Excellent talk by Chris Toomey on Mastering the Vim Language. Features a lot of must-read Vim resources and nice-to-have plugins. Key takeaway for me: Prefer text objects to motions when possible (corollary: “Is this repeatable?”)
On Post-Truth
What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are.
But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies.
To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl.
Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?
And: What would happen were you to ingest a grain-sized piece of the Reactor No. 4’s core today:
If you ate this fuel chip, not much of it would likely dissolve in your gut; the matrix is UO2, and U(IV) Oxide is poorly soluble even in the acid environment of the gut. But let’s say it did dissolve completely and got metabolized. You’d be committing yourself to about 20 mSv (2 rem) from Cs-137, and probably a similar dose from Sr-90. Basically, if you were a radiation worker in the USA, your annual dose limit of 5 rem would be met. In many countries and facilities, you would exceed annual allowances.
DarkSiteFinder is a map of light pollution around the world.
The maintainer explains why he doesn’t use the Bortle Scale. In Iowa, Lake Sugema and The Whiterock Conservancy appear to be the ‘best’ places to see some (more) stars.
Developed in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, minute repeaters sound the time in hours, quarters and minutes—hence their name. Repeaters served a practical purpose: telling time in the dark. When streetlights were rare and matches and candles precious, chiming watches were a logical solution but not a simple one.
[. . .]
A minute repeater chimes different sounds for the hours, the quarter hours and minutes. The lowest tone—dong—is for hours, the highest tone—ding—is for minutes and a combination of both—ding-dong—counts quarter hours. If the slide is pushed at 12:59, the sounds heard are: 12 dongs for the hour then three ding-dongs for the quarter hours followed by 14 dings for the minutes.
– A Minute Repeater Is as Close to Time Travel as We Can Get Today
How delightful! Watches with these complications are very difficult to make and are hence very expensive. Here’s a video of Patek Philippe’s entire line of minute repeaters. Cursory Googling tells me that the nine watches on the table are worth a total of ~$5.4M.
Good talk by Siteshwar Vashisht at FOSDEM 2019 on maintaining the Korn shell and old codebases in general. I came by his work while reading up on the fish shell. Featured this nugget
He talks about how they removed dead/inapplicable code and micro-optimizations, refactored a lot of legacy code, improved tests, switched to a new build and CI system, and so on.
Began with this baffling one-liner that won the International Obfuscated C Contest in 1987
main() { printf(&unix["\021%six\012\0"],(unix)["have"]+"fun"-0x60);}
And reminded me of this Aaron Sorkin-esque story about David Korn which I heard via BLN
Greg Sullivan, a MicroSoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing Perl, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn’t do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec. The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (DavidKorn is the author of the KornShell).
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what’s a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone else’s?
Wonderful stuff by Christopher O. Mathews. My favorite track has to be “Azimuth”.
Stumbled upon this nearly three-hour, real-time, annotated simulation of the Titanic sinking. Late night1.
Which led me to James Cameron’s 2012 documentary Titanic: The Final Word, in which he assembles a group of engineers and historians to fix the simulation in the 1997 movie, which leads to this ‘final’ version.
Cameron, in the documentary:
Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well where have we heard that one before? There was this big machine, this human system that was pushing forward with so much momentum, that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now. Within that human system onboard that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm for the world, you have different classes, you know, you’ve got first class, second class, and third class. Well in our world right now you’ve got developed nations and undeveloped nations. You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be Climate Change.
We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn we can’t turn because of the momentum of the system. Political momentum, business momentum. There are too many people making money out of the system the way the system works right now, and those people, you know, frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren’t ready to let them go. Until they do, we’re not going to be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we’re gonna hit it. When we hit it, the rich are still gonna be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water, and so on. It’s going to be the poor, it’s going to be the steerage, that are gonna be impacted. It was the same with Titanic and I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people. Because it’s a perfect little encapsulation of the world and all social spectra. But until our lives are really put at risk, the moment of truth, we don’t know what we would do.
Speaking of… found this amazing model of the ship.↩︎
My new favorite show. Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer are 💯💯💯. The best soundtrack to a TV show I’ve heard in years (Hannibal being my absolute favorite.) Via KC.
Bill Hader is made to faceshift when doing his impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s weird and brilliant and I love it. Here’s another where he does Al Pacino.
TIL about the term “deepfakes”.
Excellent stuff again from Jordan Peele. Thought the first half was about slavery and lost identity. Wisecrack has a great video on the movie’s various interpretations.
Via Deepu.
My anger has never been with the writers for having a character I love to come to a tragic end like that. No matter how gut-wrenching it was, they, or George RR Martin, always laid out a convincing argument for why it happened. And that’s what great writing does, it makes you think of the downfalls as being a result of the characters actions or a clear set of events.
For Ned, he went from Point A - being hand of the king, to point B - getting beheaded and his family being torn apart. No matter how devastating though, it was set up and executed perfectly. From the moment he figured our Cersei’s children were by Jaime and not Bobby B, the things he did, the decisions he made, led to his death. We as viewers know that he made a critical mistake in telling Cersei that he knew. In trusting and underestimating Littlefinger. And lastly with Sansa and himself trusting that Joffrey would keep his word in being merciful if Ned admitted treason. It is why when the end of Episode 9 happened, no one was talking about how bad the writers were. Our frustrations were with Ned, our anger was with Joffrey and Cersei. It is not that he deserved to get killed, it is that we have a full understanding of how he got there. There is no arguing against that progression.
And most importantly this moment hits us with what was the hard truth of the show the characters, no matter how much we love them, will suffer the consequences of their actions.
And finally, and I’ve watched this a few times with unhealthy glee, Screen Rant on how the HBO Season 8 pitch meeting might have gone (via CM.)
Season 8 was a stark reminder1 of George RR Martin’s writing prowess2.
Unoriginal and lame but couldn’t resist.↩︎
Even if he has to imprison himself in a small cabin to finish things.↩︎
Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video.
The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one:
Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a while. Like the top YouTube comment notes, “Cordyceps is evolving to trick us into believing it is medicine.”
Absolutely amazing stop motion by Daniel Cloud Campos & Co.
Here’s the making of. They did it over 17 days. I wonder when they got any sleep. At one point he says “we got 2 seconds after 4 hours.” ~3 minutes of video = 360 hours, or 15 days 😬
And it reminds me of the Oldboy fight scene!
Via Rotten Tomatoes and with the awesome ChartJS. Dots are episodes, contiguous lines are seasons (static version.)
A search for episode titles on GitHub yielded this indescribably amazing, mostly hand-curated GoT Dataset by Jeffrey Lancaster (who published a Medium article describing his process. Has a Stranger Things dataset as well.)
Update: MFW watching the final episode.
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No—not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
For My Mother by May Sarton
Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how we laughed
Till we cried
Swept into merriment
Especially when times were hard.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.
💗
via Catherine
Vicki Boykis’ excellent article on every aspect of ‘Data Science’ I can think of: a little history, employment prospects, skills, education, and continuous learning.
It would appear that more than half the job, at least, is wrangling (replicating, cleaning, imputing, transferring, understanding, augmenting) data. It’s boring and super-important so, of course, is the least favorite thing 🙃
Peter Norvig: (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)).
See also: HyLang. Looks super cool and always makes me wonder if anyone’s ever used it in production.
Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est,’ which is to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ It didn’t matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed.
My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cato’s towards Carthage: it must be rooted out, eliminated and destroyed entirely. I don’t know if I’d go quite so far as to say that the fundamental challenge of mass computing is the final destruction of JavaScript — but I want to say it, even though it’s false.
JavaScript is a pox, a disaster, a shame. It is the most embarrassingly bad thing to become popular in computing since Windows 3.1. Its one virtue (that it’s on every client device) is outshone by its plethora of flaws in much the same way that a matchstick is outshone by the sun, the stars and the primordial energy of the Big Bang added together.
JavaScript is the XML, the Yugo, the Therac-25 of programming languages. The sheer amount of human effort which has been expended working around its fundamental flaws instead of advancing the development of mankind is astounding. The fact that people would take this paragon of wasted opportunity and use it on the server side, where there are so many better alternatives (to a first approximation, every other programming language ever used), is utterly appalling.
JavaScript delenda est.
I don’t know what my newfound affection for it says about me. Via HackerNews.
Watched because “Sherlock Holmes.” An awful, unnecessary, ghastly shitshow.
Tyler Vigen maintains around 30,000 examples of “spurious correlations” (also available in book form). For instance:
You can also “discover” your own. Like this one
The first two-thirds are brilliant. As for Olivia Wilde and her riveting performance:
[. . .] it’s still good to see a cunning and capable actress rise above her usual projects, such as stupid fodder like Tron or Cowboys and Aliens, or labels like “Sexiest Vegetarian Celebrity of 2010.”
After Enough and five Death Wish movies, the revenge genre is not without its recurring clichés, many of which get defrosted and microwaved again in A Vigilante. The point, if there is one, is that “heinous criminal felonies are acceptable if they are justified by a woman driven beyond the limits of reason.” As one battered wife says, “Every graveyard is full of people who didn’t make it.” The same is true of old movies gathering dust in Hollywood film vaults.
– Rex Reed, Olivia Wilde Goes Full Charles Bronson in the Brutal Revenge Thriller ‘A Vigilante’
At least in Civilization:
[. . .] Gandhi tends to be the first to use nuclear weapons, and spares no expense on wiping your civilization off the map. You probably always thought you were crazy — how could a series that prides itself on historical accuracy portray Gandhi so wrong? Well, you’ll be happy to know that both your sanity and Civilization’s historical integrity aren’t at fault. Instead, a bug’s to blame.
In the earlier Civs, leaders are given a set of attributes that dictate their behavior. One such attribute is a number scale associated with aggressiveness. Gandhi was given the lowest number possible, a rating of 1. However, when a civilization adopted democracy, it granted a civilization -2 to opponent aggression levels. This sent Gandhi’s rating of 1 into the negative, which swung it back around to 255 — the highest possible rating available, and thus, the infamous warmonger Gandhi was born.
– Geek.com, What caused Gandhi’s insatiable bloodlust in Civilization
And they just left it in there as an homage:
This cyclical aggression scale was fixed in later versions of the game, but Gandhi wasn’t totally cured of his bloodlust. The team fixed Gandhi’s aggression rating, but as an Easter egg paying homage to the earlier aggressive versions of Gandhi, ramped his nuke rating through the roof. So, while it may be difficult to push Gandhi over the edge, he goes from zero to nuclear option once you do.
Via MS.
This video of a ball swinging in front of concave mirror (starts at 2:00, cannot embed for some reason) reminded me of simulations of what it would be like if one fell into a Black Hole.
Here’s a Schwarzschild Black Hole, one “with mass, but with no electric charge, and no spin.” (Source)
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and
without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the
speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow
down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and
exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep
isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has
jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less
visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway.
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the
mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
– Robert M. Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
via BG
| Expression | Real Distance |
|---|---|
| Next door | 1 - 2 miles |
| Right up the road | 5 - 10 miles |
| Up North | 15 - 100 miles |
| A couple miles | 10 - 20 miles |
| Not too far | 20 - 50 minutes |
| A little ways | Over an hour |
| A pretty good drive | 2 hours+ |
| Drive down there | Literally any direction |
Can attest 😆. Via.
Via GLP, a University Title Generator that generates “prestigious” titles and associated salaries. A few random gems
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
– Conrad, Heart of Darkness (taken completely out of context…)
Amar Bose on education, teaching, purpose, creativity, not whinging, Norbert Weiner (under whom he was a grad student), and working with the right (and ethical) people. Starts around 24:00.
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.
– Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”
So… Erlang? (RIP Joe Armstrong 🙏) And that was before this
(I’m not against types, but I don’t know of any type systems that aren’t a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.)
Indeed, Dr. Kay.
As the final season of HBO’s blockbuster television series Game of Thrones hits screens around the world today, audiences in China are begging for the explicit scenes of sex and violence not to be censored.
[. . .]
Disgruntled viewers in China have previously compared the significantly edited version to a “medieval castle documentary”.
Which natually leads to (which won’t embed for some reason so here)
Ramin Nazer on some models he entertains of what happens to us after we die. A few of my favorites
Best thing I’ve seen this year. About as spiritual as it gets.
After an unimaginable length of time, even the black holes will have evaporated and the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons, gradually tending towards the same temperature, as the expansion of the universe cools them towards absolute zero. Once the very last remnants of the very last stars are finally decayed away to nothing and everything reaches the same temperature, the story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the Universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered.
Nothing happens. And it keeps not happening forever.
😢 how beautiful is that? And black holes take a long, long time to evaporate
A black hole with the mass of the sun will last a wizened 1067 years. Considering that the current age of our universe is a paltry 13.8 times 109 years, that’s a good amount of time. But if you happened to turn the Eiffel Tower into a black hole, it would evaporate in only about a day.
And that’s after this happens
It will take hundreds of trillions of years for the first stellar remnant to cool completely, fading from a white dwarf through red, infrared and all the way down to a true black dwarf. By that point, the Universe will hardly be forming any new stars at all, and space will be mostly black.
BLN and I spoke about how we simply have no good strategy to attempt a comprehension of “hundreds of trillions” of years.
Captured the city’s many contrasts quite well. Felt like I was watching Mirzapur again. The excellent Pankaj Tripathi plays the same wealthy, powerful, morally bankrupt, declining patriarch as in the show. Pretty much the same deal if they’d cast a mannequin instead of Akshay Oberoi.
Everything I expected from an Anurag Kashyap movie. Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vicky Kaushal were 💯 The real Raman Raghav story is quite crazy.
Remake of the Telugu Temper. Saviour Porn. Read this article on “procedures established by law” and mind-boggling backlogs in the Indian Legal System.
Not much of a story but loved the cinematography and pre-Independence setting. Easily the best Indian horror movie I’ve seen after Manichithrathazhu.
Fell asleep about three times trying to finish this visual overload. Ended up taking a walk right after this exchange
“You expect me to call you Your Highness?”
“No, I expect you to call me… Ocean Master.”
Found screenshots of a beautiful vintage theme I’d installed on my iPhone 5 via Cydia when I was stupid enough to jailbreak my phone. Wish I could still use it though 😍
A great complement to the book.
When I think of Theranos, I really think that there were two entirely different worlds. There was the carpeted world and there was the tiled world. In the carpeted world where Elizabeth was a goddess. Everyone, you know, almost worshipped the ground she walked on. She could do no wrong. She was the next Steve Jobs. Theranos was changing the world. And then you go into the tiled side and nothing works. We’re on a sinking ship. Everything is a lie. Reconciling the differences between those two worlds was really hard for me to do.
[…] I would leave the tiled world thinking, ‘Oh man, sinking ship.’ And I would go have one conversation with Elizabeth. And I would be so motivated to go back and work and I felt like I was changing the world again. And I would go back into the tiled world and I would go, ‘Wait, what just happened?’ You want it to be true so badly and even for me, I was working with these devices every single day and she could still kind of convince me. When I think back on those conversations, I just think ‘How did she do that?’
Saw with LD. Long, slow, visceral, beautiful, gory. Kept me guessing. Excellent stuff.
There’s a pervasive hush and sense of stillness that lingers over the region of Gokseong, and scenes of brazen, crazed madness are often preceded by shots of tranquil mountain vistas whose lush, thickly forested landscapes increasingly feel smothering and secretive. This is a film as beautiful as it is gory, as painstakingly scenic as it is committed to stark visual interplays between darkness and light.
All the while, the story of Gokseong unfolds in fits and starts, each puzzle piece more confusing than the last. Are the residents of the town being systematically poisoned with a drug that causes them to become frenzied, savage killers? Are they being cursed? Or is it both, and for what reason? Na’s writing layers tension upon tension, particularly through the escalating paranoia that each of the townspeople comes to feel for any and all outsiders.
However, answers are much harder to find in this film than accusations. Horror fans wanting a plot whose ending dovetails nicely with all the elements that preceded it may wind up feeling frustrated, though many more may be drawn into the heart of its darkness: the conviction that terror has come to this town and there is no escape to be had.
– Aja Romano, The Wailing is the most unsettling Korean horror film in years, but it offers more chills than answers
Garrett Whisten made a most amazing CVS receipt generator (cached).
He even wrote a scraper that gets real product names off their website 🙏 🙌
Rajnikanth was 49 when this “mega-hit” was released.
Does The Dog Die? is a publicly curated database of sensitive, “emotional spoilers” for books, movies, TV, and many more categories. Unconsenting Media is a similar database of “sexual violence in broadcasting”.
A delightful, 20-minute video from the Hamilton Watch Company1
and a tl;dw version of the above
Bought one after looking to get the “Murph Watch” in Interstellar. That article notes that they only made 10 for the movie (and gave one away.) Well, they’re offering it now 😍↩︎
Watched with D and M. Good thriller. Dharmendra was great. Was made aware of Neil Nitin Mukesh jokes.
A few favorites from a selection of Kenny Shopsin’s infinite wisdom. He ran this diner (which doesn’t really sound like one…)
On ambition
It’s just an initiation into the idea until the abilities to appreciate life forthe moments in a row starts to make you a deeper and more fulfilled person, and the energy you put towards pursuing the goals … it starts out obsessive.
The point of goals
My stupid goal: I’ve risen above that and I don’t need a goal, I’m just stupid. I just float free, knowing that after you’ve pursued a stupid goal for a long time, even if you understand it’s not important, you understand it’s a device to help you overcome the absurdity of life.
Social Media (article lists this as “on getting involved”)
[One] modern phenomenon is that people have begun to savor their spectatorship rather than being involved. They don’t want to be a part of it, or if they do, they don’t know how. They construct an artificial wall between reality and themselves — and they don’t cross it.
And on life
The only way to not be crushed by the stupidity of life is to pursue something energetically and gain as much satisfaction as you can before it gets stupid — and just ignore the fact that it’s stupid. The whole thing is shitty. You’re gonna fucking die.
