the team in white shirts bounces the ball... okay, now did you see the bear walk across the court?) and a really nifty persistence-of-vision demo. This last was a huge LED scroller display, like the ones they have for instant replay at sports stadiums, except that there were only a few narrow vertical strips actually present, separated by blank wall. If you looked at this the right way you could see what was going by just fine, as if the display had been complete.

you learn something new every day

Turns out that you really are supposed to write & as & in the href= attribute of an <a> tag, and that most browsers really do support this. (See, for instance, this explanation.) And it also turns out to be inappropriate to use %26 for this purpose; the point of %-escape is to make the server not interpret the & as a delimiter. LiveJournal's CGI scripts are just fine.

So I've changed all the back entries to use this convention. If you've got a weird browser that this breaks, file a bug report.