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Our collective hallucinations
An interesting piece at The Atlantic on how link rot is affecting everything.
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Center is IN
A neat insight into the early days of CSS from Eric Meyer.
I first saw CSS in a technical writing class at umich (TC450 with Rod Johnson & Kara Heinrichs). Like Eric, I found it very exciting, but yeah, nothing actually worked.
We’re getting there.
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History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme
This was no idle threat. Lysenko’s powerbase was well known: “The whole country knows of the debate taking place between Vavilov and Lysenko,” one his cronies stood up and announced at a meeting. “Vavilov will have to change his ways, because Stalin said that things must not work the way Vavilov says but as Lysenko says.” Within a few years, working with Stalin and others, Lysenko was well on the way to purging Mendelian geneticists from the ranks of Soviet science, having them fired or thrown into prison if they did not swear allegiance to Lysenko’s views. He had also, for all intents and purposes, removed all mention of Mendelian genetics from biology textbooks at every level from grade school on through university.
The Botanist Who Defied Stalin -
Steel
Extend your arm out until your elbow is straight, and hold your thumb and index finger about four inches apart. That’s a little wider than a credit card. A little less than half the width of a piece of notebook paper. Got it? Cool.
Now read this.
Now look back at your fingers.
Go read Steel at MGoBlog. What an amazing story. Congrats to the 2021 Women’s Gymnasts on the first national title in school history!
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‘Jennie-isms’ from ‘Make a Chair from a Tree’
William Shakespeare is credited with the invention of 1,700 words (or at least his plays are the first known printed use thereof). Jennie Alexander can be credited with just a few less – and we even left some of them in the third edition of „Make a Chair from a Tree“ (if their meanings could […]
‘Jennie-isms’ from ‘Make a Chair from a Tree’ -
On Concurrency
Some developers I’ve known seem to think that being good at concurrency makes them badass. Others seem to think that senior developers must be great at concurrency, and so they should be too.
But what senior developers are good at is eliminating concurrency as much as possible by developing a simple, easy, consistent model to follow for the app and its components.
Brent Simmons on How NetNewsWire Handles Threading -
Tesla Model Y Temperature Efficiency
We’ve had a Model Y since last September and have been tracking drives with TeslaFi. It’s been interesting to see how much the ambient temperature affects the range of the car. Preconditioning the battery helps a bit, but there’s still a pretty sizable fall-off when it gets cold. Known and expected, but fun to see the actual data.
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“I thought you were supposed to be good at this…”
“Today it was my turn, the joke was on me. Tomorrow it could be you. It comes to us all at some point.”
PETER FOLLANSBEE: JOINER’S NOTES
I decided today to assemble the undercarriage of the next Windsor chair in my pile of projects. My goal was (is?) to go through the process a number of times without great spans of time between efforts. We’ll see. Today turned bad even sooner than I thought. This was the 2nd mortise I bored:
a re-creation of the moment of doom I’ve made lots and lots of chair joints; ladderbacks & Windsors. As I have mentioned here, this recent re-introduction to Windsor chairs is after a hiatus of over 26 years. So I’ve been rusty at it. That’s what I suspected was behind me splitting the legs. The first 2 I made last year had splits in several of the joints, though none as bad as this. But today I decided I’m not that clumsy or “un-crafty”. It’s the auger bit – that’s what’s different.
thick lead screw I never…
View original post 320 more words
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How to adjust your car mirrors
I’ve been doing it this way for ages and it works quite well. Though recommended by the SAE, it usually pushes the mirrors right to their adjustment limit. Apparently the car makers don’t read the SAE journal.
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The Beaten Path
I remember when I first started Ruby; we were using JRuby in the early days of CircleCI, and also Mongo. Both of those were well supported, with many people using them. However, we seemed to be the first to ever use them together and I quickly put together this rule of thumb:
Paul Biggar, First thoughts on Rust vs. OCaml
You can go off the beaten path once and be OK, but not twice.Also this gem:
Programming in Rust reminds me a lot of programming in C++: you add a
constto one function, and then you have to follow thatconstaround the entire codebase until you finally get to the place where you learn it actually can’t beconst, and so fuck you. -
Open Source Woodworking
Some excellent thoughts from Chris.
When I design and build a piece of furniture, it does not belong to me any more than the birdsong of the warblers outside my shop door. Since the start of my furniture career in the 1990s, I have never claimed ownership to a single design. The world is free to copy, adapt, interpret, sell …
Give it Away. Now & Forever -
RT: Grace at the Bench
One of the many ways you can judge a person’s woodworking experience is watching them at the bench. Beginners move a certain way – too fast, too slow or they look like me at a junior high dance. […]
Grace at the Bench -
[|87
meta: this is a post on a WordPress site embedding a tweet on Twitter that’s a screenshot of a Tumblr post.
All things serve the beam. -
progressions
Back at the beginning of April, I started taking screenshots of the reports on covid19.healthdata.org. Here’s how things progressed:
first capture, april 9, 2020. expecting ~800 on may 1 
mostly following the median of the projection 
still mostly following, a tick past median 
on track 
now at 1250 may 1 
added smoothing and a 3 day smooth because they realized reporting isn’t instant.
now at 2250 on may 1, nearly a 100% jump
the predicted downward ramp isn’t ramping down…. -
Feeling your oats
The expression dates back to the early 19th century, used for the frisky, energetic movements of a horse when it has a belly full of oats. The earliest example recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary comes from the Boston Transcript in 1831: “Whether the pony felt his oats…he took a frightful canter.”
Wall Street Journal -
Nicklaus & Snead at Pebble
Remastered in HD. Love seeing the classic conditions with slow greens and natural fairways.
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Listen to The Police
This is good advice. If we both reach our arms and we can touch, we’re too close.
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That last eyelet hole on sneakers
I never knew what it was for. Now I do.
Ever Wonder What That Extra Lace Hole on Your Gym Shoes Is For? We Found Out
b19y 
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