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Do enjoy some reading pleasure before the weekend commences. Does Computer Science Need Computers?, by Ben Brubaker, Quanta Magazine In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible, by Charlie Wood, Quanta Magazine The Restaurant Is 118 Years Old. The Merch Is New., by Charlotte Druckman, Grub Street
Last week, the library informed me that my hold on an ice cream maker attachment for my mixer was ready for pick-up from their Library of Things. I have literally no recollection of placing a hold on an ice cream maker. But when life hands you an ice cream maker, make a brown sugar peach frozen custard with bourbon maple pecan granola. Apparently.
We have a brand-new child-financial situation to deal with: what to do, financially, about an adult child who is working full-time and living at home. I will start by telling you what we did about children’s income when the children were still in school, because it feels relevant. A child working part-time (like during the school year) put half of their earnings into their own college fund, and kept the other half. A child working full-time (like during the summer), put...
Charles Bukowski noted that "Only boring people get bored.” It entered popular consciousness when Betty Draper stole the line on Mad Men. It's worth considering the mechanism behind this. I think it reflects a flipped perspective; a misapprehension of cause and effect. A framing error. It's not that the world bores bored people. It's that they suppress the world’s interestingness. Bored people are like Kryptonite for interestingness. They don't innocently miss it, they...
M-am uitat la clipul lui Cristi și Ralu, în care povesteau despre o problemă cu geamul vecinului lor. Am devenit curios despre ce spune legea în despre această „problemă” pe care o au muți oameni în România și legea chiar este concret despre acest lucru. În România, Codul Civil reglementează prin articolul 615 distanța minimă pentru ferestrele de vedere - adică acele ferestre prin care poți privi direct în proprietatea vecinului. Legea generală spune că o astfel de...
I stumbled across the dc command, after mistyping cd. It’s a math tool. It’s pretty esoteric in my opinion, but you can switch bases, which means you can do something like convert from a hex color to rgb, albeit digit-by-digit. For example, if you wanted to convert the hex color #FAFBFC, you’d convert FC, then FB, then FC (note the uppercase is necessary for dc). dc -e '16 i FA p' # 250
The Kinks - BBC Sessions 1964-1972 [A Prof Stoned Comp]If your kink is Kinks rarities, well, this one is for you! Prof. Stoned recently unleashed a fairly massive, absolutely crucial overhaul of the band’s BBC sessions from 1964 through 1972. Most of these recordings have been available on various comps or piecemeal on boxed sets, but as usual, the Professor has dug up the best available sources, cleaned up shoddy recordings, and worked his usual magic. Thank you,...
The Kinks - BBC Sessions 1964-1972 [A Prof Stoned Comp]If your kink is Kinks rarities, well, this one is for you! Prof. Stoned recently unleashed a fairly massive, absolutely crucial overhaul of the band’s BBC sessions from 1964 through 1972. Most of these recordings have been available on various comps or piecemeal on boxed sets, but as usual, the Professor has dug up the best available sources, cleaned up shoddy recordings, and worked his usual magic. Thank you,...
“There goes the last great American dynastyWho knows, if she never showed up, what could've been …” I’ve become something of a Swifty these last few years, having discovered the singer songwriter during lockdown. And I have to say my favourite album (to date) has to be Folklore. There’s something about the songs on this album that reached out to me. Not least because I can sing along to them all, and know all the words—yes, by heart. It wasn’t till recently though that I...
Poesiola a scopo di archiviazione, non fateci l'abitudine
I have never seen real-time rendering like this in a game. This is what 13 years, "unlimited" money, and Rockstar's developers can do.1 Goodness gracious. I love the clear Die Hard and Heat vibes. The minutia and groundedness reminds me a lot of Red Dead Redemption II, a game that I adore. The leaks of the past couple of weeks compared to this official look is a great reminder that the real deal is always worth the wait. I vividly remember the midnight launch of GTA V. The...
Humor, honesty, and kindness. Those are the character traits I value most in my fellow human beings. Funny, honest, and kind. That's how I, and those who knew him, would describe my dad. Today marks three years since he passed away. Even though it feels sad that he's no longer with us, it's with joy and warmth that I remember him. Thank you for everything, world's best dad ♥️
I have seen all kinds or people in all kinds of ways, both sick and deceived and lost, searching, waiting, and hoping that somehow the answers to their questions will either come to light or be left elsewhere and unobjectionable.I have watched good people undergo changes and become so unrecognizable in either a more spiritual or physical sense and in the end, they died as someone else to me.I spent too much time searching for a cure. And no.I am not alone. I spent what...
I don't like to boast, but yesterday Lichfield, according to the Met Office, was the wettest place in the country, with 52.8mm of rain – that's two inches in the old money – falling in a four-hour period in the morning. I can't say I'm surprised: the weather was spectacular, with fierce vertical rain, lurid sheet lightning, earth-shaking thunder, and the lower-lying parts of Beacon Park under water. And that morning onslaught wasn't the end of it – back it came in the...
Matt Moring of Steeger Books posted on Facebook this morning that Will Murray died earlier this week. Will was 73. I’m in shock. Will had been a staple of pulpdom since at least the early 1970s. His was one of the first names I saw among those writing about the pulps and pulp characters at […]
I have posted about a few literary societies here and felt a post on several of these would be a good idea. By “literary society,” I mean a group of fans of a particular author or character who have come together in an organization that publishes a journal and/or newsletter, possibly organizes meetings, and maybe […]
I was rather surprised by this statue in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. The work, made in 1873 by Howard Roberts, a native of Philadelphia, seems an odd way to represent Hypatia of Alexandria, the fifth-century Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. It hardly looks like a jacket picture for the author of a commentary on Diophantus’s 13 volume Arithmetica, or on Apollonius of Perga’s treatise on conic sections. Strikes me as more of a “Hello...
Back in June I posted a couple of real-time updates about how our truck’s front frame broke after a fuel stop, leaving the truck sitting at a service road intersection, with our coach dragging the bumper and tow base plate. This blog is usually a couple of months behind real-time, and now the posts have caught up with that and are back home after that incident. So this seems a good opportunity to recap those adventures, and give an update. We were in Fort St John, British...
Today marks the 110th anniversary of Jack Vance's birth. Back in May, I covered his Dying Earth books for my Witches of Appendix N. Today I want to look at the RPGs of the Dying Earth. There are essentially two published ones, Pelgrane Press' and Goodman Games for Dungeon Crawl Classics. I will consider both today.Games at The End of the WorldI have been spending quite a lot of time lately thinking about dying worlds.Not post-apocalyptic worlds necessarily. That is...
Alnashetri cerropoliciensisSlip back 90 million years and wander the sun-baked floodplains of Patagonia, where the giants get all the glory—but it’s the tiny, fleet-footed oddballs that hold the real secrets.Meet Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a delicate little dinosaur with a big story to tell. We’re talking under two pounds soaking wet—lighter than your average house cat—but armed with clues
Working on getting a job, more mysteries and sci-fi, more Traitors, some music, and some Persona. This weekly digest may end up short again due to more job stuff showing up at the last minute to occupy my time. I am writing this on Wednesday. On Tuesday morning I had a virtual job interview and then work that night and on Thursday morning I have an in-person job interview for the same job that I am not super keen on but will take if I have to. On Friday I have another...
The people who run oldgame.cz (English link) emailed me and outright asked if we’d link to them. Imagine that, an honest request without any exchange of money involved! Someone just offering to give me something to post about today. It’s a thing of beauty, it is it is. Honestly I don’t know that much about them, but the page says you can play DOS games in your browser there. I know they’re not the only people who offer that (heck, the Internet Archive even does it), but...
Earlier this year, I shared how excited I was for a direct service between Amsterdam and Hamburg by GoVolta. This rail link could have also provided a hop to Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia, especially as it lined up with GoVolta’s expansion plans. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long and the service to Hamburg was cancelled only three months after starting. According to Thibault Lapers from mobilithib in an interview with GoVolta’s co-CEO, Hessel Winkelman, the route...
In our previous post, we compared the assembly of cruise ship cabins to the Docker ecosystem: Docker Images are the pre-made cabins: complete snapshots that include application code, dependencies, tools, and settings. They work as reusable blueprints. Docker speeds up builds by caching layers and only rebuilding what has changed. Most people pull ready-made images from Docker Hub or the GitHub Container Registry (GHCR), so a full environment can launch in seconds. Docker...
I found a fairly fast way to convert strings representing Base 10 numbers to strings that represent Bijective Base 10 numbers. That’s a string-to-string conversion, no integer type is involved. What happens if you have an integer type variable and you want a Bijective Base 10 string representing it?