Forever misquoted, Donald Horne dies

"The Lucky Country" is to Australia what "Born in the USA" is the America.

"I was about to write the last chapter of a book on Australia," recalled Horne, who died yesterday, aged 83. "The opening sentence was, 'Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."'

History of CRPGs

Ongoing project. Via Bryn.

The Signal State on Steam

Nerdy video game recommended by Bryn

Hyenas Hoarded Thousands of Human, Animal Bones in Saudi Arabian Lava Tube | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

“It’s always just the skullcap that survives,” Stewart tells Gizmodo. “[Hyenas] seem to not really be interested in skull caps. We found maybe five or six skullcaps with gnaw marks on them at the site, but only the skullcaps. Nothing else.”

Urban Dictionary: Lucky Pierre

Just learned a 1960s era Tom Lehrer song (I got it from Agnes) contains a reference to slang for 3-way homosexual sex. It’s actually in the context of 3 way homosexual sex, so not too surprising, I guess, but I thought he’d made it up.

Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch

Massive (30x and beyond) sound stretching, written by my colleague at Owlstone.

Nginx: Everything about proxy_pass - DEV Community

Terrible hacks to get nginx not to panic if its upstream isn't resolvable.

RevK®'s ramblings: How not to QR (NHS COVID-19 App)

Fun rant about the NHS Track and Trace QR code.

Home | g Heavy Industries

Keyboards and more via bryn / programming pittance

112 Gripes about the French

Surprisingly level-headed WW2 pamphlet for American soldiers. Via HN.

Kim Lim | Tate

Really like these abstract and geometric woodblock prints.

Franz West: Paßstück, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, March 18–April 26, 2008 | Gagosian

In the early 1970s Franz West began making small-scale assemblages incorporating found materials such as cardboard, bandages, and wire, which he then covered with a coat of plaster and white paint. He called these sculptures Paßstück. West maintained that the viewer must engage with, handle, the sculptures in order to fully experience their "ergonomic" nature. Subsequently Paßstück has been translated as "adaptive" but this does not fully capture its original source as a technical term meaning "parts that fit into each other."

Rummikub - Wikipedia

Rummikub is a tile-based game for 2 to 4 players, combining elements of the card game rummy and mahjong.

PI - Emergence@ASU

Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and how to find life on other worlds. While there are many things to be solved, she is most interested in whether or not there are ‘laws of life’ - related to how information structures the physical world - that could universally describe life here on Earth and on other planets.

Alexander piano- the longest piano in the world

Extra-long piano means that the bass strings can be thinner and looser, meaning they are less "inharmonic" (I think this means the harmonics are not unpleasant) and sound less muddy (especially in chords) than a regular piano. (HN)

Sublimation (psychology) - Wikipedia

Sexual sublimation is the transformation of sexual impulses into creative energy.

I wonder if this is what Orwell had in mind in Nineteen Eighty-Four when he talked about about transformation of sexual impulses into love for the Party. (K)

Solid state drive - SSD MacBookPro 15-inch Retina Mid 2015 | SSD for MacBookPro11,4 Mid 2015 Retina |

god fucking dammit

How Izumi Suzuki Broke Science Fiction’s Boys’ Club - ArtReview

‘There is something wrong with our present society, and I can’t stand SF written by people who don’t understand that,’ she once wrote

How to Caramelize Onions

The key is that most recipes actually just want you to brown or soften the onions, which takes far less time and has a different flavour profile.

Evan Doorbell's Telephone Tapes by Telephone World

It's like a long and very nerdy podcast series about the telephone system in the (60s and?) 70s in the USA.

How T. S. Eliot Became T. S. Eliot | The New Yorker

(hn)

Mirepoix - Wikipedia

Usually the vegetable mixture is onions, carrots, and celery

"Ikuzo": A Bit More Than Just ‘Let's Go’

Way more than you could ever want to know about 行くぞ

Dasein - Wikipedia

Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself.

The Dhall configuration language

A functional configuration language

GitHub - rdicosmo/parmap: Parmap is a minimalistic library allowing to exploit multicore architecture for OCaml programs with minimal modifications.

OCaml map/reduce/map-reduce library looking basically the same as Python's multiprocessing.

UNBEATABLE [white label] on Steam

Rhythm game.

How to get useful backtraces? - Learning - OCaml

ocaml backtrace hints

Growing Neural Cellular Automata

“Differentiable morphogenesis” (via g)

Some Thoughts on the Common Toad | The Orwell Foundation

Three.js Lights

Very good super quick intro to three.js lights. I like the fact that it introduces all the helpers -- the hardest part for me is working out where to put things in 3d space.

What I wish I knew when learning OCaml — Daniil Baturin

Cool, knew most of this! Most. I have so far skipped over all the OO aspects, but aside from those OCaml seems like a satisfyingly simple language.

A lot of Python's complexity seems to come from its not supporting anonymous closures. List comprehensions ([expr for expr in expr if expr]), generators ('yield') and context managers ('with') (off the top of my head) could all be replaced using anonymous functions without needing any extra syntax. The syntax makes Python more readable (assuming you're comfortable with it), but it does somewhat increase the cognitive load of writing code: rather than the lambda hammer, one has to decide which piece of specialised syntax to make use of for a particular requirement.

On the third hand, having your functional choices straight-jacketed and presented nicely is a good way of constraining code creativity, which is not altogether bad. For example, list comprehensions are very simple to understand for almost anyone in ways that passing a random block of code to Array.init is not. Being introduced to context managers through Python got me thinking about the whole concept of lifetime management in ways which might not have occurred to me if I hadn't had them presented to me so straightforwardly. In other words, Python's extra syntax is the result of several experts working out the best way to take a particular concept and make it broadly accessible while keeping the majority of its features.

ELIZAGEN - The Original ELIZA

Written in MAD-SLIP! (hn)

To Codon Optimize or Not: That is the Question

Choosing the most-efficiently-expressed codon from a set of synonyms can improve protein expression rate, but sometimes the stability of the protein depends on a less-efficient expression (for example, one that takes longer, which can sometimes affect the way in which the protein folds).

MQTT Explorer | An all-round MQTT client that provides a structured topic overview

Quentin's recommendation

GitHub - ocaml/ocaml-lsp: OCaml Language Server Protocol implementation

OCAML LSP. This worked easily with coc-nvim!

Using the __cleanup__ variable attribute in GCC — Amit Saha: Technical Writings

Destructor for stack-allocated objects.

Simulant Shop - Hardware, Computers, Software and Retro computing

Retrocomputer shop in the UK

Aeromechanics and Evolutionary Morphology | Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Brown University

nunununununununuBAT LAB

Speculation Control — The Linux Kernel documentation

>Quite some CPUs have speculation-related misfeatures which are in fact vulnerabilities causing data leaks in various forms even across privilege domains.

>The kernel provides mitigation for such vulnerabilities in various forms. Some of these mitigations are compile-time configurable and some can be supplied on the kernel command line.

>There is also a class of mitigations which are very expensive, but they can be restricted to a certain set of processes or tasks in controlled environments. The mechanism to control these mitigations is via prctl(2).

(hn)

What is it like to be boring and myopic?

Kathleen Akins' response to Nagel.

NNRG Publications

Ristu Miikkulainen's research group at U Texas

Evolution of neural networks | Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion

More generally, search re using statistical methods instead of random selection for evolution of GAs.

Autopoiesis - Wikipedia

The term autopoiesis refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts and eventually further components.

[1803.03453] The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities

Experience paper with various examples of unexpected solutions achieved through evolutionary algorithms.

Chūnibyō - Wikipedia

Chūnibyō (中二病) is a Japanese colloquial term typically used to describe early teens who had grandiose delusions, who desperately wants to stand out they convinced themselves with hidden knowledge or secret powers. It translates to "second year disease (in Japanese lower secondary school)"

AirGradient DIY

CO2 and PM2.5 DIY air quality monitor. (HN)

Laurence Tratt: Fast Enough VMs in Fast Enough Time

An extended talk about RPython. Via HN. To read.

About Us — Wildtype

":By growing seafood directly from cells, we now have the ability to cultivate genuine salmon and other seafood without relying on wild or farmed fish. "

But $200 for 6 pc of sashimi according to HN.

Aesthetic Measure — George David Birkhoff | Harvard University Press

This guy answered “What is Beauty?” back in the 1930s.