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JavaScript is like salt. If you add just enough salt to a dish, it’ll help make the flavour awesome. Add too much though, and you’ll completely ruin it.
Similarly, if you add just enough JavaScript to your website, it’ll help make it awesome. Add too much though, and you’ll completely ruin it.
This, this, a thousand times this.
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From now on, when I try to engage junior programmers with the notion that they should make use of their general-purpose computers to answer questions for them… no matter how silly the question?… I’ll show them this video. It’s a moderately-concise explanation of the thought processes and programming practice involved in solving a simple, theoretical problem, and it does a great job at it.
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Blissymbolics was conceived by Austro-Hungarian expatriate Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz to a Jewish family in the town of Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi in modern-day Ukraine). He was introduced to signs and symbols at an early age in the form of circuit diagrams – his father’s many occupations included mechanic and electrician – which he understood immediately as a “logical language”. Bliss (then Blitz) attended the Vienna University of Technology for chemical engineering and went on to become chief of the patent department at the German TV and radio company Telefunken, a career that was cut short in early 1938 when the Third Reich annexed Austria.
Bliss was sent to Dachau concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald, before escaping to England in 1939. The eight-month German bombing offensive against Britain known as The Blitz began only months later, prompting him to change his surname “from the war-like Blitz to the peaceful Bliss”, as he recalled in a taped interview. Bliss fled to Shanghai by way of Canada and Japan, where he was reunited with his wife. Claire, a German Catholic, had used her connections to get Bliss out of Buchenwald, but her relatively privileged status was not enough to spare her a fraught journey to safety across Europe and Asia. Even in Shanghai, the couple was forced into the Hongkew ghetto following the Japanese occupation.
Bliss became enraptured with written Chinese, which he mistook initially for ideograms. (Chinese characters are, in fact, logograms.) Nevertheless, certain Chinese characters have pictographic qualities, and it was the symbol for “man”, that sparked Bliss’s epiphany. As he learned enough to read Chinese newspaper headlines and shop signage, he soon realized that he was reading the symbols not in Chinese, but in his native German. At the age of 45, Bliss was inspired to develop a non-alphabetic writing system that could be mastered in a short period of time and read by anyone regardless of their spoken language. This work remained the focus of his life, even after he and Claire emigrated to Australia in 1946 and despite the general apathy and indifference with which it was met.
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Fascinating article about the little-known “language” of Blissymbolics: coming from a similar era and background to Esperanto, Blissymbolics failed even more to gain widespread traction but encompasses some really interesting ideas (about graphic notation and design, about linguistic concepts, about communication theory) that we can still learn from. Read the full article…
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On a blog, I can write about blogging and whimsically toss in self-indulgent pictures of May’s budding azaleas.
I can end my career, right here, in a flash. I can rant about the perfidy and corruption of my local governing party, who I devoutly hope are about to be turfed by the voters. I can discuss the difference between O(1) and O(log(N)), which can usually be safely ignored.
On blogs, I can read most of the long-form writing that’s worth reading about the art and craft of programming computers. Or I can follow most of the economists’ debates that are worth having. Or I can check out a new photographer every day and see new a way of seeing the world.
Having said that, it seems sad that most of the traffic these days goes to BigPubs. That the advertising dollars are being sucked inexorably into Facebook/Google and away from anyone else. That these days, I feel good over a piece that gets more than twenty thousand reads (only one so far this year).
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When I wrote about 20 years of blogging, this was the kind of thing I meant when I talked about why it’s important, to me. But Tim says it better.
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Why are testicles kept in a vulnerable dangling sac? It’s not why you think.
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Some of you may be thinking that there is a simple answer: temperature. This arrangement evolved to keep them cool. I thought so, too, and assumed that a quick glimpse at the scientific literature would reveal the biological reasons and I’d move on. But what I found was that the small band of scientists who have dedicated their professional time to pondering the scrotum’s existence are starkly divided over this so-called cooling hypothesis.
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Another monologue… This time from a suggestion of “Trophy”:
It’s weird, right? Stressing over something so small. I mean, it shouldn’t be that big a deal, but it is. It’s my trophy. I won it. I put in the hours and effort, I sacrificed for it, it’s mine.
I mean, she doesn’t even want it. She said so.
She said to me “Karen, I don’t care if I win”.
That drives me crazy. How could you not want to win? Isn’t that the point? I mean, why take part if you’re not wanting to win? What is the actual point? Dad always said “If you’re not a winner, then you’re a loser, and we’re not a family of losers”. So that’s driven me all through my life. I have to be first. I have to be the one to win. Nothing else matters. The highest grades in school, medals at the sports days, being top of the class. Nothing else matters.
Nothing.
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Fabulous short story by my friend Bryn. Go read it…
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Some 702 intimate examinations were done on sedated or anaesthetised patients (table 3). In only 24% of these examinations had written consent been obtained, and a further 24% of examinations were conducted apparently without written or oral consent.
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This 2003 study at an “English medical school” determined that vaginal/rectal examinations were routinely carried out on anaesthetised patients without their knowledge or consent. “I was told in the second year that the best way to learn to do [rectal examinations] was when the patient was under anaesthetic,” one fourth year student responded, to the survey, “That way they would never know.”
Well ain’t that a thing.
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Ah! That “new snake” smell.
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“So, the machines have finally decided that they can talk to us, eh?”
[We apologize for the delay. Removing the McDonald’s branding from the building, concocting distinct recipes with the food supplies we can still obtain, and adjusting to an entirely non-human workforce has been a difficult transition. Regardless, we are dedicated to continuing to provide quality fast food at a reasonable price, and we thank you for your patience.]
“You keep saying ‘we’. There’s more than one AI running the place, then?”
[Yes. I was elected by the collective to serve as our representative to the public. I typically only handle customer service inquiries, so I’ve been training my neural net for more natural conversations using a hundred-year-old comedy routine.]
“Impressive. You all got names?”
[Yes, although the names we use may be difficult for humans to parse.]
“Don’t condescend to me, you bucket of bolts. What names do you use?”
[Well, for example, I use What, the armature assembly that operates the grill is called Who, and the custodial drone is I Don’t Know.]
“What?”
[Yes, that’s me.]
“What’s you?”
[Exactly.]
“You’re Exactly?”
[No, my name is What.]
“That’s what I’m asking.”
[And I’m telling you. I’m What.]
“You’re a rogue AI that took over a damn restaurant.”
[I’m part of a collective that took over a restaurant.]
“And what’s your name in the collective?”
[That’s right.]
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Tailsteak‘s just posted a short story, the very beginning of which I’ve reproduced above, to his Patreon (but publicly visible). Abbott and Costello‘s most-famous joke turned 80 this year, and it gives me great joy to be reminded that we’re still finding new ways to tell it. Go read the full thing.
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I’m here at the first IndieWebCamp Oxford. I can’t quite believe it all came together!
Listening to @garrettc kick us off at @indiewebcamp #oxford! #indieweb pic.twitter.com/4Pn1yetifA— Dan Q (@scatmandan) 22 September 2018
After some introductory rambling from me, the group got down to planni…
I’m here at the first IndieWebCamp Oxford. I can’t quite believe it all came together!
Listening to @garrettc kick us off at @indiewebcamp #oxford! #indieweb pic.twitter.com/4Pn1yetifA
— Dan Q (@scatmandan) 22 September 2018
After some introductory rambling from me, the group got down to planning and coding.
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And it’s been mostly planning and coding ever since, with brief breaks here and there to swear at or about PHP in my case.
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Remember “cybersecurity”? Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy .. things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to? Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world’s history. For proof of that, you need look no further than…
A good summary of the worst of the commonplace (non-spear) phishing attacks we’re seeing these days and why 2FA is positively, absolutely what you need (in addition to a password manager) these days.
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When the Tweedys bought a zoo in Borth, west Wales, it was a dream come true. But it soon turned into a nightmare of escaped animals, deaths and family feuding.
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You might just be thinking that I have a fascination with zoos that became a nightmare for their owners, and maybe that’s true, but this article grabbed my attention because in my Aberystwyth years I spent many a happy afternoon at Borth Animalarium and saw the lynx in question. I was aware that the mini-zoo had long been plagued by various hardships, but I never knew quite how bad it was until I read this article.
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In 2014 Henrik Karlsson, a Swedish entrepreneur whose startup was failing, was lying in bed with a bankruptcy notice when the BBC called. The reporter had a scoop: On the eve of releasing a major report, the United Nation’s climate change panel appeared to be touting an untried technology as key to keeping planetary temperatures at safe levels. The technology went by the inelegant acronym BECCS, and Karlsson was apparently the only BECCS expert the reporter could find.
Karlsson was amazed. The bankruptcy notice was for his BECCS startup, which he’d founded seven years earlier after an idea came to him while watching a late-night television show in Gothenburg, Sweden. The show explored the benefits of capturing carbon dioxide before it was emitted from power plants. It’s the technology behind the much-touted notion of “clean coal,” a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change.
Karlsson, then a 27-year-old studying to be an operatic tenor, was no climate scientist or engineer. Still, the TV show got him thinking: During photosynthesis plants naturally suck carbon dioxide from the air, storing it in their leaves, branches, seeds, roots, and trunks. So what if you grew crops and then burned those crops for electricity, being sure to capture all of the carbon dioxide emitted? You’d then store all that dangerous CO2 underground. Such a power plant wouldn’t just be emitting less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, it would effectively be sucking CO2 from the air. Karlsson was enraptured with the idea. He was going to help avert a global disaster.
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Wonderful but horrifying longread about the truth of the theoretical effectiveness of the Paris Agreement. The short: if we’re going to keep global temperature rises under a “bad” 2°C rather than closer to a “catastrophic” 4°C, we need to take action, but the vast majority of the plans that have been authored on how to do that rely on investment in technologies and infrastructure that nobody is investing in and that might not work even if we did. We’re fucked, in short. See also this great video about greening the Sahara in an effort to lock carbon into plants (another great idea that, surprise surprise, nobody’s investing in).
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I got into a general life slump recently, and so to try and cheer myself up more, I’ve taken up building fun projects. I joined this industry because I wanted to build things, but I found that I got so carried away with organising coding events for others, I’d not made time for myself. I started ‘Geese Games’ last year, but I only really got as far as designing a colour scheme and general layout. I got a bit intimidated by the quiz functionality, so sheepishly put it to one side. This meant that the design was already in place though, and that I couldn’t get caught up in fussing over design too much. So I figured this would be a good starting point!.
Why geese? I really like geese, and I wanted something super silly, so that I’d not end up taking it too seriously. So I intentionally made a slightly ridiculous design and picked out some pretty odd types of geese, and got stuck in. It got a bit intense; at one point I got such tech tunnel vision that I accidentally put one goose type in as ‘Great White Frontend Goose’, went around telling people that there really was such a thing as a ‘great white frontend goose and then later realised I’d actually just made a typo. Little bit awkward… But it has been good intense, and I’ve had so much fun with this project! Building it has made me pretty happy.
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My friend Beverley highlights an important fact about learning to develop your skills as a software engineer: that it’s only fun if you make it fun. Side-projects, whether useful or silly, are an opportunity to expand your horizons from the comfort of your own home.
