Strange Attractor @strangeattractor@refactorcamp.org

I finally read To Say Nothing of the Dog. It's as good as advertised – even a bit better than that, because part of it is targeted at people who had their heart broken by Gaudy Night, which I just had two weeks ago. I'm very happy I didn't accidentally read this one before Gaudy Night, that would've ruined the reading experience quite a bit. #amReading

Did you read the one about the USB-C Charger chip that is easily as powerful as the Apollo Guidance Computer? 'cause apparently, that's a thing. https://forrestheller.com/Apollo-11-Computer-vs-USB-C-chargers.html

Short refresher on ISO 8601, *the* correct way to write numeric dates (https://xkcd.com/1179/). The standard uses the Gregorian Calendar, and goes from most to least significant component:

2020-02-15 = February 15 of this year
2020-02 = February of this year.
2020 = This year.

And finally, the interval syntax I was looking for: use a "/" (or a "--" in filenames) to separate the start and end value. You can omit redundant elements from the beginning of the end value:

2020-02-10/16 = February 10 to 16
2020-01-15/02-15 = January 15 to February 15

"Eric S. Raymond started a popular movement, but in the process lost the point and direction of what was promised. Of course this is nothing new. The early Christians, the French revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks all engineered movements designed to free people and all of them ended out of control and being oppressive."

oh wow, I aspire to these levels of shade.

From the long and good essay "The Cathedral and the Bizarre". http://marktarver.com/thecathedralandthebizarre.html

Ngl I will applaud s2 of THE TERROR for taking the line that empathy is a more effective interrogation tactic than intimidation or torture.

Like, it's literally empirically true (there was a whole US government investigation about it and all that) but it's still super rare to see in media, particularly American media.

winslowson avocados, painted by james marion shull, 1937

Hey #fediverse, who are your favorite shitposters?

Instagram artist royalty_now_ creates portraits of what historical figures would look like if they were alive today.

(Image: https://www.instagram.com/royalty_now_/) https://t.co/4HENbA4AcB

All right so now that a Korean film won the big boy Oscar do you think maybe we could manage to get a Hugo Award shortlist this year that isn’t like 99 Americans and one Canadian? 🤔

Something like the flamenco scale (http://music.hcoder.org/music-monday/Flamenco%20scale.mp3) sounds intriguing and exotic. But how to compare them in a given song? You're in luck, because some people change songs to experiment with exactly this. For example, see how Nothing Else Matters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAGnKpE4NCI) sounds when switched to the major scale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oruno-NlJh0

2/2

#MusicMonday

you: sorry, whats that?

me: uhh, well i mean i can't really explain it, just look it up, google is your friend, jus--- *shakes head vigerously* fuck,!!! Google ain't your friend! duck duck go it. go it. duck the fuck outta it. put that question to the duck my friend. Duck it. or go to a library & ask them. say "can you duck this for me" like that. "can you duck this fact to tell me its true". thats what you say now

Over 100,000 people have been forcibly evacuated in Victoria alone.

Most of NSW is running out of water.

Temperatures today are predicted to exceed 40°C.

Shits going on in SA, WA, and I think also Tasmania but I don’t even really know because things here are so messed up…

Also, this is mostly because we got a teeny tiny bit of rain here, so instead of all the smoke being in the air it's currently coating every available outside surface in a layer of fine ashy mud which is still gross but in an entirely different way.

In other news the air quality here today is only like seven times hazardous levels rather than the 35 times it has been, so everyone is having an "outside day."

Y'all know the thing about boiling frogs? Yeah. That.

Will be riding the Texas Eagle from Austin to San Antonio today. Super excited as I haven't been ridin since childhood.

Made a trains playlist to listen to while traveling If anyone is interested.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0fIYqJyWfVHHxIxM1yWzzE?si=tt8nblhzSPOz6e4iseDv9w

freelance web developers -- does anybody have tips on finding good work?

(1/3) Call for recommendations: what's the best note-taking app?

I'm looking for something to bridge the gap between paper-and-pencil and typical computer interfaces, which is cross-platform and accessible via the cloud. When you need to write down ideas fast, and those ideas involve something other than just text - writing up little diagrams to express software architecture or organization planning or draw a picture of something or what have you - or you need to rapidly organize things visually into hierarchical lists so that there's some semblance of structure to the ideas your taking, without taking up precious time thinking about how to muck around with some formatting UI to do that, nothing seems to beat paper and pencil/pen.

I think I've watched this simulation of baking/heating different textures five times today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBpolaB4DqA