Science(-Fiction)
- The intelligent Forest
- (itself an excerpt from “Finding the Mother Tree”)
- Birds might be seeing the magnetic field
- Engrossing and calming video of the death of a Ciliate
- Vernor Vinge gave a talk at Google
- What is it like … to be a Jellyfish?
Japanese scientists have induced the jellyfish to repeat this transformation at least 10 times in a row—allowing a polyp to grow into a tentacled adult medusa, before subjecting it to stress (for example, a needle prick), and watching the process begin all over again. In this way, a single jellyfish—hypothetically at least—might be induced to live forever, cycling endlessly from young to old and back again.
The immortal jellyfish has something that humans have sought for centuries: the answer to eternal life. But to them, it is nothing. Workaday. Simple creatures, they may not even know they have this prize. Certainly, what with their rejuvenation coming during periods of pain or suffocation, they will not enjoy it. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.” I’m sure that jellyfish would, if they could, agree.
Hypertext
- Interactive fiction and a historical look at hypertext
Society
- Partly amusing, partly horrifying: the ability of Google to control how the world sees you
- A breaking point of sorts
- A summary (Harper’s Weekly) of events that reads both absurd and breathless
- Of Covid and Cybernetics
History
- Story of a dig, in Saqqara
- A human tale of atomic secrets
- An article itself from fourteen years ago, looking back a further twenty years, to when v1.0 of the GNU C Compiler was released
Tech
- Viewing Docker as a compiler
- “Hell is other REPLs”
- Also, REPLs as shells
- Metastability and Distributed Systems
- Developing a self-hosted compiler from scratch
Abacus Noir 