Monthly recap (December 2017)
Major updates: * Spent the last week of December and the first week of January in India (also, a couple of days in Singapore). Mostly fun. Caught up with a lot of people. * Tara’s birthday party! A…
Sci/Math/Prog Summary: December 2017
Interesting stuff from the last month: * Meta: last month of the year, and one where I was busy with work and vacation * Very interesting deep-dive on “Type-Safe GraphQL with Ocaml” * Scaling up Q…
Media Summary: November 2017
Some interesting links for the month: * Opening with a L. A. Review post on Celebrity Warfare, with this quote: “I understood the mood of depression which had lain over the convention, because fina…
Monthly recap (November 2017)
Spent a week in Kauai. The first few days were surprisingly windy and rainy, but … improved a lot towards the end. There is nothing better than floating on your back under the sun (can come pretty cl…
Sci/Math/Prog Summary: November 2017
Interesting stuff from the past month: * Beginning with this headline, from the BBC: ”‘Big void’ identified in Khufu’s Great Pyramid at Giza” * I don’t honestly think there’s a “way back” to the “o…
Media Summary: October 2017
Some interesting links for the month: * Dan Brown’s new book came out, but unlike before, this time I just added it to the end of a long reading list. In lieu, this interview. * A niche link, ignor…
Setting up ZSH on a Mac
I’ve been using the excellent Fish shell for the last few (three? four?) years, but every once in a while I need bash-compatibility, and Zsh seemed like perhaps a sweet spot between the two. If you’r…
On the space dog
From an article in the New Yorker reminiscing about Laika: But the story of Laika had a dark lie at its core.a space coffin turned shooting star…
Monthly recap (October 2017)
Some ups and downs this month … leaving out some things. One surprisingly good movie I saw this month was “Never let me go”, based on a book by the recent Nobel-prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s alr…
Adventures with exhaust fans
This might be downright trivial for a lot of people, but it was an ”Achievement Unlocked” moment for me. There was a Nutone exhaust fan in our bathroom that was really loud, as in louder than any sou…
Sci/Math/Prog Summary: October 2017
Interesting stuff from the past month: * I feel the old “static typing vs dynamic typing” debate has gotten more nuanced recently with ‘spec’ and ‘schema’ in Clojure (i.e. better, fine-grained, runt…
On Robot Overlords
Extract from a recent New Yorker story, "Welcoming our new robot overlords" beep-beep-whooshA decade ago, industrial robots assisted workers in their tasks. Now workers—those who remain—ass…