Progress

It's getting slower towards Christmas -- but still a lot of work to do.

Also: Christmas!

PlantEd

No progress this week.

NTS

No progress this week.

Articles

• A teenager on TikTok disrupted thousands of scientific studies with a single video - The Verge: Publishing the name of a survey website on TikTok to many young women skewed the distribution of survey takers on the website. The fact that this site did not have any mitigation strategies available is more interesting than the fact that groups of people follow trends. It was not the teenager, nor the video, nor the new survey takers that broke these studies, it was an inadequate tool that should have had very simple and easy-to-implement mechanisms to prevent such a thing from happening. But I guess it's much easier to rely on "the randomness of the internet" than on correctly programmed tools.
• Rendering in Real Time with Spatiotemporal Blue Noise Textures, Part 1 -- NVIDIA Developer Blog: Blue-noise that's blue in space as well as in time. Very patent-encumbered, unfortunately.
• Startup.py -- Ned Batchelder: You can point the PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable at a Python file, and that file will be executed every time you enter the interactive prompt.
• I actually bought a cheap electric pickup truck from Alibaba. Here's what showed up - Electrek
• 🍂 arborelia 🌲 on Twitter: ""Optimally packing equal-sized shapes into a shape" twitter is just a fascinating rabbit hole to go down https://t.co/MrZB3S9BJ3" / Twitter: Optimal shape packing has some regular solutions and some hilariously irregular ones.
• Erich's Packing Center: So many wonderful shape-packings, both regular as well as irregular.
• Street Fighter II, paper trails: The sprite space on old machines was very constrained, so Capcom laid our the tiles needed for their games on paper.
• How to Draw S-Curved Arrows Between Boxes / Rectangles -- Alexander's Garden: Drawing a line between two boxes is one of these problems that look very simple at first but actually becomes hard quite quickly if you want to do it right. Just think of all the edge cases and the aesthetic considerations!
• Average colors of the world -- EOX
• Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
• Selling my own GPL software, part 1: a lot of hurdles - Raymii.org
• Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic -- Tim Harford: This is mostly silly, and mostly not "contrarian logic" but regular logic: don't think of just yourself, think of a more global solution. Buying a coal mine to shut it down isn't even contrarian in any sense, it's just common sense, and business sense too, because you can now sell CO2 certificates. At $0,4 per ton that's super-cheap. And some of the other examples plain won't work either, both because queues don't work that way and because people will siphon fuel from their tanks into (probably un-regulated) vessels and still go panic-buying.
• marktext/marktext: 📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.: Yes, I'll gladly try out the next markdown editor!
• Pathbird "Pathbird brings your course content to life. Build self-guided, interactive lessons for computational skills with Pathbird."
  The actual real advantage of trainer-led courses isn't "interactivity", it's "I can try this out and ask a question when I don't understand it!". But this still looks neat.
• AoC (Unofficial) Survey Results
• h3r2tic/cornell-mcray: 🕹 A quick'n'dirty game sample using kajiya, physx-rs, and dolly: This may be a quick, simple demo, but ray/path-traced shadows look fantastic

Libraries, programming, etc

• GitHub - Music-and-Culture-Technology-Lab/omnizart: Omniscient Mozart, being able to transcribe everything in the music, including vocal, drum, chord, beat, instruments, and more.
• Startup.py: Customizing python shell startup. Note that ipython has its own mechanism: Startup files
• For a while, I've been looking for a better terminal emulator, and I've looked at a handful. Most recently, kitty and wezterm. Neither of those had a feature I need: start up a handful of environments in a handful of tabs. I've kludged my way around this missing feature by running xmacros using xmacroplay. By itself this is quite amazing, but also very slow and a bit error-prone: I must not click anywhere outside the window while the macro is running and if the window does not start up correctly (which sometimes happens), the commands will go to whatever is in focus right nowWhich is sometimes entertaining, when it's an IDE for example. Sometimes it's absolutely disruptive, for example when Thunderbird gets loads of commands it'll move emails and mark them and delete them and who knows what else..
  But now it seems that kitty has that feature, or at least something remotely like it. I'll have to investigate further...

Books

• Immun by Philipp Dettmer of Kurzgesagt. This is my book of the year 2021.
• Atlas of Poetic Botany by Francis Halle, which is a hymn to botany and plants and enjoying the wonderful variety of nature. It's also just a beautiful book.

Games

• Craftopia with the guys. Great fun, again.
• Prey is free on the EGS and you should play it.
• Control is free on the EGS and you should play it.

Backlog

• Loop Hero (from free EGS)
• Wands (from some VR bundle)
• Alekon
• Maquette

Other media

• I Climbed Inside a Blue Whale - Dr. NEMO:Note that this is the title, I didn't actually climb into a whale! There is one taxidermied blue whale in the world, and it's in Göteborg, and one can go inside (on special occasions like Whale Day).
• Real Gregorian MONKS Singing Halo Theme Song in a real Chapel (does unfortunately not break out into the orchestral section, like this one does)
• We Put a Gigantic Rocket Motor in a Christmas Tree because what could be more festive than launching a christmas tree on a huge column of flames?