nikhil.io

four hundred and eighty-two posts

A Conservative Plan

By Amii James (Instagram). Context was the Tories but applies to our fine people stateside as well. Tory ministers saying “we owe it to children to keep schools open” might want to explain to me why they closed my youth centre, cut mental health services, underfunded my secondary school, stripped…

“I have to do this.”

I made a bet at work that involved me eating my Crocs (if I lost, of course), prompting my co-worker to send me this story about Eric Taylor, a “former Magic: The Gathering player and highly regarded Magic columnist, especially during the earlier days of the game” (MTG Wiki), who made a similarly ha…

On Winters

Taken completely out of context, for the letter itself is a lot of bro-y “locker room talk.” My mind is dried up, exhausted. I’m disgusted to be back in this damned country where you see the sun in the sky about as often as a diamond in a pig’s asshole. Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Ernest Chevalie…

Stop Words

In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text). Though “stop words” usually refers to the most common words in a language, there is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, and indeed…

THIS is America

Lord of our lives and sovereign of our beloved nation, we deplore the desecration of the United States Capitol building, the shedding of innocent blood, the loss of life, and the quagmire of dysfunction that threaten our democracy. These tragedies have reminded us that words matter and that the po…

This Is America

During the four years of the Civil War, the confederates never got closer to Washington than Fort Stevens. Until today, when insurrectionist supporters of @realDonaldTrump paraded through the U.S. Capitol Building carrying the Confederate battle flag. @JordanOnRecord The ultimate in White…

Scottish Sass

Asked about speculation that Mr Trump could travel to Scotland in order to avoid the inauguration, Ms Sturgeon said: "I have no idea what Donald Trump’s travel plans are, you’ll be glad to know. "I hope and expect that – as everybody expects, not everybody necessarily will hope – that th…

The Work of Ron Cobb

Ronald Ray Cobb was “an American-Australian cartoonist, artist, and film designer” who passed away in September last year. He worked on movies like “Back to the Future”, “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, and “Alien”. An ornithopter! But it’s perhaps his cartoons that are more enduring and eeriely relevant afte…

Ghost Structures

This is such a wonderful idea. Stand opposite the glass and you’d know what Kruševac Fortress in Serbia looked like in its heyday: Franklin Court in Pennsylvania is another example of how one could illustrate architectural history. Franklin Court was the site of the handsome brick home of Benjami…

A Cheat’s Hankerchief

This is a silk hankerchief from c.1860 used by one or more people to cheat1 on the Imperial Examinations. Via the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Here are a bunch of Art History Professors discussing this artifact and its history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85gAfiJGpVM They’d use all sorts of th…

Dorothy Counts

04 September, 1957 Dorothy Counts, the first and at the time only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (NC), is mocked by protestors on her first day of school. Bystanders threw rocks and screamed at Dorothy to go back to where she came from. The…

Guide to Book Conditions

Reproduced here via AbeBooks with this caveat: The definitions below are for reference only. Booksellers use these terms, as well as unique terms not included in this list, based on their own criteria. If you would like clarification on any term in a particular seller’s description, please contact…

You Don’t Need to be Exceptional

Michel de Montaigne: Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more r…

On Side-Projects

I stumbled upon a book called Refuse to Choose and it’s about a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD) that happens to want to do a lot of things (sometimes in parallel or in sequence). It was very comforting to know others struggle with this and this book helps you to be ok with it. I wou…

The Incredible Story of Arslan Ash

A fascinating peek into the (big, lucrative) world of competitive gaming and how an humble champion’s unorthodox, world-class skills developed in a vacuum in a country not known for its gaming scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-fZciAKvho&feature=youtu.be…

“Genre Defining” Trip Hop

From a Reddit thread on the subject. With as diverse of a sound as trip hop can have, I wanted to know what everyone here thought would be the one song they would pick if someone asked them “What’s trip hop?” User submissions: “Glory Box” by Portishead “Teardrop” by Massive Attack “Roads” by Port…

On Efficiency vs. Effectiveness

Science, technology, and economics focus on efficiency, but not effectiveness. The difference between efficiency and effectiveness is important to an understanding of transformational leadership. Efficiency is a measure of how well resources are used to achieve ends; it is value-free. Effectivenes…

On Fiction

It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer…

The Conservative Refrain

Starring Ted Cruz. It cannot be anyone else. /misc/w/why-am-i-persecuted.mp4 And there’s the 10-hour version (of course) for when a batshit-crazy, cultist conservative whinges about freedom and liberty and censorship and free markets and privatization and regulation and “corporations are people” and…

On Moochers

Many years ago interviewed an older gentleman as part of a study I was conducting. He said “Republicans are people who will withhold food from 100 people out fear that 1 might not need or deserve it. Democrats will feed 100 out of concern that 1 might really need it. @silvercoug With this foll…

On Imagination

The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange. G.K. Chesterton…

On Security Through Obscurity

Security by Obscurity is when you hide how a security measure works, not when you keep some part of it a secret. Daniel Miessler, “No, Moving Your SSH Port Isn’t Security by Obscurity” As a former sysadmin (but no expert on security): This should be read and re-read. After which one should take…

Robot Party

I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw…

Corpsing

Corpsing is British theatrical slang for unintentionally laughing during a non-humorous performance or when a role in a humorous performance is intended to be played “straight”. In North American TV and film, this is considered a variation of breaking character or simply “breaking”. Wikipedia He…

Supply-Side Jesus

Saith The Lord to Socialist Democrats: ha, nice try. healthcare is about consumer choice. get a job and enroll in a market-based plan. no peter i won’t help you that will only create dependency pick yourself up by your own sandal straps it’s called personal responsibility. i would love to give you…

Tampography

Using a Bloopy Thing to print on all sorts of materials is called “Pad Printing” or tampography. Here’s a Big Bloopy Thing printing a very beautiful pattern onto a bowl (and here’s two of them going at the same time.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I2fMf0xtCQ You can use the same technique on all…

“Where are the Turks?”

Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020. /misc/g/greatest-video-ever.mp4 He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview1 which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine): Q: How has the respo…

An 18,000-year Old Pupper

This is Dogor 🐾, an 18,000-year old puppy preserved in Siberian permafrost. His name means “friend.” He was discovered as a lump of frozen mud near Yakutsk and lies at a private museum. Dogor left the wilderness as a lump of soil and ice, but scientists could make out the head and paws of what th…

Idiots Out Walking Around - II

Informed Choice Iowa is a group that “unites Iowans seeking to preserve their medical freedoms.” They are “pro-science” folk that count “ex-vaxxers”, “selective vaxxers”, “non-vaxxers”, and “vaxxers” among their members. I’m guessing that this list doesn’t include a single practicing physician. And…

Sleeping Octopus

You could almost just narrate the body changes and narrate the dream. So here she’s asleep. She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is a camouflage like she’s just subdued a crab and now she’s going…

Naughty Letter Frequencies in English

Here’s a community-maintained "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" across various languages on Github. I was curious about a naïve frequency distribution of consonants across the English-language corpus (NSFW, obviously) and wrote a small script. Here are the results:…

Shrek The Elder (Maybe)

Known as “The French Angel”, the wrestler Maurice Tillet is rumored to have inspired the look of Shrek. He suffered from acromegaly caused by a benign tumor on his pituitary gland (which regulates the synthesis of Human Growth Hormone - Wikipedia). Here’s a color video of him chilling 🤗…

Ottoman Food

I found out I am to thank the Ottomans for a lot of my favorite things to eat and drink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGKrKJ1iKtg Baklava (which dates back two thousand years, to the Assyrian Empire) Coffee made the Right Way™ The modern kebab Shawarma Sherbet Dolma (stuffed food) and Sarma (wra…

On Serving Your Niche

“Nina Simone said this and I never forgot it. She said, ‘You will use up everything you got, trying to get everybody what they want.’ You got to focus man. You know what I do?! I super serve my niche.” Tyler Perry, as quoted by Jefferson Ridgeway, “What #BlackAF Taught Me About Serving My Niche”…

Disposable Software

The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 ye…

On ‘Finding Someone’

There’s so much more to life than finding someone who will want you, or being sad over someone who doesn’t. There’s a lot of wonderful time to be spent discovering yourself without hoping someone will fall in love with you along the way, and it doesn’t need to be painful or empty. You need to fill…

On Good Commit Messages

On the developer side, what I hope people are doing is trying to make, not just good code, but these days we’ve been very good about having explanations for the code. So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Sometimes the code change is so obvious that no message…

On Masks

Bill Burr on The Joe Rogan Experience: BURR: I don’t want to start this bullshit. I’m not gonna sit here with no medical degree, listening to you with no medical degree, with an American flag behind you smoking a cigar, acting like we know what’s up, better than the CDC. All I do, is I watch the ne…

Getting Naticked

Rex Parker: A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the “N” — I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK… is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs…

Always be leveraging

On tech culture’s obsession with quantifying and optimizing every single moment of one’s existence1: I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don’t…

That ’70s Typeface

Spent a few frustrated hours over the years trying to identify this typeface I’d see on restaurant menus, photocopied class handouts, movie titles (even Indian ones from the early 80s), and a lot of books. I now know what it is and am quite happy the mystery’s resolved. It’s Souvenir! Designed in 19…

The Official Response

WOOLEY. What if the Prime Minister insists we help them? SIR APPLEBY. Then we follow the four-stage strategy. WOOLEY. What’s that? SIR WHARTON. Standard Foreign Office response in a time of crisis. SIR WHARTON. In stage one we say nothing is going to happen. SIR APPLEBY. Stage two, we say something…

Gender Roles

Sofia Tolstoy, at 19, after the first of their thirteen children: I am left alone morning, afternoon and night. I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture. I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats th…

COVID-19 Map

Found this map when Googling “coronavirus india”. Looks like it’s maintained by the WHO and is pretty up-to-date. They have a daily update page. At the time of this writing, there are 110,029 confirmed cases, with 3,817 deaths in 105 countries. China, South Korea, Iran, France, and Germany account f…

Optotypes

Optician Sans is a free optotype 1 based on the Sloan letters2. I had no idea this was a thing. There’s a lot to learn here about the eye charts I see once a year. The earliest chart appears to go all the way back to 1862 (!) Those little "C"s are called Landolt C. The one most optometris…

The Song of Seikilos

This is the "the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world" and dates from “either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD.” It was found engraved on a tombstone and was “dedicated by Seikilos to Euterpe, who was possibly his wife.” (W…

The Unborn

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t…

Mondegreen

A mondegreen /ˈmɒndɪɡriːn/ is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that s…

On De-Duplication

I’ve usually heard this phenomenon called “incidental duplication”, and it’s something I find myself teaching junior engineers about quite often. There are a lot of situations where 3-5 lines of many methods follow basically the same pattern, and it can be aggravating to look at. “Don’t repeat you…

Nine Pints of The Law

by Lawson Wood (more work here.) I first saw this when I was about 10 and tried my first jigsaw puzzle with my little sister. We were quite mesmerized by the painting. We found the puzzle too difficult and lost the pieces. 26 years later, I found a complete puzzle on eBay and can’t wait to put it t…

Process and Tooling

I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make m…

Dank Typefaces

Was looking try something other than my beloved Operator Mono and came across Dank Mono which claims to be a “rather special coding font.” I love it. Looks like the cooler twin of Inconsolata. I remain quite tickled by how many of my co-workers find the italic variants of monospaced fonts ‘disturbin…

Richard Serra on Art

Q: Why make art? What do you find by doing it? What does it get you? Serra: I always wanted an alternative existence. And by that I mean I wanted to do something where I could study my own sentiments and experiences. And I found that I can do that in relation to making things and making art in part…

Home

So, here you are too foreign for home too foreign for here. Never enough for both. – Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada and Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease. – Naguib Mahfouz…

Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

One of my favorite things in the world. Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the rectangular image is 2.4 arcminutes to an edge, or 3.4 arcminutes diagonally. This is approximately one tenth of the angular diameter of a full moon viewed from Earth (which is le…

A Vickrey Auction

When you end up paying the price you bid (“first price”), you have a strong incentive to lie about how much you’re willing to pay. Suppose there’s an item for sale that you’d be happy paying up to $1,000 for if necessary, but of course you’d rather pay less. In a first-price auction, if you bid $1,…

Data, Data, Data

Linus Torvalds on git I’d also like to point out that unlike every single horror I’ve ever witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of designing your code around the dat…

Anurag Kashyap on The Struggle

Kashyap on his journey to become one of India’s most important filmmakers. The cover picture is clickbait. No “shocking” revelations. Just a good story about pursuing one’s chosen vocation with grit and perseverance (with a bit of luck along the way.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYeaVyc1Krc On “…

Netflix’s “Secret” Genre List

A list of sub-genres you cannot view easily on Netflix. From a Reddit thread on the subject: This is ridiculous. What kind of hubris does Netflix have to think that their recommendation engine is better than browsing by category? Browsing by category has been the standard for browsing things since…

Computers Are Fast

A nice little quiz meant to illustrate how much your typical Python and Bash code can accomplish in one second. If the answer is 38,000, both 10,000 and 100,000 are considered correct answers. The goal is to not be wrong by more than 10x :) and A newer computer won’t make your code run 1000x fast…

Why Hulls are Painted Red

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AdW030xQB4 TL;DW: This is “anti-fouling” that repels barnacles, algae, and mollusks by emitting “biocides”. This is desirable because they cause drag (think fuel) and structural damage. Red because traditionally some oxide of Copper. Also this: In nature bright colo…

Love, Knowledge, and Compassion

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching…

Two Levels of Not Giving a Fuck

No Code is the best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere. Start by not writing any code. Brilliant. I love both the presence and contents of the Dockerfile in that repo. As is always the case with such projects, the issues and pull requests are 💯 And if one…

Comedians and Comics

From an episode of My Next Guest with David Letterman: Letterman: First of all, let’s define terms. Comedian and comic: used interchangeably but mean two different things. Seinfeld: Kind of different, yeah. A comedian is a, to me, a full-fledged, not only a monologist, but someone who can really wo…

Baby Chromatophores

I cannot get over how maddeningly cute this is. Reddit user pendragwen’s comment makes it even better: Awww! But look at how they test out their chromatophores first thing after hatching! It’s speculated that color-changing is how they communicate and show emotion. Almost like a little joyful stret…

Simpler Gmail

Michael Leggett, lead designer of Gmail from 2008-2012 “It’s like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen,” he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It’s true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive–and at least half a dozen notifications–all clutter Gmail at any given moment…

Text Objects versus Motions

Excellent talk by Chris Toomey on Mastering the Vim Language. Features a lot of must-read Vim resources and nice-to-have plugins. Key takeaway for me: Prefer text objects to motions when possible (corollary: “Is this repeatable?”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlR5gYd6um0…

Light Pollution Map

DarkSiteFinder is a map of light pollution around the world. The maintainer explains why he doesn’t use the Bortle Scale. In Iowa, Lake Sugema and The Whiterock Conservancy appear to be the ‘best’ places to see some (more) stars.…

Minute Repeaters

Developed in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, minute repeaters sound the time in hours, quarters and minutes—hence their name. Repeaters served a practical purpose: telling time in the dark. When streetlights were rare and matches and candles precious, chiming watches were a logical solu…

The Korn Shell

Good talk by Siteshwar Vashisht at FOSDEM 2019 on maintaining the Korn shell and old codebases in general. I came by his work while reading up on the fish shell. Featured this nugget He talks about how they removed dead/inapplicable code and micro-optimizations, refactored a lot of legacy code, imp…

The Titanic and Climate Change

Stumbled upon this nearly three-hour, real-time, annotated simulation of the Titanic sinking. Late night1. Which led me to James Cameron’s 2012 documentary Titanic: The Final Word, in which he assembles a group of engineers and historians to fix the simulation in the 1997 movie, which leads to this…

Faceshifting

Bill Hader is made to faceshift when doing his impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s weird and brilliant and I love it. Here’s another where he does Al Pacino. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPhUhypV27w TIL about the term “deepfakes”.…

Fungi Are Horrifying

Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one: Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a…

Penny Flip Tip

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,    and you’re hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,    is simply by spinning a penny. No—not so that chance shall decide the affair    while you’re passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny i…

Mama

For My Mother by May Sarton Once more I summon you Out of the past With poignant love, You who nourished the poet And the lover. I see your gray eyes Looking out to sea In those Rockport summers, Keeping a distance Within the closeness Which was never intrusive Opening out Into the world. And what…

Data, Data, Data

Vicki Boykis’ excellent article on every aspect of ‘Data Science’ I can think of: a little history, employment prospects, skills, education, and continuous learning. It would appear that more than half the job, at least, is wrangling (replicating, cleaning, imputing, transferring, understanding, aug…

JavaScript Delenda Est

Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est,’ which is to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ It didn’t matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed. My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cat…

Gandhi the Annihilator

At least in Civilization: [. . .] Gandhi tends to be the first to use nuclear weapons, and spares no expense on wiping your civilization off the map. You probably always thought you were crazy — how could a series that prides itself on historical accuracy portray Gandhi so wrong? Well, you’ll be ha…

Concave Mirror, Ball, Black Hole

This video of a ball swinging in front of concave mirror (starts at 2:00, cannot embed for some reason) reminded me of simulations of what it would be like if one fell into a Black Hole. Here’s a Schwarzschild Black Hole, one “with mass, but with no electric charge, and no spin.” (Source) https://vi…

Scaling Mountains

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when yo…

Midwest Distances

Expression Real Distance Next door 1 - 2 miles Right up the road 5 - 10 miles Up North 15 - 100 miles A couple miles 10 - 20 miles Not too far 20 - 50 minutes A little ways Over an hour A pretty good drive 2 hours+ Drive down there Literally any direction Can attest 😆. Via.…

It Will Be Okay

It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. – Conrad, Heart of Darkness (taken completely out of context…)…

Amar Bose on Life

Amar Bose on education, teaching, purpose, creativity, not whinging, Norbert Weiner (under whom he was a grad student), and working with the right (and ethical) people. Starts around 24:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySAXW-7WrDg…

Alan Kay on OOP

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them. – Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Obje…

Medieval Fun Land

As the final season of HBO’s blockbuster television series Game of Thrones hits screens around the world today, audiences in China are begging for the explicit scenes of sex and violence not to be censored. [. . .] Disgruntled viewers in China have previously compared the significantly edited versi…

How a Watch Works

A delightful, 20-minute video from the Hamilton Watch Company1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL0_vOw6eCc and a tl;dw version of the above Bought one after looking to get the “Murph Watch” in Interstellar. That article notes that they only made 10 for the movie (and gave one away.) Well, they’re of…

Rōshi Shopsin

A few favorites from a selection of Kenny Shopsin’s infinite wisdom. He ran this diner (which doesn’t really sound like one…) On ambition It’s just an initiation into the idea until the abilities to appreciate life forthe moments in a row starts to make you a deeper and more fulfilled person, and t…

Paleoart

All Yesterdays is an exploration of things we know we will never know about “dinosaurs and prehistoric animals” . Jonathan Wojcik at bogleech.com has an excellent review of the book. Of particular interest: We know little-to-nothing about the creatures’ anatomies and morphologies because of missing…

Juliana Lepine

Makes amazing sculptures. See the ones of Freddie Mercury and Doc Brown posted on social media quite often. Has an active YouTube channel.…