This video made me laugh enough I watched it twice, and then a bunch of others from the series, which were also good but not as funny as How to Fix Grocery Stores from Hank Green.
This made the rounds thoroughly, but this is exactly how I consumed the weather forecast for years and I would absolutely install a widget that ran this on my phone.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation is a variation on the falsehood programmers believe about names. While the names piece is great, the aviation variation is interesting because, on its surface, air travel is an entirely manufactured process that seems like it should be controllable and standardizable.
Dragonsweeper: You probably didn’t know that you needed a mashup of minesweeper and a dungeon crawler, but you do. Key to know that you can lose all of your hearts, so long as you don’t lose more than are available, leveling up restores all your health, and you can carry extra diamonds forward from one level to the next. I am not good at this and still have not swept the dragon.
Real life updates: Managed my first 10K run, and no I won’t tell you how very slow it was. Having a good start to the veggie garden including my first foray into growing lettuce, with positive signs for the cucumber crop as well. Good reading from the month included The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy), The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld.
I have an old collection of Byte magazines that I picked up early in my time as a faculty member imagining I would do …. something? …. with them. It occurred to me the other day that a thing would be to include highlights in my miscellanea posts. So, trying that out – here’s the cover of the oldest issue I have from August 1983. Look at how minimal the text is there. Besides the publication info at the top, there’s no chaos of article titles, just “The C Language”. Love the cup of coffee far from the computer on a separate desk. Just a couple of pages in to the magazine, there was this sweet ad for C86, the preferred compiler of bulgy-brained aliens who want tight code that includes all the functions in K&R.
