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Psychoacoustics: The World's Loudest Lisp Program
The only thing that can be improved under self-evacuation is the flow of information towards people in emergency. This leaves us with eyesight and hearing to work with. Visual aids are greatly more flexible and easy to work with. However their huge drawback is their usefulness expires quickly once the smoke sets in.
2500 dense Lisp programming words from Eugene Zaikonnikov via lobste.rs, whence this YouTube ad.
Listening at Two Very Different Scales
Large-scale listening: To ensure that DSS-43 can still place the longest of long-distance calls, the antenna underwent a round of updates in 2020. A new X-band cone was installed. DSS-43 transmits radio signals in the X (8 to 12 gigahertz) and S (2 to 4 GHz) bands; it can receive signals in the X, S, L (1 to 2 GHz), and K (12 to 40 GHz) bands. The dish’s pointing accuracy also was tested and recertified. 1200 words from Willie D. Jones for IEEE Spectrum.
Small-scale listening: The sounds being produced are within the lower range of human hearing, so it’s possible there are sounds in the soil we haven’t heard yet. Early research from Switzerland shows soils were producing the most complex sounds in spring and summer, which declined in autumn and winter. Phoebe Weston writes 1000 words for The Guardian.
A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life
“Equations are just a way of describing nature [...] Air is a fluid and blood is a fluid, so the same equations that model the air around an aircraft are the ones used to model the blood inside your body.” Joe Zadeh writes 6500 words for Noema magazine [via Arts & Letters Daily]
Airfoil - Bartosz Ciechanowski
"The particles are zipping around in random directions, constantly entering and leaving this region. However, despite all this motion what you’re seeing here is a simulation of still air." Elaborate 14,000-word web-essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski (previously) via lobster.rs
Guns N' Roses - Perhaps
YouTube link to a Guns N' Roses song called "Perhaps."
Vim creator and maintainer Bram Moolenaar (1961 – 2023-08-03)
Bram Moolenaar, the Dutch software engineer, creator and maintainer of long-lived text editor Vim, has died.
Something in space has been lighting up every 20 minutes since 1988
On Wednesday, researchers announced the discovery of a new astronomical enigma. The new object, GPM J1839–10 [...] takes 22 minutes between pulses. [...] The list of known objects that can produce this sort of behavior is short and consists of precisely zero items. John Timmer writes 900 words for Ars Technica.
radio on the tv
For about the next decade, the combined DMX/AEI Music would compete with Muzak. In 2011-2012, Canadian background music (now usually called "multisensory marketing") firm Mood Media bought both Muzak and DMX/AEI, combining them all into the Mood Media brand. This behemoth would enjoy nearly complete control of the background music industry, were it not for the cycle of technology bringing in IP-based competitors like Pandora for Business. Haha, no, I am kidding, Pandora for Business is also a Mood Media product. 3600 words from J. B. Crawford at Computers Are Bad.
The cursed universes of Dana Sibera
The #1 adjective others seem to put under her creations routinely and casually shared on Mastodon is cursed. Sibera seems to think likewise. “They are terrible for the most part, but better out of my head than in,” she wrote when I asked. Marcin Wichary writes 2400 words with lots of pictures for the newsletter Shift Happens. [via lobste.rs]
Children of the Ice Age
For more than 200 years, children have been neglected by archaeologists. It was part of a disciplinary bias towards adult men in archaeological interpretations. This began to change in the 1970s and ’80s with the rise of feminist archaeology and the archaeology of gender [...] The approaches advocated by these female scholars critically examined the roles of women in the past and, by extension, children started to become ‘visible’ too. But it is only in recent years that youngsters have truly emerged from the shadows. April Nowell writes 4400 words for Aeon Magazine.
Ted Chiang joins SFI Miller Scholars
He has never interviewed a scientist for any of his stories despite the fact that, because of their fidelity to scientific ideas, they often read like they were written by one. “My understanding of science comes entirely from the written word,” Chiang says. Just as SFI’s scientists can’t predict what fresh perspective they might glean from conversations with Chiang, Chiang can’t predict whether those conversations will spur him to write new stories. 1000-word press release via MeFi's own Nelson's linkblog
The Mystery of the Dune Font
Putting a name to the typeface that defined the visual identity of the science fiction series and its author, Frank Herbert—around 2000 words from Florian Hardwig for Fonts In Use.
What time is it on the Moon?
Defining lunar time is not simple. Although the definition of the second is the same everywhere, the special theory of relativity dictates that clocks tick slower in stronger gravitational fields. The Moon’s gravitational pull is weaker than Earth’s, meaning that, to an observer on Earth, a lunar clock would run faster than an Earth one. [...] “This is a paradise for experts in relativity, because you have to take into account so many things.” 1300 words from Elizabeth Gibney for Nature.
The miracle of the commons
Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, the young political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. 3700 words from Michelle Nijhuis for Aeon Magazine [an update to a previous post]
How Pitfall Builds its World
Jack Evoniuk reverse-engineers and explains, "I'm surprised that, as far as I can tell, I'm the first to detail how exactly Pitfall! rendered its world, but I'm also kind of disappointed. If you haven't seen this GDC talk about preserving the history of games you absolutely should. Unlike many other disciplines the history of software is not being well preserved, even though it should be the easiest to preserve. We have the original source code for basically zero games for the Atari, NES, SNES, ColecoVision, you name it. Disassemblies are invaluable, don't get me wrong, but they're not the original. And they show nothing about the original comments."
Elegant Six-Page Proof Reveals the Emergence of Random Structure
The methods that would eventually lead to [Jinyoung Park and Huy Tuan Pham's] new proof of the Kahn-Kalai conjecture began with a breakthrough on a seemingly unrelated problem. In many ways, the story starts with the sunflower conjecture, a question posed by the mathematicians Paul Erdős and Richard Rado in 1960. The sunflower conjecture considers whether collections of sets can be constructed in ways that resemble the petals of a sunflower. 2500 words from Jordana Cepelewicz for Quanta Magazine.
Bugs in Hello World
Hello World might be the most frequently written computer program. For decades, it's been the first program many people write, when getting started in a new programming language.
Surely, this humble starting-point program should be bug free, right?
A 650-word blog post from sunfishcode via lobste.rs
Thoughts on writing a Minecraft server from scratch (in Bash)
For the past year or so, [sdomi had] been thinking about writing a Minecraft server in Bash as a thought excercise. 2600 words plus code plus images describing the effort.
Bryan Braun Keeps Making Things Out of Checkboxes
"Something happened earlier this year where [Bryan] got on a run making checkbox animations and just couldn’t stop." Frontend developer Bryan Braun writes 650 words with lots of pictures and animations and links.
USPS Begins Postal Banking Pilot Program
“Offering new products and services that are affordable, convenient and secure aligns with the Postal Service’s Delivering for America 10-year plan to achieve financial sustainability and service excellence,” said USPS spokesperson [Tatiana] Roy in a statement to the Prospect. “This pilot, which is in collaboration with the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), is an example of how the Postal Service is leveraging its vast retail footprint and resources to innovate.” Executive editor David Dayen writes 1800 words for The American Prospect.
One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia
Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.” 4100 words from Noam Cohen for Wired magazine.
What exactly was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
Shellcheck developer Vidar Holen asks and answers a question about arcane command-line syntax in about 1000 words.
The Panmnemonicon - History and Memory in the Age of the Search Engine
History and memory are two different things, but their interpenetration makes it hard to talk about the one without talking about the other. We ordinarily suppose that, on a stroll of the mind backwards into the past, memory leaves off, and history begins, where the self itself leaves off: you can’t remember stuff from before you were born, obviously, and so once you hit that absolute boundary, you have no choice but to rely on third-person documentary sources, and that’s what we call history. 3500 words from Justin E. H. Smith at Substack on search engines and memory and history and nostalgia. Via 3quarksdaily.
The Real Novelty of the ARPANET
In my view, the Network Working Group was able to get everything together in time and just generally excel at its task because it adopted an open and informal approach to standardization, as exemplified by the famous Request for Comments (RFC) series of documents. [...] That framing, and the availability of the documents themselves, made the protocol design process into a melting pot of contributions and riffs on other people’s contributions where the best ideas could emerge without anyone losing face. The RFC process was a smashing success and is still used to specify internet standards today, half a century later. 3800 words from Sinclair Target for Two-Bit History touching on ARPANET's protocols.
Transgression, An Elegy
But it’s a new era: the transgressed-upon of the world are speaking, and the world is listening. This changes many things, profoundly. It’s been a long time coming. As to whether injury will prove a wellspring of cultural vitality or a wellspring of platitudes and kitsch, that is what’s being negotiated at the moment. Long 6300-word essay by Laura Kipnis for a journal called Liberties, edited by Leon Wieseltier.
1915 film footage of Monet, Renoir, Rodin and Degas
"In this charming little artifact over a century old, Russian-born French actor, Sacha Guitry, employs newfangled technology, the motion picture camera, to capture some of France's great artists at the ends of their lives."
Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science
How has mathematics managed to escape this so far? I suppose it's because historians of math have always faced the fact that they won't be able to please everybody. Historians of other sciences have the delusion that any ordinary person can understand it, or at least they pretend so. A 2200-word edited transcript of a talk Donald E. Knuth gave in 2014 about historiography in computer science.
This guy tracked every single piece of clothing worn for three years
Have you ever wondered whether expensive clothes are worth their price? Or had that subtle feeling of guilt when buying something pricey, and then justifying it because you will wear it so many times, even if you have no clue if it’s actually true? If you thought yes, then this is for you. 4800 words from Olof Hoverfält at Reaktor.
Astropanel - Astronomy program for the terminal
This program will help you decide when to bring out your telescope. Command-line software by Geir Isene.
How old, ambient Japanese music became a smash hit on YouTube
Seven out of 50 video clusters the researchers identified are deemed "situational" music. This designation doesn't operate under the standard concept of genres but rather the context in which the music takes place. This includes relaxation music like "Ambient/Chillout," "Sounds of Nature," and the ASMR-affiliated "Hair Dryer Sound." The paper concludes that situational music, sometimes deemed trivial by musicologists, is growing in popularity. They also found a cluster of "Ethiopia/South Sudan Music," suggesting the context of a local scene comparable to '80s Japanese ambient music. 2800 words from Catherine Sinow on YouTubecore for Ars Technica.
Efficient text editing on a PDP-10
So I started to dig around in the SAILDART archives, and quickly found Donald Knuth’s TeX working directory, because this actually was the system TeX initially was developed on! Not only the early TeX78 can be found there (look for the TEX*.SAI files), but also the source code of TeX82, written in literate Pascal, which essentially still is the core of today’s TeX setups.
1400 words from Leah Neukirchen on some deep UNIX roots.
The Enduring, Pernicious Whiteness of True Crime
After all, as Walter Lowe told me, you can’t sell a product for which there is no audience. To have more books, features, and podcasts by and about nonwhite people, there must be a demand for them. (There is.) In order for there to be sufficient, recognized demand, he said, nonwhite victims must be seen as people. That part, maddeningly, is not a given. 4000 heavily linked words from Elon Green for The Appeal.
The holy founding text of The Church of the Next Word
Again, what follows are not my words, this is what GPT-3 said, prompted by Lantz. Or rather: this is the collective unconscious of humanity, put into words by the algorithm. 1000 words from Matt Webb.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of Declarative Programming
The blue circle's animation is quite complex. It consists of multiple stages. (1) The circle grows in size. (2) It continues to grow in size at a faster rate, as it shoots off to the right. (3) It pauses. (4) It moves to the middle. (5) It pauses again. (6) It shrinks to nothing.
Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In
What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire. A 1250-word email conversation between Halimah Marcus and Ted Chiang for Electric Literature.
A clock and calendar made of concentric rings
On subjective data, why datasets should expire, & data sabotage
A Dataset is a Worldview: a slightly expanded version of a talk given by Hannah Davis at the Library of Congress in September 2019.
How I made a 3D game in only 2KB of JavaScript
My entry, Hue Jumper, is an homage to 80’s racing game rendering technology. The 3D graphics and physics engine was implemented from scratch in pure JavaScript. I also spent ungodly hours tweaking the gameplay and visuals. Frank Force's 4400-word description (plus code!) for a driving game.
The Life of a Data Byte
This article is going to travel in time through various mediums of storage as an exercise of diving into how we have stored data through history. By no means will this include every single storage medium ever manufactured, sold, or distributed. This article is meant to be fun and informative while not being encyclopedic. Let’s get started. 34,128 characters (5800 words) from Jessie Frazelle, aka @jessfraz.
Old CSS, new CSS
"I’m here to tell all of you to get off my lawn. Here’s a history of CSS and web design, as I remember it." 14,000-plus words from eevee at fuzzy notepad.
a template for how to feel confident whenever I need to: do the work
The mathematician Arthur Ogus explained Alexandre Grothendieck’s approach to problem solving by saying, "If you don’t see that what you are working on is almost obvious, then you are not ready to work on that yet." I find this quote comforting because it suggests that good ideas—at least for one famous mathematician—do not come into the mind ex niliho. Rather, good ideas come from so deeply understanding a problem that the solution seems obvious. 2700 words from Gregory Gundersen on the benefits of keeping a research blog.
ChessRoots
More than eight hundred million chess games at ChessRoots.com depict opening moves and their responses in visual graphs.
Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math
In a way, it’s not surprising that a new insight into centuries-old mathematical objects came from physicists. Nature has inspired mathematical thinking ever since humans started counting on 10 fingers. “For math to thrive, it has to connect to nature,” Vu said. “There is no other way.” Natalie Wolchover writes 2000 words for Quanta Magazine.
“Numderline.”
I could have made specific solutions for each, but I thought “How could I solve this in the most general way possible?” and an idea came to me: I could make a font that uses fancy font shaping features to insert commas in all numbers, everywhere. 2000 words from Tristan Hume for Jane Street.
80×25
“Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I have been able to push this, but let’s get started. MeFi's own mhoye dives 2500 words deep into the history of terminal aspect ratios.
Data on clay
"If you're interested in cuneiform writing, you'll be pleased to hear that the major cuneiform symbol groups have been assigned blocks in Unicode," says Robert Mesibov, a data auditor and retired zoologist in West Ulverstone, Tasmania, Australia. "There are also online resources for everyday computer users who want to learn more about cuneiform and the cuneiform-using cultures. The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC) project not only welcomes new participants, but is also strong on FOSS and open data."
progress of the field of software engineering between 2004 and 2016
Nowadays, professionally, I am extremely conscious of this sort of style choice or convention, trying hard to ensure it's consistent across the team, organization, or better yet with the rest of the broader community. At the time, though, I was programming basically alone, and idiosyncrasies, like this mistaken naming convention, could persist for years. 3500 words from Li Haoyi, "a software engineer, an early contributor to Scala.js, and the author of many open-source Scala tools such as the Ammonite REPL and FastParse," describing a 300-line version of Asteroids he wrote when he was fourteen.
A bad workday's lessons on building Stack Overflow’s community
The monster in this case is not one person, it was created when lots of people, even with great intentions, publicly disagreed with you at the same time. Even kind feedback can come off as caustic and mean when there is a mob of people behind it. No matter how nicely they say it, when a large group of people you really respect publicly challenge something you’ve done it can feel like a personal attack. 1600 words from Sara Chipps at Stack Overflow.
The English Word That Hasn't Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years
The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. 1250 words from Sevindj Nurkiyazova for Nautilus.
The Other Wolf of Wall Street
“Of course, what I found is every time I uncovered the corruption, I was just getting higher and higher. The reason why nothing was being done about any of these appalling actions was because the corruption went right to the top.” Zaron Burnett III writes 6400 (somewhat rambling) words for MEL Magazine, mostly about Jho Low.