- Public art in a surprising place
Hilton Waikoloa’s art collection
In pursuit of that goal, Hemmeter traveled to China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and beyond. He spent at least a year traveling and shipping artwork back to Hawaii on barges where it would then be flown by helicopter to the hotel’s property.
But the best thing about the collection, besides its sheer size and diversity, is that viewing it costs nothing, and that holds true for both guests and members of the general public.
Displayed throughout the corridors and common spaces for all visitors to enjoy, the Hilton Anatole’s varied collection ranges from 12-foot segments of the Berlin Wall painted by Jurgen Grosse to an 18th Century Thai Reclining Buddha fashioned in gilt-bronze.
- Two approaches to (web)publishing
The “just use Fossil” approach is particularly novel!
2022-08-05
Spectacularly contrarian take: “Use one server“
When you experience growing pains, and get close to the limits of your current servers, today’s conventional wisdom is to go for sharding and horizontal scaling, or to use a cloud architecture that gives you horizontal scaling “for free.” It is often easier and more efficient to scale vertically instead. Using one big server is comparatively cheap, keeps your overheads at a minimum, and actually has a pretty good availability story if you are careful to prevent correlated hardware failures. It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.
Everything getting older
The Onion’s Our Dumb Century is a classic satirical look at the twentieth century, of course, but it’s also a nice tour through the American zeitgeist over that time. One of the headlines that hits a little harder than it used to is from 1985: “Dynamic New Soviet Leader Not on Brink of Death.” In the early 80s, the USSR successively appointed Yuri Andropov (68 years old, died in office in a year and a half) and then Chernenko (who took power at the age of 72 and died after just over a year). But now the US Senate is the oldest it’s ever been, the speaker of the House is 82, the party leaders in the Senate are 71 and 80, and the Presidency is held by someone who won at age 77, running against a 74-year-old.
A look at “low-level” schemes (though still missing a mention of Gambit/Gerbil)
An entertaining Youtube channel which also promotes a much-needed “cultural coming-together” in these times:
On the bio-electrical science behind how organisms control anatomy through gene expression.
On unifying “toy languages” and “real languages”
A blend of FreeBSD and macOS?
Sounds too good to be true, but good luck to the folks doing this 👍
Some Guix evangelism
Scheme in Excel? :-O
First Windows Subsystem for Linux, now this … how different from the world of 15 years ago ! 🙂
In which I learn about the python concurrency landscape
The promise of Rust, and a perspective on the languages that came before.
Matt Damon explains things 😐
(or, why moves are the way they are …)
Interesting overview of the types of computation in games (simulation numerical shading) and the varying performance aspects of each, and musings on “language suitability”.
Fun fact: a Russian team was hunting for Atlantis near Britain in the late 90s 🤷♂️
- BBC article
- A paper about it
Fun fact: Alligators can go up to two years without food !!
(saw this while watching a new nature documentary)
Some interesting comments in this post on what was lost with the loss of the old Usenet:
A look at Racket and Rhombus
Surprised I never came across this earlier: Cliodynamics
(Reminiscent of psychohistory !)
Abacus Noir 