First, bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever… too complex for a bee to solve on its own. So scientists trained some bees by offering separate rewards for the
first and second steps.
These trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle, and the reward for the first step was removed.
Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees, without ever receiving a reward for the first step.
…
This news story is great for two reasons.
Firstly, it’s a really interesting experimental result. Just when you think humankind’s learned everything they ever will about the humble bumblebee (humblebee?), there’s something more
to discover.
That a bee can be trained to solve a complex puzzle by teaching it to solve each step independently and then later combining the steps isn’t surprising. But that these trained bees can
pass on their knowledge to their peers (bee-ers?); who can then, one assumes, pass it on to yet other bees. Social learning.
Which, logically, means that a bee that learns to solve the two-lever puzzle second-hand would have a chance of solving an even more-complex three-lever puzzle; assuming such a thing is
within the limits of the species’ problem-solving competence (I don’t know for sure whether they can do this, but I’m a firm bee-lever).
But the second reason I love this story is that it’s a great metaphor in itself for scientific progress. The two-lever problem is, to an untrained bee, unsolvable. But
if it gets a low-effort boost (a free-bee, as it were) by learning from those that came before it, it can make a new discovery.
(I suppose the secret third reason the news story had me buzzing was that I appreciated the opportunities for puns that it presented. But you already knew that I larva pun, right?)
I used to have a single minor niggle with the BBC News RSS feed: that it included sports news, which I didn’t care
about. So I wrote a script that downloaded it, stripped
sports news, and re-exported the feed for me to subscribe to. Magic.
Lately my BBC News feed has caused me some annoyance and frustration.
But lately – presumably as a result of technical changes at the Beeb’s side – this feed has found two fresh ways to annoy me:
The feed now re-publishes a story if it gets re-promoted to the front page… but with a different<guid> (it appears to get a #0 after it
when first published, a #1 the second time, and so on). In a typical day the feed reader might scoop up new stories about once an hour, any by the time I get to reading them the
same exact story might appear in my reader multiple times. Ugh.
They’ve started adding iPlayer and BBC Sounds content to the BBC News feed. I don’t follow BBC News in my feed reader because I want to watch or listen to things. If
you do, that’s fine, but I don’t, and I’d rather filter this content out.
Luckily, I already have a recipe for improving this feed, thanks to my prior work. Let’s look at my newly-revised script (also available on GitHub):
#!/usr/bin/env rubyrequire'bundler/inline'# # Sample crontab:# # At 41 minutes past each hour, run the script and log the results# */20 * * * * ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.rb > ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.log 2>>&1# Dependencies:# * open-uri - load remote URL content easily# * nokogiri - parse/filter XML
gemfile do
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'nokogiri'endrequire'open-uri'# Regular expression describing the GUIDs to reject from the resulting RSS feed# We want to drop everything from the "sport" section of the website, also any iPlayer/Sounds linksREJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING=/^https:\/\/www\.bbc\.co\.uk\/(sport|iplayer|sounds)\//# Load and filter the original RSS
rss =Nokogiri::XML(open('https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=uk'))
rss.css('item').select{|item| item.css('guid').text =~REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING }.each(&:unlink)
# Strip the anchors off the <guid>s: BBC News "republishes" stories by using guids with #0, #1, #2 etc, which results in duplicates in feed readers
rss.css('guid').each{|g|g.content=g.content.gsub(/#.*$/,'')}
File.open( '/www/bbc-news-no-sport.xml', 'w' ){ |f| f.puts(rss.to_s) }
It’s amazing what you can do with Nokogiri and a half dozen lines of Ruby.
That revised script removes from the feed anything whose <guid> suggests it’s sports news or from BBC Sounds or iPlayer, and also strips any “anchor” part of the
<guid> before re-exporting the feed. Much better. (Strictly speaking, this can result in a technically-invalid feed by introducing duplicates, but your feed reader
oughta be smart enough to compensate for and ignore that: mine certainly is!)
You’re free to take and adapt the script to your own needs, or – if you don’t mind being tied to my opinions about what should be in BBC News’ RSS feed – just subscribe to my copy at: https://fox.q-t-a.uk/bbc-news-no-sport.xml
A devastating blow by RSS against a competitor 19 years his junior! For updates on this bout as it develops, don’t forget to subscribe… using either protocol.
When I subscribe to content, I want:
Resilient failsafes. ActivityPub has many points-of-failure. A notification might fail to complete transmission as a result of downtime, faults, or network
conditions, and the receiving server might never know. A feed reader, conversely, can tell you that an address 404’d or the server was down.
Retroactive access. Once you fix the problem above… you still don’t get the message you missed: it’s probably gone forever – there’s no retroactive access. The same
is true when your ActivityPub server connects with a peer for the first time: you only ever get new content after that point. RSS, on the other hand, provides some number of “recent” items the moment you first subscribe.
Simple subscriptions. RSS can be served from a statically-hosted single file, which makes it suitable to
deploy anywhere as well as consume using anything. It can be read, after a fashion, in anything from Lynx upwards.
RSS ticks all these boxes. If I can choose between RSS and
ActivityPub to subscribe to your content, and I don’t need a real-time update, I’m probably going to choose RSS.
Obviously I appreciate that RSS and ActivityPub are different tools for different jobs, and there are doubtless
use-cases for which ActivityPub is clearly the superior solution.
I certainly don’t object to services providing both RSS and ActivityPub as syndication options, like
Mastodon does, where both might be good choices.
This week, Parry Gripp and Nathan Mazur released Young Squirrel Talking About Himself.
You might recognise the tune (and most of the words) from an earlier Parry Gripp song. The original video for the older
version is no longer available on his channel, and that’s probably for the best, but I was really pleased to see the song resurrected in this new form because it’s fabulous. I’ve been
singing it all day.
For World Book Day (which here in the UK is marked a month earlier than the rest of the world) the kids’ school invited people to come
“dressed as a word”.
As usual, the kids and teachers participated along with only around two other adults. But of course I was one of them.
If you enjoy a bit of “cable gore”, let me introduce you to the fusebox cupboard at my house, with its plethora of junctions, fuses, breakers, switches, timers, and cabling everywhere!
Banana for scale.
Has anyone informed work/colleagues about being ENM and how was it received?
I’ve informed a few colleagues but I am considering informing my team as part of my Team Champion and EDI role.
…
I’ve been “out” at every one of the employers1 since I entered into my first open/nonmonogamous
relationship a couple of decades ago.
I didn’t do so immediately: in fact, I waited almost until the point that coming out was an academic necessity! The point at which it was only a matter of time before somebody thought they’d
caught us “cheating”… or else because I didn’t want to have to lie to coworkers about e.g. from whom a romantic gift might have
come.
I guess I’ll squeeze in “come out to colleagues” in between the project planning meeting and working on rolling out the server upgrades.
Here’s how it went to be “out” at each of the three full-time jobs I’ve held over that period:
We lived and worked in and around a small town, and in our small tight-knit team we all had a reasonable handle on what was going on in one another’s personal lives. By the time I was
actively in a relationship with Ruth (while still in a relationship with Claire, whom all my coworkers had met at e.g. office parties and the
like), it just seemed prudent to mention it, as well as being honest and transparent.
This photograph – featuring some of my coworkers – was taken in 2005. At that point, they probably all thought of me as a regular, normal person. At least, as far as my relationship
structure was concerned. Not in any other way. Obviously.
It went fine. And it made Monday watercooler conversations about “who what I did at the weekend” simpler. Being a small team sharing a single open-plan office meant that I
was able to mention my relationship status to literally the entire company at once, and everybody took it with a shrug of noncommittal acceptance.
The Bodleian Libraries was a much bigger beast, and in turn a part of the massive University of Oxford. It was big enough to have a “LGBT+ Staff”
network within its Equality and Diversity unit, within which – because of cultural intersections2
– I was able to meet a handful of other poly folk at the University.
This motley crew were exactly as warm and accepting a bunch as you could ask for.
I mentioned very early on – as soon as it came up organically – the structure of the relationship I was in, and everybody was cool (or failing that, at least professional) about it.
Curious coworkers asked carefully-crafted questions, and before long (and following my lead) my curious lifestyle choices were as valid a topic for light-hearted jokes as anything else
in that fun and gossipy office.
And again: it paid-off pragmatically, especially when I took parental leave after the birth of each of our two kids3.
It also helped defuse a situation when I was spotted by a more-distant coworker on my way back from a lunchtime date with a lover who wasn’t Ruth, and my confused colleague
introduced herself to the woman that she assumed must’ve been the partner she’d heard about. When I explained that no, this is a different person I’m seeing my
colleague seemed taken aback, and I was glad to be able to call on a passing coworker who knew me better to back me up in my assertion that no, this wasn’t just me trying to lie to
cover some illicit work affair! Work allies are useful.
I’ve been with Automattic for four and a half years now, and this time around I went one step further in telling potential teammates about my relationship structure by mentioning it in
my “Howdymattic” video – a video introduction new starters are encouraged to record to say hi to the rest of the company4.
Some full-on MSPaint grade titling made it into that video, didn’t it?
A convenient side-effect of this early coming-out was that I found myself immediately inducted into the “polymatticians” group – a minor diversity group within Automattic, comprising a
massive 1.2% of the company, who openly identify as engaging in nonmonogamous relationships5!
That was eye-opening. Not only does Automattic have a stack of the regular inclusivity groups you might expect from a big tech company (queer, Black, women, trans,
neurodiverse) and a handful of the less-common ones (over-40s, cancer survivors, nondrinkers, veterans), they’ve also got a private group for those of us who happen to be both
Automatticians and in (or inclined towards) polyamorous relationships. Mind blown.
My relationship structure’s been… quietly and professionally accepted. It doesn’t really come up (why would it? in a distributed company it has even less-impact on anything than it did
in my previous non-distributed roles)… outside of the “polymatticians” private space.
In summary: I can recommend being “out” at work. So long as you’d feel professionally safe to do so: relationship structure isn’t necessarily a protected characteristic
(it’s complicated), and even if it were you might be careful about mentioning it in some environments. It’s great to have the transparency to not have to watch your words when a
coworker asks about “your partner”. Plus being free to be emotionally honest at work is just good for your mental wellbeing, in my opinion! If you trust your coworkers, be honest with
them. If you don’t… perhaps you need to start looking for a better job?
Footnotes
1 I’m not counting my freelance work during any of those periods, although I’ve been
pretty transparent with them too.
2 Let’s be clear: most queer folks, just like most straight folks, seem to be
similarly-inclined towards monogamy. But ethnical non-monogamy in various forms seems to represent a larger minority within queer communities than outside them. There’s all kinds of
possible reasons for this, and smarter people than me have written about them, but personally I’m of the opinion that, for many, it stems from the fact that by the time you’re
societally-forced to critically examine your relationships, you might as well go the extra mile and decide whether your relationship structure is right for you too. In other
words: I suspect that cis hetro folks would probably have a proportional parity of polyamory if they weren’t saturated with media and cultural role models that show them what their
relationship “should” look like.
3 Unwilling to lie, I made absolutely clear that I was neither the father of either of
them nor the husband of their mother (among other reasons, the law prohibits Ruth from marrying me on account of being married to JTA), but pointed out that my contract merely stipulated that I was the partner of a birth parent, which was something I’d made completely
clear since I first started working there. I’m not sure if I was just rubber-stamped through the University’s leave process as a matter of course or if they took a deeper look at me
and figured “yeah, we’re not going to risk picking a legal fight with that guy”, but I got my leave granted.
4 If you enjoyed my “Howdymattic”, you’ll probably also love the outtakes.
I use a tool called Sonarr to, uhh1, keep track of when new episodes of television
shows are released, regardless of what platform they’re on (Netflix, Prime, iPlayer, whatever) and notify me so I remember to watch it.
For several years, I’ve used IFTTT as the intermediary, receiving webhooks from Sonarr and
translating them for Slack:
This worked for years, but it’s time to retire it.
IFTTT‘s move to kill its Legacy Pro plan2 – which
I was on – gave me reason to re-assess this configuration. It turns that the only Pro feature I was using was an IFTTT “filter” to convert the Sonarr webhooks to a
Slack-friendly-format.
Given that I’m running an installation of Huginn on my home network anyway, I resolved to re-implement this flow in Huginn and
cancel my IFTTT subscription.
Raven-powered automation is the new hotness.
This turned out to be so easy I wonder why I never did it before.
First, I created a Webhook Agent and gave the URL to Sonarr.
Then I connected that to a Slack Agent with the following configuration:
I’ve omitted my Slack webhook URL so you don’t spam me. I tried for far too long to get the pluralize filter to
work so it’d say “episode” or “episodes” as appropriate before realising I didn’t care enough and gave up.
Then all I needed to do was re-emit some of the previous webhooks to test it:
As a bonus, I swapped out the IFTTT logo for Slackmoji’s :tv: icon and added the “Sonarr” username, as shown in my code sample.
Now I’ll continue to know when there’s new television to watch3!
I love the power and flexibility that Huginn provides to help automate your life. It does many of the things that I used to do with a handful of cron jobs and shell scripts, but all in
one convenient place.
Footnotes
1 I’ve heard there are other uses for the tool. Your mileage may vary. Don’t forget to pay
for your content, if possible.
3 It’s especially useful when you’re between seasons or a show is on hiatus to be reminded
that it’s back and I should go and watch it. Hey, there’s a thought: I wonder if I can extract the subtitles from shows and run them through a summarising LLM to give me a couple of paragraphs reminding me “what happened last series” if the show’s been on a long break?
During a family holiday last week to the Three Valleys region of the French Alps for some skiing1, I
came to see that I enjoy a privilege I call the freedom of the mountain.
“Mornin’. Let’s go skiing.”
The Freedom
The freedom of the mountain is a privilege that comes from having the level of experience necessary to take on virtually any run a resort has to offer. It provides a handful of
benefits denied to less-confident skiers:
I usually don’t feed to look at a map to plan my next route; whichever way I go will be fine!
When I reach one or more lifts, I can choose which to take based on the length of their queue, rather than considering their destinations.
When faced with a choice of pistes (or an off-piste route), my choice can be based on my mood, how crowded they are, etc., rather than their rated difficulty.
Let’s tear this up, yo.
The downside is that I’m less well-equipped to consider the needs of others! Out skiing with Ruth one morning I suggested a route back into town that “felt easy” based on my previous
runs, only to have her tell me that – according to the map – it probably wasn’t!
Approaching the Peak
The kids spent the week in lessons. It’s paying off: they’re both improving fast, and the eldest has got all the essentials down and it’s working on improving her parallel turns and on
“reading the mountain”. It’s absolutely possible that the eldest, and perhaps both of them, will be a better skier than me someday2.
I’m not perfect, mind. While skiing backwards and filming, I misjudged the height of an arch and hit the back of the head with it… despite the child shouting to warn me! 😅
Maybe, as part of my effort to do what I’m bad at, I should have another go at learning to
snowboard. I always found snowboarding frustrating because everything I needed to re-learn was something that I could already do much better and easier on skis. But perhaps if I can
reframe that frustration through the lens of learning itself as the destination, I might be in a better place. One to consider for next time I hit the piste.
My very first “ski-o-cache” was 9 years ago, down in La Tania: this was my second! Found the host easily at the
coordinates and found the cache in the third hiding place I tried. It’s quite stiff and hard to extract right now! Needed to wait to return it while some other skiers took pictures of
one another at the GZ, but got there in the end. Salutations d’Oxford, en Angleterre. MPLC!
I haven’t hashed for long enough that my home graticule got marked as inactive. I’ve got a little free time this morning, so let’s fix that!
Expedition
It took two attempts to reach this hashpoint.
The first attempt saw me set off around 09:40, with a plan to drive over the world’s
stupidest toll bridge (paying 5p for the privilege), park up in Cumnor somewhere, then work down the Cumnor-Appleton footpath before dipping into the fields (which are likely to be
fallow this time of year) to claim the hashpoint. I suggested to take the dog, and the 7-year-old child asked if he could join me too, so the three of us with our eight legs set off.
This winter’s seen heavy rain around these parts, and the stream that runs alongside the footpath had broken its banks and flooded the fields. The water had receded, but the ground
remained extremely boggy. That kind of thick, wellie-sucking mud that means that if you stop walking for more than a couple of seconds, you might as well give up and say you live there
now because your boot is never coming back.
The kid found the going especially-tough, especially after a particularly-deep puddle splashed over the edge of his wellies, and asked to turn back. The dog was finding it a bit
challenging too! So we doubled-back and found a geocache a little way off the
path. We’ve generally been disappointed by Cumnor’s geocaches and especially this series, finding them to be ill-maintained or completely absent, but it looks like the cache owner
has been working on repairing and replacing them towards the tail end of last year and this one was soon found. I drove the dog and child home (back across the toll bridge), then came
back out myself (paying the fivepence toll a third time). So began the second attempt:
Unburdened by short-legged dogs and damp-footed kids, I made better progress. At points, the path was completely flooded-out, but this gave me an excuse to walk along the “tramlines” of
the cultivator that must’ve been working in the field last year, which put me on a better course to reach the hashpoint. By 11:06 I was well within the circle of uncertainty and
declared the mission a success.
Then I plodged back through the mud, changed my footwear, and drove over the toll bridge a fourth time. The attendant, clearly sick of seeing me driving back and forth, took
pity on me and let me off without paying yet another 5p piece, so that was nice.
This “path” seems to be a stream.
Muddy boots
200 metres to go.
Zero point!
Silly grin
View North from the hashpoint.
View East from the hashpoint.
View South from the hashpoint.
View West from the hashpoint.
Found after trying a few different hosts while out on an expedition to try and reach the 2024-02-10 51 -1 geohashpoint with the 7-year-old and the dog. The path to the hashpoint is really waterlogged and the little
man said his wellies were leaking so we doubled back and retrieved this cache. Extracting the log was a bit of a challenge owing to tune container shape but we managed in the end.
TFTC.
