In hindsight, this was probably one of the most important classes that I took in college.

Using Common Lisp for doing astronomical calculations for a SF story, really cool. Love these explanations where I can get an idea of how a language is actually used.

https://borretti.me/article/astronomical-calculations-for-hard-sf-common-lisp

Crochet to concentrate!

"We demonstrated that crochet positively affects the alerting and the orienting networks"

"Our results provide for the first time that crochet promotes an increase in attention and determines modification on the brain circuitries"

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283453v1

(below: my daughter with a recent crochet project of hers)

Ruby is faster than C ™️ https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/6983

I know $12 USD is a lot of money for some people, so to celebrate 1000 sales, I'm giving away 1000 copies of The Pocket Guide to Debugging (honour system: please only use the free link if you can't afford $12!)

Here’s the link, use code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get a free copy https://store.wizardzines.com/products/the-pocket-guide-to-debugging-pdf

(I can't disable the billing address prompt but you can just enter a fake address like 123 Fake st, new york NY 12345, (123) 123 4567 :))

Sometimes my approach to a technical problem is "do stuff and see if it works" and other times it's "think about the problem for 1 to 3 years before making any moves" and I wish I knew how to articulate when to do which one.

Usually the "think for 3 years" thing is what I end up doing when it's a socio-technical feature with a strong possibility of causing harm if I get it wrong

Hey designers-- Tell me about your favorite software engineers/developers you've worked with.

What's something they did that you wish all engineers you work with would do?

#design #designers #ux #uxdesign

A wonderful essay on witching cats of New Jersey and AI art.

https://varnelis.net/on-the-witching-cats-of-new-jersey/

Enjoy this short clip of the raccoon that is currently trying to catch snowflakes on my deck. 🦝 ❄️

Yeah I do unit testing

assertEqual () ()

So here's a random thing that I learnt yesterday. Compasses are region-specific and the needle will "stick" if a normal compass is used in the wrong region! Australia and New Zealand are in magnetic zone 5. If you want a #compass that works anywhere in the world, it needs to have a "global needle", which is built a bit differently to account for the problem of the magnet aiming directly through the earth to magnetic north and dragging the needle down with it.

OK, here it goes. Why quote-posting is a critical positive feature we need to get on this platform. A 🧵 of uses (I'll start; feel free to add)

This is not a chart depicting Moore’s Law.

This chart is the CRAYOLA COROLLARY showing that the number of Crayola crayon colors doubles approximately every 18 years.

Huh, I wonder why I stopped defaulting to SSH for GitHub… seven years ago.

https://git.kejadlen.dev/alpha/dotfiles/commit/0c4d64959d9a510fc55d8b0007e4bf8e64630b80

Totally forgot about this, but this will make managing my dotfiles w/submodules so, so much nicer.

Being on a software team is more like being in a band than working on an assembly line. If two members don't click, you'll get a worse outcome than if one worked solo. In fact, it's far from likely productivity would be halved—it might even increase thanks to less conflict and rework.

And yet almost every software team is assembled as if it were a landscaping crew. Far too little regard is paid to the importance of rapport, creativity, inspiration, positivity, and the overall vibe in the air.

anyone out there hiring early career devs, or think they might in the new year? holler at me, i know a number of amazing young devs who are really excited to get their careers going!

In case you were wondering, about me and cats: well, I have combined my love of cats and linguistics in my upcoming publication: "Purrieties of Language: How We Talk about Cats Online", which is due out at the end of February. It's available for preorder here: https://www.cambridge.org/at/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/sociolinguistics/purrieties-language-how-we-talk-about-cats-online?format=PB 🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈🐈

#cats #linguistics #sociolinguistics #digitalspaces #purrieties #book #dialectology #lexicology

Good thread by @Slavin on just how ineffectual and unambitious is response of US governments (at all levels) to COVID, almost three years in

COVID is transmitted by poorly-ventilated indoor air -- yet no levels of government are willing to address it

https://saturation.social/web/@Slavin/109519395846754071

#covid #health #publichealth