[22:06] Want to encode some text in base64 and then give people a Unix one-liner to decode it? Look no further! echo "echo \"$(echo "INSERT YOUR TEXT HERE" | base64)\$\" | base64 --decode"
[21:19] Just read a wonderful essay about Unix as Literature: http://theody.net/elements.html
[00:07] I bought some refurbished Samsung SyncMaster SA650 monitors. I just had to install an ssh server on my machine blindolded in order to troubleshoot these bastards.
[00:06] When something goes wrong with Linux video settings, you are totally lost.
[11:56] Hey! I am back on ctrl-c.club. I just booted up an old laptop from the closet, to take travelling, and got it setup to access ctrl-c.club. Hopefully I'll be more active this summer.
[19:53] I have finally got around to *starting* to write a Monte Carlo simulation for Hex.
[14:48] Hey folks, I have been away for a while. I've got two teaching gigs that keep me pretty busy these days: A33 (Calculus for Management II) and 246 (Mathematical Reasoning). Both are good clean fun.
[18:30] Writing a useful script is really rewarding.
[18:28] Worked a bit on quizbot, a shell script for making variations on a quiz. It is very rudimentary. Presently, it spits out a header, a random variant of each question from a static list, and outputs a LaTeX file for each tutorial.
[12:13] Added some music to ../notes/music/ : The Potato Chip Song. This is my first recorded piece!
[11:09] Here is Alison Krauss singing Down in the River to Pray is really powerful. The images in the video, when really considered, complement the song perfectly. It is amazing to think of intense the people in those photos feel.
[11:57] The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam Paper (local mirror) where they talk about the first computer simulation of a physical system, is really nice and easy to read as well.
[11:20] Freeman Dyson's Intestellar Transport (local mirror) is a great short paper.
[11:15] Wikipedia has simulated views of the sky from the exo-planets in Alpha Centuri available: here. I hope we one day get to see real photos of that sky.
[11:11] Stanislaw Ulam (WP) invented Monte Carlo simulation and worked on everything ever.
[15:03] The average distance between two points selected uniformly at random from a unit cube is called Robbins constant. It is not a nice simple number!
[23:20] I continue to be totally wrapped up in music. It is amazing. This evening, we played recorder music together. We sang together this morning. Played recorder music together this evening. Now I am trying to play along Mike Lynch playing Scarborough Fair on ukuele. Beautiful!
[09:54] On Wednesday night I worked up the courage to go to Sing for Joy choir. It was the first choir type thing I'd ever attended. When they told me that the choir was in the Ubuntu Choirs tradition, I was greatly relieved. It was nice to know that this experience was from the standard repos, so to speak. It was a blast!
[10:07] "Yes, life ends and there is nothing after it, but the world is beautiful despite that, and we should use our time and appreciate that beauty. That, and love, are the only two answers that can be found to a wholly material universe." -- Jonas Kyratzes
[13:40] Some websites are designed to distract you, from their own content. I am trying to read a news article online, and I find myself scraping the text from the artcle.
[17:10] A Representation of Orientable Combinatorial 3-Manifolds by Lickorish.
[17:09] There are a lot of good reviews in Ukulele Tonya's little library. Available here.
[14:32] The random string figure display is now active. It shows you a randomly chosen selection from String Figure Magazine.
[12:05] I am playing with Heru and Evie\'s very fancy microscope. It is very fancy. The experience of looking through it reminds me a lot of astronomy. There are optics to adjust and strange sights to see. It is very relaxing too. One can chase the fractal structure of plant cells down through various different scales of magnification. Lovely.
[12:04] I am playing with Heru and Evie's very fancy microscope. It is very fancy. The experience of looking through it reminds me a lot of astronomy. There are optics to adjust and strange sights to see. It is very relaxing too. One can chase the fractal structure of plant cells down through various different scales of magnification. Lovely.
[13:15] We went out yesterdat and bought an old desktop (Dell Optiplex 780) and a refurbished display port monitor (HP Compaq LA 2205wg). It is nice to have desktop computer with an ethernet connection in the apartment. XUbuntu runs great on this thing.
[02:36] Just realized that ~endorphant responded to an mail message that I sent him on the club. It was neat to get a message in mail. Moreover, it made me sense how long the ~ had been active for. It also sent me questing after endorphant's other manifestations: spray.no-leverage and endorphant@tilde.town and mogdethanc@github.com.
[15:52] "O Éternel -- Donne-nous le courage tranquille, nécessaire en toutes circonstances, et naturel à celui qui t’a consacré sa vie." Freely and hastily translated: "Oh, Eternal One, grant us tranquil courage, which is necessary in all circumstances and is natural to those who have consecrated their lives to Thee."
[19:28] My collection of language tidbits now has a poem in French. It is often attributed the St. Francis, but this attribution is not attested before 1912.
[01:04] Added some pictures to the Botanical Illustrations post. I am starting to sketch the plants in the apartment. The orchid was a lovely subject to sketch.
[10:43] If you turn Job's phrase about computer and bikes inside out then I think you get : Bikes are computers for the body''
[10:41] Now I want to get a bike.
[10:40] ~philips wrote a monster post about all kinds of stuff [bikes, art, busking, etymology, etc?] It was a great read. These rambling open minded posts are excellent. The micro-summary was a nice touch. Last night, bleery eyed and dazed, I put up some visual art in nature notes. It was a great to see some visual art on ctrl-c.club this morning. My tools of choice for art are pencil, pen, and water colour. Simple tools. They are limitless tools, though. It's the same thing with bikes: they are the simplest tool (other than walking) that helps one get around. I am reminded of the famous Steve Jobs speech: ''Computers are bicycles for the mind''. They solve the problem of getting around efficiently.
[00:28] Greeting from Canada!
[00:27] I just found out that ~philips and ~gioabel did not already know each other! Yay for more excellent Brazilian people.
[13:57] Recently some folks published an article in Nature about analysing the chemical contents of the air in movie theaters. Fascinating stuff. The abstract, available here, has a chilling ending.
[10:36] I am very excited about amateur microscopy. It seems to me that that telescopes show you other worlds and microscopes show you alien life forms. There is a nice well narrated bit of microscopy here.
[04:24] Work on your projects locally, on the actual hard disk, and then upload them to The Cloud.
[03:58] I just about lost a very important document due to vim trying to write to an incorrectly mounted partition. Be careful! The lesson, when vim hangs, proceed with caution. Make sure your swap file directory is in a place where nothing can screw it up. Save your file often.
[15:53] ARES -- using heavy rail cars to store electric energy as gravitational potential energy -- is very clever. For a long while I've been thinking that trains are the correct way to automate shipping, not self-driving trucks. This could be another clever use for self-driving trains.
[21:12] "The power of the computer is locked behind a door with no knob." -- Brenda Laurel, 1993.
[21:11] Computers are weird.
[21:10] The Turing Complete User is another essay by Olia Lialina. The essay by her that I read last night, I thoroughly enjoyed. Started reading this second one. It was slow to get going. The main point though, is mind boggling and worth the long build up. The note that I took away from it was: Assume that the things ('people' or 'users') who interact with a program are themselves Turing complete. Assume they are clever and will figure out how to do things. People can get Excel to raytrace graphics. Cory Doctrow maked a cameo and remarked: 'If you have a general purpose computer serving as a single use appliance in your home, then that computer has malware on it by definition.' Well said!
[19:20] Okay guys, this is what I want in my office when I grow up: a desk in a room with a blackboad. I want the desk to have a document scanner placed above it, and I want to blackboard to have a camera pointed at it. There should be a computer constantly watching the cameras for changes, e.g. moving a bright object on the desk, which indicate that a picture should be taken. When I effect those changes, the computer takes a photo and uploads it to some kind of wiki or blog for commentary.
[19:11] A nice result due to Croke that I just learned about: Round hemispheres are the only finite area, two dimensional, Riemannian manifolds (with or without boundary) such that almost every pair of complete geodesics intersect once and only once.
[12:48] Last night I went out and observed Jupiter through the binoculars. Came in to watch a documentary about the moons of Jupiter and found out about the Juno Mission. Watched this YouTube video about the mission. It is a very exciting time.
[16:02] "The first lesson is that computational complexity theory is really, really, really not about computers. Computers play the same role in complexity that clocks, trains, and elevators play in relativity. They’re a great way to illustrate the point, they were probably essential for discovering the point, but they’re not the point." -- Scott Aaronson (here)
[01:15] Turns out that Keevash's paper on designs was used by Lubotzky-Luria-Rosenthal to create bounded degree expanders.
[01:13] I was at Heathrow headed to Switzerland almost exactly a year ago.
[00:38] "Obviously, all the theorems of the geometry corresponding to a given group continue to be theorems in the geometry corresponding to any subgroup of the given group; and the more restricted the group, the more figures will be distinct relatively to it, and the more theorems will appear in the geometry. The extreme case is the group corresponding to the identity, the geometry of which is too large to be of consequence." -- Oswald Veblen
[23:51] Another documentary about plants communicating is available here: [21:40] A Nature documentary that has a lot of Francis Halle. The documentary talks about observations of various kinds of plant behaviour.
[17:46] Joseph D'Antoni talking about string figures on YouTube. Part 1 and Part 2.
[10:39] Fourier Toy is a fascinating demonstartion of the idea of Fourtier Analysis.
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrrSAc-vjG4">What Plants Talk About. It was nice to see a lot of Canadian scientists doing work; clearly these people are normalish hippies.
[01:00] A History of String talks about Jewish sacred spaces bound with string (eruv), ancient Meso-American knot records (qhuipu), and string figures.
[17:30] A very brief essay on why poetry is interesting. It includes the phrase "As far as the rest of art goes, words and pictures/sounds are non-overlapping magisteria."
[23:48] Barbara Becker does amazing stuff with astronomy. Her website is exquisite reading.
[23:16] Ernie Wright does really pleasant amateur astronomy. For example, he painstakingly aligned his patio with North. It is lovely stuff, and worth reading.
[13:07] The following tutorial, is so good that I've got to post it again: userland. There are some follow-up thoughts from last month: userland 1 of ?.
[12:43] Dear Data is a blog of hand illustrated post-cards by two data visualization experts. Lovely stuff. This is the kind of mail that one dreams of recieving.
[14:09] Just found a beautiful wall calendar in a heap of free books. I put it in the back my research noteboook, this is excellent. Much better than using my tiny phone as a calendar. Use a calendar as a calendar."
[14:32] John B. Calhoun did interesting work on emergent social structures on Norway rats held in 'ideal conditions'. Turns out that ideal conditions gie rise to strange behaviour.
[22:02] I've been getting excited about Esperanto again; Meg and I are speaking it at home, and I'm reading it again. This evening we watched The Universal Language.
[23:30] After ten years of wanting a chalk-board at home, I finally have one. The pleasure of receiving, for free, something that you have strongly desired over a long period of time is amazing.
[12:57] A thirteen month old child got a stone out of the garden, and put it in my outstreached hand. I'll never understand this interaction in the way that the smaller human understood it.
[19:33] A quote from work that could provide the title for a book: "how to transform a function by stretching, shifting, and reflecting". That's a book on social etiquette that I'd read.
[19:26] The comments on Reddit concerning people taking down Little Libraries are fascinating, in my opinion.https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/3i8in9/the_crackdown_on_little_free_library_book/
[01:27] Whee! We have an official tilde.json (implementing tilde description protocol). And a wiki! I go away for the weekend, come back, and the club is blossoming. Beautiful!
[14:58] The New Media Consortium has a very interesting series of reports produced using the Delphi Method. In their report on higher education they consider the problem of rewarding teachers in higher education a 'wicked problem: Those that are complex to even define, much less address'.
[14:31] The Delphi method for running committees seems like a great idea. It would be nice to talk to Quakers about it, since they are so busy with committee work. Moreover, it seems like a perfect way to use the internet to get decisions made. The only trick would be to get people to take it seriously.
[21:52] Organizing photos is really tricky business!
[21:09] ~philips continues to completely rock out the ~. I love his idea of using vim for a read-eval-listen loop via ABC notation and MIDI. This is how I am trying it out: :w |! abc2midi % -o %.midi && timidity %.midi
[16:05] It would seem that I've found a brief clip of Lewis Thomas explaining his fascination with Bach, his view summarizes perfectly my current feelings about the majesty of nature, our role in it, and the importance of art: (Michael Lawrence on (Lewis Thomas on Bach)).
[22:41] solfege.org is a GNU tool for learning music theory. I am excited.
[13:57] And now I'm excited about collecting nature sounds? Maybe I'll have to hack together a tiny amplifier system for doing bird watching. This guy has lots of interesting stuff: Nature Songs
[15:22] Been playing around all day with my account. I've updated sync.html to better reflect my current usage. It has all the info needed to hook up a sshfs filesystem to make interacting with ctrl-c.club much nicer.
[12:44] Looking through the various photos, bits of art, and illustrative diagrams that I've collected on my computer over the last ten years brings to mind not how much my tastes of changed but rather it reveals the large scale pattern that I've been building. It's clear that certain things have changed, but the main theme is still the same.
[17:35] A man was by the sea. His son was learning how to gut fish by the water. The man wrote about it, and now I know that someone else reads these. (Hello -- ~rrb)
[17:18] I've been browsing around the ~ and noticed that there is a lot of good stuff going on. It looks like ~eka is doing something neat in Indonesian. is continues to be awesome.
[13:23] I'm in the stairwell beside the apartment, connected to wifi and sketching the mini-garden. This is surprisingly pleasant. Good music, plants, and sketching.
[21:42] "I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." – Jorge Luis Borges
[21:42] "I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." – Jorge Luis Borges
[00:32] The way that I use a computer simulates using a teletypewriter, and it seems to be working out pretty well. Often I'll format plain text documents to eighty columns for some kind of aesthetic gut feeling about how text ought to work. Turns out that's the right width for easily printing using a typewriter.
[23:55] "If the whole thing were not rewritten it was feared that future generations of mathematicians might find it incomprehensible." from Mark Ronan on the classification of finite simple groups.
[22:28] jhead makes photo manipulation so much nicer.
[22:24] jhead makes photo manipulation so much nicer.
[01:31] If we could channel a time before "how to code" seemed deemed the only thing worth learning, an enhanced appreciation for poetry would probably feature highly on surveys of edificatory aspiration. -- harvard press blog
[18:35] Trying to figure out how to write long prose works without imploding before I'm forced to write a thesis. Expect some hastily written math content soon.
[15:58] The ctrl-c.club quote of the day award goes to ~jovan for writing: "Right now I'm trying to solve a heat capacity equation using the Commodore 64 Basic emulator on my phone." We live in the future, folks.
[22:37] Just finished playing The Dreamhold. It's the first piece of IF I've ever played. I'm amazed by how powerful the experience was. Meg is still playing; she is totally consumed by IF.
The Cornell Mycology Blog is neat. They have a great quote up: "To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall." -- Thomas Henry Huxley, 1854. On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences.
[18:52] ~imt created tilde.hol.es to monitor uptime in the tildeverse.
~papa over at tilde.center has a very tiny very micro blog tool soc. ~rklett over at tilde.town has given a lot of thought to how he wants his tilde-space to look. ~endorphant pointed out that he knows tom7 in real life and this got me looking at more of the latter's stuff. I really like his crap art page.
~papa over at tilde.center has a very tiny very micro blog tool soc. ~rklett over at tilde.town has given a lot of thought to how he wants his tilde-space to look. ~endorphant pointed out that he knows tom7 in real life and this got me looking at more of the latter's stuff. I really like his crap art page.
Jason Kotenko reminds us that more sleep might not be better.
