Generally interesting links - Jul 2021
History * Stone age art “in a new light” Concave stone lamps filled with animal fat, on the other hand, are smokeless and can offer more than an hour of focused, candlelike light. Science * “Wh…
On the "unix philosophy"
There's this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ea3pkTCYx4 There's this blogpost about an aspect of the talk: https://blog.deref.io/unix-and-microservice-platforms/ There's this disc…
A poetic paradox
Caveat: I like poemhunter.com, but it's extremely ad-riddled, and the only way it's tolerable to me any more is in "reader-mode" that strips out all the distracting fluff. I read ra…
The World of Tomorrow
I came across the old footage of the 1939 World's Fair, which was promoted, at the time as "the world of tomorrow", talking about the magnificent world of twenty years from now, of 1960!…
(Through) A Scanner Darkly
I had written previously about how 2006 was a year with a lot of great movies. Yet, since I was going by what came to mind then, there was one important omission: “A Scanner Darkly” If you didn’t kn…
Rediscovering Disco
After dipping into movie soundtracks several years ago, I haven't actually returned to any other consistent "genre" (I know soundtracks aren't a genre, I lack a better word, and musi…
Simple calculator in Rust
Sometime last year, I had tried writing a parser for basic arithmetic to drive a simple calculator in Scala. To follow-up, I decided to try writing this in Rust. I looked at some parser crates, sett…
Well, this is cheerful
Continuing an MIT study from 1971 Subscribed to r/solarpunk just to have a counter-weight of optimism.…
News Extracts: 16 Jul 2021
A shocking trend, that is easily missed A perspective on a sort of change in culture and art, using Michaelangelo as an example…
Generally interesting links - Jun 2021
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 Cili…
Monthly recap (Jun 2021)
Major updates * A trip to Muir Woods Minor updates * Got a covid test (negative!) * Dealing with some ants and cockroaches at home * Patio work at home (tiling) * Got some cards for Father…
From an older time
I came across this plaque while on a trip last week. We were staying at Gualala, and were eating at Upper Crust Pizzeria, which was really good, and so we returned to it. Next to it was the “Gualala…