Weeklog for Week 1: January 03 to January 09
Progress
Vacation week!
Articles
- One thing I like to do during down times is to go to StackOverflow and check out the "hot questions" on the right-hand side. It's such a wonderful collection of weird and widely-different topics that it's great fun to dive into. I won't record most of the questions I read there, but here are some highlights:
- Cooking: Wild Salmon from grill is too dry
- Scifi: Is Equestria on a flat world like Discworld or on a sphere?
- Worldbuilding: 1-month Free Shipping... To Mars
One has to know when to stop, though, so no more!
- Operation Night Watch - Rijksmuseum: Ultra-High-Resolution photography and restoration of "Night Watch" by Rembrandt
- Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever — except she was a fraud - Paperpile
- Compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch™ - Ebiten
- Mathematicians Outwit Hidden Number Conspiracy -- Quanta Magazine: Very, very roundabout progress on the conjecture that the number of prime factors of consecutive numbers is independent. This is one of the things that seem like they're happening nowadays: very disparate fields of mathematics are tied together to reveal the underlying great structure.
- A New Future for GnuPG: Status report on the past and future of GnuPG, which is now funded through federal contracts and thrives.
- How much does a Linux desktop OS cost? - nixCraft: If you wanted to buy a Linux to install on your system (like you'd by Windows), how would you do it and why is it so surprisingly expensive?
- Why Restaurants Are So Fucked — Part II -- by Joelle Parenteau -- Jan, 2022 -- Medium: Well, the pandemic hit some sectors very hard, and politics do so as well. I think the situation isn't as dire in Europe. But on the other hand, maybe dining/drinking out is a sector that will contract in the future, which wouldn't be that bad.
- An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine (Antikythera) Reveals New Secrets - Scientific American: The Antikythera Mechanism is one of the greatest things ever to be found, and any article on it is interesting.
- phonetonote -- my personal note taking journey: I'll have to try this out sometime...
- Real-life Rupees: How to Grow Green Potassium Ferrioxalate Crystals From Iron Rust: Tutorial on growing crystals at home with many interesting links, I have to try this sometime!
- The Best Way to Grow Alum Crystals at Home - Crystalverse: Maybe these are easier?
- How to design a house to last for 1000 years (part III): A friend has expressed interest in designing/building such a house. Interestingly, the article goes a very different way that I'd have gone. Instead of the american-style carrier construction, I'd have gone with tried-and-proven european building styles and avoided metal constructions.
- Bread in the Middle Ages: Contains a recipe for middle-age bread
- Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3: Anyone with half a brain will recognize that "web3" is a scam and shit for most people involved, except those at the top. This article is just a beautiful formulation of the previous sentence, plus an elaboration of the technical problems/lies it brings with it. Choice quote: "visualizing this financial structure would resemble something similar to a pyramid shape"
- ‘Mysterious Hut’ Spotted on Far Side of the Moon Is a Huge Disappointment: It's a rock. Who would've guessed?
- My Favorite Liar - A Shrewd and Cunning Teacher: What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class: “Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”
- Unpacking CVE-2021-40444: A Deep Technical Analysis of an Office RCE Exploit
- New Law in North Carolina Bans Latest Scientific Predictions of Sea-Level Rise - ABC News: Old, but great. There was a scientific paper that outlined that sea level will rise by 39 inches during the next century, endangering new housing development. The North Carolina government responded by banning the use of scientific studies in development planning.
- Conscious consumerism — petroleum -- by Santhosh Sundar -- Jan, 2022 -- Medium: "If you intend to use an EV to reduce carbon emissions from oil, you don’t have to wait until you own one. If you already own one, you can further reduce your footprint. Let’s find out." Lots of talk, very little solution, and also more personal responsibility stuff.
- The James Webb Space Telescope — making 300 points of failure reliable -- by Robert Barron -- Jan, 2022 -- Medium
- Where Is Webb? NASA/Webb: Excellent visualization of the JWST mission status, I need to have this open every day!
- Following Recipes – Thomas Stehle:
- Donald Knuth - The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves: Writing a book in 10 easy steps. Step 1: Write your own typesetting system (contains at least three sub-steps)...
Libraries, programming, etc
- init_subclass -- Simon Willison’s TILs: "I think 95% of the problems once solved by a metaclass can be solved by init_subclass instead"
- notes/use_init_subclass_hook_to_validate_subclasses.md at master · rednafi/notes · GitHub
- Creating Beautiful Topography Maps with Python: Finally, some source code on @beautifulmaps made with Python
- 22–2 Built-in Python Libraries That Will Put Haters to Shame -- Towards Data Science: Most of these I'd known and used, but I definitely need to go back on some of them.
- Base 32: "Base 10 is well known and well accepted, but it produces strings that will be unacceptably long. Base 16 is only slightly more compact. Base 64 encoding uses a large symbol set containing both upper and lower case letters and many special characters. It is more compact than Base 16, but it is difficult to type and difficult to pronounce. Base 32 seems the best balance between compactness and error resistance. Each symbol carries 5 bits."
Books
- Still Immun