nikhil.io

Saw with PLG. Plan on doing things around the house to the soundtrack. When they hand him his second Oscar, DiCaprio should just stare at the glitterati, play the trailer scene, and walk away 💯 🙏 🙌

Finally saw this with PLG. Daniel Day-Lewis’ best performance IMO. Astounding, really.

Mr. Day-Lewis’s outsize performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the film’s surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have invaded Plainview’s every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It’s a thrilling performance, among the greatest I’ve seen, purposefully alienating and brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle.

– Manohla Dargis “An American Primitive, Forged in a Crucible of Blood and Oil”

Paul Dano is great as an ageless vampire-pastor 😑 The excellent soundtrack was written by Jonny Greenwood (!) and features works by Arvo Pärt and Brahms.

I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication”, and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often.

There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat yourself!” Right?

So you try to extract that boilerplate into a method, and it’s fine until the very next change. Then you need to start passing options and configuration into your helper method… and before long your helper method is extremely difficult to reason about, because it’s actually handling a dozen cases that are superficially similar but full of important differences in the details.

I encourage my devs to follow a rule of thumb: don’t extract repetitive code right away, try and build the feature you’re working on with the duplication in place first. Let the code go through a few evolutions and waves of change. Then one of two things are likely to happen:

1. you find that the code doesn’t look so repetitive anymore, or,
2. you hit a bug where you needed to make the same change to the boilerplate in six places and you missed one.

In scenario 1, you can sigh and say “yeah it turned out to be incidental duplication, it’s not bothering me anymore.” In scenario 2, it’s probably time for a careful refactoring to pull out the bits that have proven to be identical (and, importantly, must be identical across all of the instances of the code).

Whatever. I say we continue to abstract away and make better and better hammer factories and beam at our sophistication in creating unnecessary complexity #jobsecurity

Dependencies (coupling) is an important concern to address, but it’s only 1 of 4 criteria that I consider and it’s not the most important one. I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order.

I’m willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless.

I’m willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling.

And I’m willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex.

Only if it doesn’t increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.

The reason I put stateless code as the highest priority is it’s the easiest to reason about. Stateless logic functions the same whether run normally, in parallel or distributed. It’s the easiest to test, since it requires very little setup code. And it’s the easiest to scale up, since you just run another copy of it. Once you introduce state, your life gets significantly harder.

I think the reason that novice programmers optimize around code reduction is that it’s the easiest of the 4 to spot. The other 3 are much more subtle and subjective and so will require greater experience to spot. But learning those priorities, in that order, has made me a significantly better developer.

I am so proud to be an Iowan. Iowa is fucking awesome, and here is why:

1. In 1838, before we were even a state, our Supreme Court upheld the law that in Iowa escaped slaves couldn’t be forced to return to a slave state. The same year it became law an unmarried women could own property. In most of the rest of the US either category having any rights was laughable and were considered property themselves.

2. We were involved in a war with Missouri. The Honey War! was a border dispute that we Iowans may not have started but we sure as hell won.

3. We were the second state in the union to allow interracial marriage (1851) almost a century before it became legal in the rest of the US.

4. In 1851 Iowa legislated that, “the property of married women did not vest in her husband, nor did the husband control his wife’s property”.

5. In 1857 University of Iowa, my alma mater (Go Hawkeyes!!), was the first state university to have a degree program open for women.

6. For the American Civil War, Iowa contributed more men than any other state per capita. This despite the fact not a single major battle occurred on Iowan soil.

7. Iowa outlawed segregated schools in 1868. We were the second state in the union to do it and we did it close to a century before the rest of America.

8. Iowa elected the first women to public office in the united states, in 1869. That same year we were the first state to allow women to join the bar and we had the first female US attorney. This paved the way for Iowa to have the first female practice law before a federal court.

9. Iowa was passing civil rights act, prohibiting discrimination in public, all the way back in 1884.

10. Iowa was the third state (tip of the hat to Wyoming and Colorado for beating us to the punch)to give women the right to vote in 1894.

11. Iowa has the first mosque in the US and the only exclusively Muslim cemetery.

12. In 1953, amongst all the states of the union, only Iowa defeated a McCarthyistic legislative measure to impose a teacher’s loyalty oath.

13. Iowa was the first to have an openly gay man run for a seat in Congress. And the guy was a Republican!

14. In 2007, Iowa was the second state to allow full marriage to gays and lesbians.

15. In Iowa we protect our children from from bullying due to sexual orientation AND gender identity.

tl;dr: And for the two part cherry on the cake…

16) 2008 Democrat Caucuses, Iowa became the first in the nation to select Barack Obama as their choice for president. This when almost all political pundits thought he wasn’t a viable candidate. For some perspective on the Iowa is 95% white. You have to go to the North Pole to find a whiter place.

17) Norman Borlaug is an Iowa native son, born and bred. Who is Norman Borlaug you ask yourself? Look him up! He was the greatest man who ever lived, a man who saved a billion lives (No hyperbole).

QED Bitches.

by Lawson Wood (more work here.)

I first saw this when I was about 10 and tried my first jigsaw puzzle with my little sister. We were quite mesmerized by the painting. We found the puzzle too difficult and lost the pieces. 26 years later, I found a complete puzzle on eBay and can’t wait to put it together with her 😃

Googling revealed that a certain David Lewis recreated the painting with real officers of the Royston Police Station in Hertfordshire in 1990.

Image via Herts Past Policing

2019 in review, by way of Mr. Lovenstein’s comics.

And why not just twist the knife?

I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

I’ve made this mistake all too often, especially when trying to learn something new.

Things that quote kinda reminds me of:

• The old “Hole in My Bucket” song (here’s a version by Odetta and Harry Belafonte.)
• “For Want of a Nail”
• This classic from “Malcolm in the Middle”

I’ll consider myself dead on the inside until I’m this ecstatic after sipping mushroom soup.

Vox on the history of plain-white Roman statues and how historians attempt plaster reconstructions with the original colors. Like this one:

Slow start but gets pretty exciting towards the end. I couldn’t wait for Lynn to rid herself of her parasitic friends (especially the cloying Grace, played to perfection by Eisaya Hosuwan.) Cheating on standardized tests is big business in India and China. The Atlantic has a relatively recent article on the phenomenon.

The usual commentary on class and meritocracy. Lots of love for Boston University.

Saw these trucks on the interstate the other day and feel in love with the logo 😍 Designed by a buncha nice Minnesotans at Swim Creative.

Was looking try something other than my beloved Operator Mono and came across Dank Mono which claims to be a “rather special coding font.” I love it. Looks like the cooler twin of Inconsolata. I remain quite tickled by how many of my co-workers find the italic variants of monospaced fonts ‘disturbing’ when they look at my screen.

Q: Why make art? What do you find by doing it? What does it get you?

Serra: I always wanted an alternative existence. And by that I mean I wanted to do something where I could study my own sentiments and experiences. And I found that I can do that in relation to making things and making art in particular. And I did that since I was a kid it was a place I always could go to that I could concentrate and deal with the problems that I thought were of interest to me. And if I was clear enough about what it was that I was probing,
and stayed with the premise of I was probing, it was possible that it could also be clear to someone else, and it was important that it not be something that somebody else has done.

I think one of the things art does is that it asks you to perceive what it is on its own level […] I think works of art engage, possibly, an ‘internal memory bank’ that isn’t linear and it can make you see the outside reality in that way also.

That’s from a recording at the SF MoMA. I first heard of him after moving to Des Moines and seeing his “Five Plate Pentagon” at our beautiful sculpture park.

Image Source: DSM Public Art Foundation

So, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
Never enough for both.

– Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

and

Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

– Naguib Mahfouz

The last 15 minutes are the best depiction of old age, loneliness, and isolation I’ve ever seen committed to film. Two masters at their very best.

I love all the memes about its length but (a) the pacing was brilliant and (b) I am someone who grew up watching 200-minute family-values extravaganzas and can take it. Still.

Need to read up more on the de-aging process they used in the film.

Dec 9 It’s so bad a Swiss company made a much saner substitute that sells for ~$20.

---

Nov 16 Looks like you can use the old remote with the new AppleTV.

---

I’m annoyed every time I have to use the infernal thing.

• It tries (poorly) to be something other than a damn TV remote¹.
• There’s no way to tell which end is up.
• There’s no accidental tap detection when you pick it up.
• It’s way too small.
• It’s way too slippery.
• I use Siri to skip forward and backward because the edge clicks are unmemorable and dysfunctional.

I use the iPhone app when I can and, while I can’t stand the terribly implemented inertial scroll, still find it better than the hardware.

Inertial scrolling does in fact exist on the Siri remote, but the effect is muted. The on-screen movement doesn’t accurately reflect your swiping — scrolling is staggered and it often stops abruptly, when you don’t intend to stop. This makes aspects of navigation, like manual search or entering your email address or password, extremely cumbersome.

– Dave Smith, “My biggest problem with the new Apple TV remote”

See also: Steve Brykman of ArsTechnica’s thoughts on “the nightmare horrorshow” that’s the remote.

1. “You’re basically getting a giant iPad game that you have to play with a tiny remote”↩︎

One of my favorite things in the world.

Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the rectangular image is 2.4 arcminutes to an edge, or 3.4 arcminutes diagonally. This is approximately one tenth of the angular diameter of a full moon viewed from Earth (which is less than 34 arcminutes), smaller than 1 sq. mm piece of paper held at 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one twenty-six-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented so that the upper left corner points toward north (−46.4°) on the celestial sphere.

– Wikipedia (emphasis mine)

Here’s all that in video form

The best screensaver in the world using red-shift data

And a very high-resolution image (> 60MB). Wallpapers are available.

Our shit is so, so, so tiny.

There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Simply saying that number doesn’t really mean much to us because it doesn’t provide any context. Our brains have no way to accurately put that in any meaningful perspective. When we look at this image, however, and think about the context of how it was made and really understand what it means, we instantly gain the perspective and cannot help, but be forever changed by it.

We pointed the most powerful telescope ever built by human beings at absolutely nothing for no other reason than because we were curious, and discovered that we occupy a very tiny place in the heavens.

– Deep Astronomy

Not so sure about “instantly” gaining perspective but the rest about wonder and curiosity and our insignificant place the heavens still stand.

Loving these Moebius-like works by Ali Hoff (prints are available.) Imagined it being a short animated series like Aeon Flux 😍

I absolutely love Dustin Curtis’ splendid explanation of “AppleTV” branding that’s making making the rounds on HN. For posterity, I stole this handy color-coded transcription off Michael Tsai’s blog.

See also: The intractably stupid AppleTV Remote.

When you end up paying the price you bid (“first price”), you have a strong incentive to lie about how much you’re willing to pay. Suppose there’s an item for sale that you’d be happy paying up to $1,000 for if necessary, but of course you’d rather pay less. In a first-price auction, if you bid $1,000 and you lose. Well, someone else was willing to pay more than you were willing to, so that’s OK, but if you win, you know that nobody else offered that price and you’d be slapping yourself for not going for $950 and saving a little. Or, who knows, maybe there are really few buyers and you later discover that the second person was only valuing the item at $600? Damn, you could have walked away with it for $610!

[. . .]

In a second-price auction, there’s no reason for you to do that. You can simply say exactly the maximum price you are willing to pay, and there’s never any advantage for you in saying anything else:

• You don’t want to post a higher bid since you might be forced to pay it, and you don’t want to do that.
• You don’t want to post a lower bid since you might lose the item for no good reason at all.
• You’ll end up paying exactly what it takes to win the item: one dollar or one cent more than the next person’s maximum bid.

So, a second-price mechanism encourages everyone to bid truthfully, and the item ships to the person who really values it at the highest price. It’s the best outcome for the seller and as good an outcome for everyone else as they could wish for.

Incidentally, note that this is exactly what happens in ordinary public auctions (“going once, going twice… sold!!”) Everyone walks in with an idea of how much they’re willing to pay, and they keep bidding one dollar more than the current price until they hit their max—but they’re never forced to reveal their max and what they end up paying is just one dollar (or penny, or whatever) more than the second-highest bidder.

– Alon Amit on Quora (emphasis mine.)

Quite a bit of Game Theory stuff on Wikipedia as well.

Moody and plenty gruesome. Got tired of the commune’s many ‘rituals’. Florence Pugh is 💯, as is the creepy-ass soundtrack. Learned about senicide. First half is a bit of a slow burn like “Hereditary”.

I could just stare at his work all day. This one’s called “The River of Life”

and this one “Deep Forest”

Linus Torvalds on git

I’d also like to point out that unlike every single horror I’ve ever witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it’s one of the reasons git has been fairly successful

[. . .]

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

This is just wonderful stuff. More on his website and on Instagram.

Entertaining, very nicely done, two-hour long desi “Black Mirror” episode¹. Taapsee Pannu was 💯. You will want to hug Vinodhini Vaidynathan’s character. Saw with Deepu and we wondered what makes Tamil directors so good at this genre.

1. “Presented” by Anurag Kashyap. Not sure what that means.↩︎

When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18^th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches.

And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he’d bought. And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels. And as he did so, his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving, were words.

And he said to the guy, “Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see?” And the watchmaker turned around and said, “God can see it.”

Now I’m not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. But I felt something. And it was a physiological response. And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way. And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it?

I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Do quite a bit more, good and invisible things, than required for the MVP or for the bloody “sprint.” You will then smile a lot and sleep quite well indeed. Excellence is a habit. It is yours. Nobody steals this from you.

Saved here via Stephanie Harcrow’s post.

A wafer-thin afterthought of a plot undergirds an important and harrowing commentary on the history, pervasiveness, and evil of the caste system in India.

Excellent cinematography and performances by Ayushmann Khurrana, Kumud Mishra as Jatav, and Sushil Pandey as Nihal Singh.

Kashyap on his journey to become one of India’s most important filmmakers.

The cover picture is clickbait. No “shocking” revelations. Just a good story about pursuing one’s chosen vocation with grit and perseverance (with a bit of luck along the way.)

On “Josh Talks”, who look like a TED clone and are “on a mission to raise the aspirations of Young India.”

Behold Ray Cicin’s yuge version of Ernst Haeckel’s octopus illustration drawn with discarded ballpoint pens. Prints are available.

In Ramayya Vasthavayya, Avinash is a mononymous “Central Crime Branch” officer who, according to the barcode on his IDENTITY CARD, loves new-agey mind meld books. Or so I gather. Couldn’t decipher the other barcode but submit that it might reveal his preference for reasonably priced cutlery sets at Bed Bath & Beyond.

A list of sub-genres you cannot view easily on Netflix. From a Reddit thread on the subject:

This is ridiculous. What kind of hubris does Netflix have to think that their recommendation engine is better than browsing by category? Browsing by category has been the standard for browsing things since categories of things has existed. Some VP of product made his bonus by convincing someone that his ML team could do better. “Yeah, just remove it and let us populate 15 movies randomly in a whimsical fictitious category like ‘movies with dogs and music’. People will love it.”

and

Because the studios pay Netflix (via discounted licensing) for favorable placement on those “recommended viewing” lists.

Always follow the money.

Jaspreet Singh on the awful abandonment fantasy beloved by desi parents (starts around 1:10.) Here’s the entire shitshow of a movie.

Yakeen maan-na, Baghban dekhne se pehle mujhe idea bhi nahin aaya tha ki maa-baap ko nikaala bhi jaa sakta hai.

A nice little quiz meant to illustrate how much your typical Python and Bash code can accomplish in one second.

If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :)

and

A newer computer won’t make your code run 1000x faster :)

A most beautiful, astoundingly well-crafted, and painfully short work of interactive art. Finished it on my way to see my sister in California 💗 Lovely, lovely, lovely.

Watched with Paaji. Third Anurag Kashyap and Amit Trivedi film. Superb. Maybe a little too drawn out at times (gotta fit in all 14 tracks of that sweet Trivedi score) and was dismayingly Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam-predictable towards the end.

“Gray Waala Shade” (with the accompanying opening scenes) is a magnificent song¹².

1. Yes, yes, “Daryaa” too.↩︎

2. Kashyap saw Poonam and Priyanka Shah on this viral Bharatnatyam video before asking them to be part of the movie.↩︎

Was watching an episode or two of Joy of Painting with my sister when we wondered what happened to all the finished paintings on his show.

Now we know.

Never knew this was a thing. Behold a pliable, $200 digital model of an octopus for 3D Studio Max (with “72366 Faces and 71879 Vertices.”)

TL;DW: This is “anti-fouling” that repels barnacles, algae, and mollusks by emitting “biocides”. This is desirable because they cause drag (think fuel) and structural damage. Red because traditionally some oxide of Copper.

Also this:

In nature bright colours serve as a warning and to stay away. Ships are very territorial and have even been known to attack people.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

– Bertrand Russell, What I Have Lived For

Why?

This travesty should make it very clear that Guillermo del Toro loves and paints his monsters better than anyone else in the business.

No Code is the best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere.

Start by not writing any code.

Brilliant. I love both the presence and contents of the Dockerfile in that repo. As is always the case with such projects, the issues and pull requests are 💯

And if one is tempted to go against the tenets of No Code, there’s always my beloved fuckitpy, a (strangely well-thought-out) “Python error steamroller”¹:

@fuckit
def buggy_function():
    problem_solved

@fuckit
class BuggyClass(object):
    def __init__(self):
        everything_works_now

And:

This module is like violence: if it doesn’t work, you just need more of it.

See also: The Fuck, another Python-based utility that addresses CLI frustrations.

1. Inspired by FuckitJS.↩︎

Reminded me of Dave Chappelle’s intimate and heartfelt Bird Revelation. Spike Jonze directed this one. You won’t be missed, RAAAAAAAANDY.

From an episode of My Next Guest with David Letterman:

Letterman: First of all, let’s define terms. Comedian and comic: used interchangeably but mean two different things.

Seinfeld: Kind of different, yeah. A comedian is a, to me, a full-fledged, not only a monologist, but someone who can really work a room, work a crowd and has a real act. A comic… that, I think, is a notch down. Wouldn’t you agree?

Letterman: Well, you’re assigning value to them.

Seinfeld: Yes.

Letterman: I thought they were two different pursuits. That a comedian was somebody who would be funny on stage, in a theatrical production, or in film, something like that, whereas a comic would be more like what you’ve made a career of.

Seinfeld: Oh, no, no, no. You’re talking about a comedic actor. Jackie Gleason was not a comic. He started out as a comic but he was a great comedic actor. Ten Danson is a great comedic actor, but he’s not a comedian. He has no act to do in Vegas. Which is the objective.

Letterman: So you’re saying that a comedian… but I don’t understand why there is a judgment assigned to being a comic.

Seinfeld: Just because we like judging others, that’s the reason.

Completely predictable plot and twists, ridiculous ending, cookiecutter songs (features the laziest, dullest, ‘You composed it the day before it was due didn’t you?’ qawwali I’ve ever heard.)

Fantastic cinematography. Sikander Kher is great. Got a lot of digital errands done whilst watching it, so there’s that.

The red and orange areas have about the same number of people (~104 Million)

More on this interactive page.

THE influence of Pisces upon the Sun does not make specially for strength, except in the last decanate, which is ruled by Mars. Otherwise, there is a certain softness and placidity which diminish the vitality. The Pisces type is extraordinarily psychic, more so than is the case with that of any other sign, but this manifests itself in an entirely passive way. The native depends upon intuition and impressions generally, and the active qualities of the soul which make the great mystic are rarely present. Rudolph Steiner is fortunate enough to have aspects of Uranus, Saturn and Mars, which increase his practical power. Picus de Mirandola is a more typical example of this sign. Unless the dignities of the planets concerned in this matter are extremely good, the native may suffer from illusions and be led constantly astray. There is in him a notable lack of correlation in practical details, and he is apt to leave things at loose ends. His constructions power being psychic does not exactly translate itself into the objective. In spite of this, however, there is a great deal of practical good sense in the composition, but sometimes the native will be accused of hypocrisy, owing to the extreme contrast between the idealism expressed and the course of action undertaken, and people not similarly constituted may take it into their heads to “read them a lesson.” The native is inclined to self-indulgence in emotional experience, and this in the undeveloped type very often takes the form of the abuse of alcoholic liquors or even occasionally of noxious drugs. This is partly due to the watery nature of the sign, and its ruler, Neptune, and partly to the soft {31} and seductive influence of Venus, who is exalted in the sign, and to its connection with the Moon.

There is a good deal of discontent in this sign, naturally caused by such conflict between the aspirations and the expression of the life. This often manifests itself in restlessness and in inattentiveness, and in attaching far too much importance to trifles, the least of which often appears to them highly significant. Even in external manner, the native, thought seemingly calm upon the surface, is full of tremor within, like the sea. The native is very fond of others and may be so solicitous as to their well-being that the result will often be trying to the recipient of his extreme devotion.

The constitution is, generally speaking, not particularly robust; the general health is good, but there is a lack of power to resist disease. The native is more susceptible than in almost any other sign. Michael Angelo and Sir Richard Burton had magnificent constitutions, but the Sun being in the last decanate of Pisces, the influence of Mars is able to correct the general weakness.

In the human body, Pisces rules primarily the feet, but his action extends throughout the whole body, over the lymph and all watery secretions of an excretory character, such as mucus. The principal diseases characteristic of this sign are oedema, ascitis, and dropsies in general. Another very common disease associated with Pisces is gout. In the consideration of Pisces as a rising sign, there is also danger of tuberculosis if the system is allowed to become depleted.

The following well known persons were also born with the Sun in the sing Pisces:

• George Washington
• Grover Cleveland
• Victor Hugo
• Ludwig II of Bavaria
• Brander Mathews
• William Jennings Bryan
• William Dean Howells
• Henry W. Savage
• Enrico Caruso
• Amelia Bingham
• Rose Coghlan
• Edward Stotesbury
• Adolph S. Ochs
• Margaret Deland
• Percy A. Rockefeller
• Isabel Irving
• George H. Swift
• Joseph E. Otis
• Thomas Hastings
• Oswald G. Villard
• Van Hoogstraaten
• Robert W. Goelet
• Geraldine Farrar
• Penrhyn Stanlaws
• Mary Garden

I cannot get over how maddeningly cute this is. Reddit user pendragwen’s comment makes it even better:

Awww! But look at how they test out their chromatophores first thing after hatching! It’s speculated that color-changing is how they communicate and show emotion. Almost like a little joyful stretch and squeal. “Yay! I’m alive!”

Michael Leggett, lead designer of Gmail from 2008-2012

“It’s like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen,” he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It’s true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive–and at least half a dozen notifications–all clutter Gmail at any given moment. And of course, there’s that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed “gmail.com” into your browser bar three seconds ago. “Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left,” rants Leggett. “C’mon. It’s pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break.”

– Fast Company, “The former lead designer of Gmail just fixed Gmail on his own”

So he made this plugin for Chrome and Firefox that cuts out all the terrible visual noise of Gmail. I’m never uninstalling this one.

And while I’m on the subject, who signed off on this disaster?

Because we all know that the only way to attact attention to a UI element is to adorn it with a big blue goddamn fucking tumor.

Dom Ricciobene makes stunning 3D topographic maps, and very satisfying time-lapses, with a CNC machine. Like this one (don’t want to embed Instagram.) Here’s one of Westeros 💯