Miscellany
Stray notes
Notes with few or no connections to other notes.
Semantic line breaks
A name for the practice of putting line breaks between clauses in markup. Buckminster Fuller called it ventilated prose. (Found via Gwern.net.)
I encourage students to treat the files as private “source code” that they are free to format semantically. Instead of fussing with the lines of each paragraph so that they all end near the right margin, they can add linefeeds anywhere that there is a break between ideas.
The reason I am writing this is that I find Ventilated Prose a valuable aid to composition of text intended for presentation in conventional, unventilated format. In this essay I first present an example of Ventilated Prose as an aid to reading and then describe my use of it in composition.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks in search of a home.
2009
- Atomic Priesthoods, Thorn Landscapes, and Munchian Pictograms (Juliet Lapidos, 2009)
2011
- Nanolaw with Daughter (Paul Ford, 2011)
2016
- A first lesson in meta-rationality (David Chapman, 2016)
2017
- A List Apart – Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At (Richard Rutter, 2017)
- Aphorisms on programming language design (Michael Arntzenius, 2017)
- Even Racists Got the Blues (The Geeky Gaeilgeoir, 2017)
- GTD in 15 minutes – A Pragmatic Guide to Getting Things Done (Erlend Hamberg, 2012–2016)
- How to think like a programmer (Zell Liew, 2017)
- Johnny Castaway’s Home Page (Dave Brown, 2007)
- Lojban dictionary: la sutysisku
- Onym: Tools and resources for naming things (Greg Leppert and Willem Van Lancker, 2017)
- Portable Puzzle Collection (Simon Tatham)
- The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek (Rosa Lyster, 2016)
- Vim: you don’t need NERDtree or (maybe) netrw (George, Ornbo, 2019)
2018
- A List Apart – Designing for Cognitive Differences (Brandon Gregory, 2018)
- An Unofficial Index of MetaFilter Megaposts (not_the_water, 2018)
- Celestia: real-time 3D visualization of space
- Essays on Language Design (Rick Morneau, 1991–2007)
- Notation and thought (Katherine Ye, 2016–2018)
2019
- A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 (Chris Zacharias, 2019)
- A Cypherpunk Privacy Reading List (Sonya Mann, 2019)
- A List Apart – Trans-inclusive Design (Erin White, 2019)
- AirPods Are a Tragedy (Caroline Haskins, 2019)
- English cannot encode Real News (Breck Yunits, 2019)
- Frinkiac (2016)
- game developers, send me screenshots of your “debug” room, where you dump random game objects and NPCs to test them out (Chevy Ray, 2019)
- Keep out! The 100m² countries – in pictures (Rubén Martín de Lucas, 2019)
- One-Page Packing Checklist (Doug Dyment, 1994–2020)
- ‘TAke a look, y’all’: One Blogger’s Hunt for IMG_4346.jpeg (Brian Feldman, 2017)
- The Forgotten Operating System That Keeps the NYC Subway System Alive (Andrew Egan, 2019)
- Unraveling The JPEG (Omar Shehata, 2019)
- What makes a good design principle? (Matthew Ström, 2017)
- What’s In A GIF (Matthew Flickinger, 2005)
- Worlding Raga: 2 – What is a World? (Ian Cheng, 2019)
2020
- Avoid rewriting a legacy system from scratch, by strangling it (Nicolas Carlo, 2019–2020)
- Synthetic at Every Scale (Geoff Manaugh, 2020)
- The Forgotten Neoliberal Man of Parasite (Ask a Korean!, 2020)
- The Spatial Politics of Geofencing (Geoff Manaugh, 2020)
- Go Deeper, Not Wider (David Cain, 2017)
Wikipedia bookmarks
- Bald–hairy
- Brass razoo
- Chindōgu
- Chisanbop
- Codes for constructed languages
- Dihydrogen monoxide parody
- Falkirk Wheel
- General Motors streetcar conspiracy
- Glasgow Ice Cream Wars
- Hex (Discworld)
- Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol
- I Am Rich
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Mariko Aoki phenomenon
- Muggeseggele
- On Beyond Zebra!
- Ragged Ass Road (street)
- RAS syndrome
- Raurimu Spiral and Kelok 9
- Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
- Silbo Gomero
- Sniglet
- Tom Swifty
- Turritopsis nutricula1
- Wikipedia:Deleted articles with freaky titles
Twitter favs
[mysterious old lady flips tarot card revealing a dude who looks exactly like me flying a hot air balloon into power lines]
Me: is that good
USERS: you’re alienating the people who actually use your product
TWITTER: likes are now florps
USERS: what
TWITTER: timeline goes sideways
The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist
genie: please no
millipede: more legs
my dad once said “do what you hate first thing in the morning to get it out of the way” then 2 mos later called me on my birthday at 6am
Preserving computer tech
Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program micro-controllers through civilizational collapse.
Our expectation is that you didn’t need our definitions of software, computer, and other terms. We imagine you have computers of your own, probably vastly more advanced than ours, and possibly fundamentally differently architected. Once you understand the overview and guide below you will easily be able to access all of the data.
However, it’s possible that you have inferior computers to ours, or even no computers at all. In case of that eventuality, we have prepared an uncompressed, unencoded, human-readable reel of data which we call the Tech Tree. The Tech Tree contains information about our fundamental technologies, our computers, and our software, in the hopes that, over time, you will be able to use this knowledge to recreate computers that can make use of the open source software in this archive.
Programming dictionary
- idempotent
- Describes a procedure which can be repeated without changing the initial result or causing unintended side effects. Without this property, the caller may need to track whether the procedure has been run.
Style Guide for online hypertext
- Style Guide for online hypertext (Tim Berners-Lee, 1992–1998)
Attention Conservation Notice
…we will begin each Viridian Note with a useful set of its key concepts. With some practice, we hope that you will be able to reject a Viridian Note, confidently and without a pang, within two or three seconds.
This effort, however, may not be enough. You may still find yourself painfully tempted to actually read the Note. We therefore offer a backup safety system, our unique “Attention Conservation Notice.” This will begin each Note by explaining to you, in some brief detail, why you should NOT read it.
This has never been done before in print-based publishing, but in the text-glutted electronic context, we feel this practice makes a lot of sense…
Knacks
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TLA+ Helped Me Count to Six (Computer Things #86, Hillel Wayne, Oct 2020)
The term for this is subitizing, which is the worst-sounding word I learned all year. Subitization is the process of exactly determining the number of objects in a collection without having to explicitly count them. I looked for resources on improving my subitization but all the resources are for teaching children. Children can barely subitize two, and then gradually get better until they can subitize around four, where it stabilizes. If I want to improve my adult subitization then I’m on my own.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to learn a weird mental skill. I call them “knacks” for some reason. Not complete mental disciplines, not party tricks, just small things that come often. I’ve been fascinated with them ever since I learned about compass belts.
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Due to this regular transformation by T. nutricula, it is thought to have an indefinite lifespan.
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