andrewl

The headquarters of the Army Futures Command are in an Austin skyscraper. Their task is to develop the technologies and concepts that will enable the Army to stay up to speed with developments in areas such as robotics, quantum computing, hypersonics, directed energy and artificial intelligence.

The article recommends Bite Size Bash by Julia Evans. Does anybody have an experience with it?

There is a list at:

https://pharo.org/success/

They have an extensive list at https://pharo.org/success/.

I’ve never heard of such a service, but I’d love to get data like that. Where do you live?

This article is worth reading. The ideas are good, and the writing is clear. As in:

An error of omission occurs when an individual or organization fails to do something it should have done. For example, when Kodak failed to acquire Xerox when it could have, or when Xerox failed to develop the small computer produced by its employees. Of the two types of error, errors of omission are usually the more important. The deterioration and failure of organizations are almost always due to something they did not do.

...

Now for a key fact: Accounting systems in the Western world only take account of errors of commission, the less important of the two types of error. They take no account of errors of omission. Therefore, in an organization that frowns on mistakes and in which only errors of commission are identified, a manager only has to be concerned about doing something that should not have been done. Because errors of omission are not recorded, they often go unacknowledged. If acknowledged, accountability for them is seldom made explicit. In such a situation, a manager who wants to invoke as little disapproval as possible must try either to minimize errors of commission or transfer to others responsibility for those he or she makes.

And also this: Learning how to learn is probably the most important thing an organization or individual can learn.

Exactly. The famous Chesterton’s Fence.

I thought this was particularly interesting:

I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus—one of the pioneers of functional programming—in 2006 on behalf of the Computer History Museum. I asked John why functional programming didn’t enter the mainstream, and his answer was perfect: “Functional programming makes it easy to do hard things” he said, “but functional programming makes it very difficult to do easy things.”

Yurii Rashkovskii, the developer, wrote a short intro last month:

https://betterprogramming.pub/what-happens-if-you-put-http-s...

The sub-head on this article is Good luck trying to become a professor if you don’t have family money. It discusses the problems of people stuck in what would be called adjunct positions in the United States.

The Wikipedia page for the Tunguska event says it was “a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size.” How far out would something that size be detected? This is very much out of my area.

A similar event in or near a populated area today might be interpreted as a nuclear attack.

I had an anthropology professor in college who did some work on genetic diseases in the Amish. It is a problem. This Wikipedia has a short overview and a lot of references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_among_the_Amish

This is interesting. I’d always assumed the stripes were camouflage, similar to a tiger’s stripes. Tigers look orange and black to us, but many prey animals perceive color differently, and the tiger’s stripes help it blend in among jungle foliage. The photos in this short article demonstrate the effect:

https://theconversation.com/why-do-tigers-have-stripes-14522...

This is the only thing I ever read about healthcare in the Netherlands (and it’s from 2007, so I have no idea what things are like now):

https://supasuze.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/the-dutch-midwife-...

I first read it back in 2007, but I’ve always remembered it.

This is a review of the book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. From the article:

[The book] cuts past the deceit, examining the histories the fable dresses up in heroic garb. Doing for Palo Alto — population 70,000 — what Mike Davis’s classic “City of Quartz” did for Los Angeles, Harris reconsiders 200 years of history that many in the town would rather forget. Over more than 600 concussive pages, Harris narrates the town’s evolution and influence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. He theorizes, above all, that it is defined by its distinctive approach to capitalism and profit, known as the “Palo Alto System”: a rapacious, violently exploitative mode of capitalism that generations of would-be moguls have perfected. “Palo Alto” is a skeptic’s record, a vital, critical demonstration of Northern California’s two centuries of mixing technology and cruelty for money.

For more on how to lace and knot shoes, see Iain’s Shoelace Site:

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

Do you know what supplements have this as a side effect?

The title here is the fourth item in the list of highlights:

• Cellular responses to double-stranded DNA breaks erode the epigenetic landscape

• This loss of epigenetic information accelerates the hallmarks of aging

• These changes are reversible by epigenetic reprogramming

• By manipulating the epigenome, aging can be driven forward and backward

I had a toy ornithopter many years ago. It didn’t fly too well, but I thought it was really cool. I’m looking forward to advances in the field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithopter

The original title was too long:

The Joy of Sets: Why Won’t Our Artistic-Literary Establishment Recognise That There’s Mystery, Beauty and Humanity in Maths?

Agreed. I find the SQLite diagrams very helpful. They are generated with Pikchr, which itself was created by the SQLite developers I believe:

https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/sqlitesyntax.md

When I saw the title I thought at first it was about police and legal work in Canada or Alaska. It’s actually about warming and the spread of disease in the Arctic, and I thought it was fascinating. Here are a few excerpts in case anybody is on the fence about reading it:

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska-be it a sea otter, polar bear, or humpback whale-veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call. Her necropsies reveal cause of death and causes for concern as climate change frees up new pathogens and other dangers in a vast, thawing north.

Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest, smallest, most charismatic, and most ferocious creatures in Alaska, looking for what killed them. She’s been on the job for more than 20 years, self-employed and working with just about every organization that oversees wildlife in Alaska. Until recently, she was the only board-certified anatomic pathologist in a state that’s more than twice the size of Texas. (There’s now one other, at the University of Alaska.) She’s still the only one who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and vials, harvesting samples that she’ll later squint at under a microscope.

A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less attention has been paid to what will happen-indeed, is already happening-in the world’s highest latitudes, and to the people who live there. Put another way: The north isn’t just warming. It has a fever.

This matters to you and me even if we live thousands of miles away, because what happens in the north won’t stay there. Birds migrate. Disease spreads. The changes in Alaska are harbingers for what humans and animals may see elsewhere. It’s the front line in climate change’s transformation of the planet.

Addressing a visitor to a necropsy who found the experience challenging: “The only shame is if you pass out where we can’t find you.”

That brings back memories! On a related note, I threw boomerangs in college. It felt magical when I first caught one without having to take a step from where I threw it. The idea that a properly-shaped piece of wood, with no motor, batteries, propellers, rubber bands, or anything, could turn around and fly back to its origin was wonderful. I should get back to it.

In this conversation from July 2021 he said he’s going to write his own email server, which I would be very interested in:

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

I’m going to write my own mail server. I was making notes on that even as we were setting up this call. That’s a big problem, and that’s at least as difficult if not more difficult than writing a database engine, but I don’t want to be beholden to Gmail. I don’t want them controlling my destiny. I don’t want them controlling the record of all of my conversations. I want to control that myself, and so I’m going to go through a lot of pain and a lot of work and a lot of effort to come up with some solution that I can control myself. I can go out and lease a virtual machine out there in the cloud and run it myself and not depend on a third party to control my email.

This is interesting. I wonder if he’s actually working on it:

Q: If you magically had enough extra time to do one additional thing at work that you’re not doing now, what would it be?

A: Oh, I’ve got a long list. But my #1 thing right now I think would be a new version control system which the working name is Fit, it’s a combination of Fossil with Git. Uses the Fossil user interface but it uses the low-level file format of Git. So that then you can work with Fossil’s interface but push and pull to legacy Git users. And I think that would be huge.

I've learned useful things from all of these: The Stack Overflow Podcast, Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman, Software Engineering Radio, and Coding Blocks.

There are quite a lot of links to Wikipedia posted for discussion (often rather interesting discussion). Here are more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

I’m really getting out of my area of expertise on this, but could the fact that whales live immersed in a heat sink be a factor? They’re the most massive animal that’s ever lived (as far as is known). Maybe an animal that size can only be endothermic if it lives in the water.

[Edit: the blue whale is the most massive animal known.]

I agree on the privacy policy. (I also agree that this looks good, and I want to sign up.)