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Archive: December 2022
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 Welcome back! To me ...
I've been blogging since Jan 1, 2003, and during that time there have been years when I posted hundreds of items, nearly every day, and years when I posted only a handful of items; even years when I posted just one item, my "never forget" posts on 9/11. Please see the archive for the whole story.
2020 was a weird year in many ways but it became a blogging year, after a light 2017 and one-post-only 2018 and 2019. But 2021 was a no-blogs-at-all year, my first, not even a "never forget" post (I didn't forget 9/11, but I was in Italy at the time [story for another day] and forgot to blog about not forgetting), And so far 2022 has been a no-blogs year too. Anyway.
One of the joys of blogging after having done so for a number of years is seeing what I was blogging about in past years;my "flight" link is my favorite, a vertical slice of what was going on in my head this time each year. Of course that requires that I blogged in a prior year, so my ancient history is way better than more recent times.
 This morning I did it again, clicked flight, saw no posts at all for many recent years, and resolved to start posting again. It's easier to make such a resolution than to keep it so we'll see how I do, but at least if you are reading this it means the mechanism for doing so is still up and running - after nearly 20 years! - and I was able to wake it up.
I have a little store of "things to blog about", going back to, um, 2016!, and I'll see if I can dribble some of them out, and then also start posting about whatever. Many thoughts this Holiday season for sure, a lot going on.
But I don't only blog for me, I blog for you too, and you have no idea what's been going on with me, for a loong time I guess, all the way back to 2016. I can't tell you everything and I won't try, but I can hit the highlights with the perspective of time; some things seem amazing in the moment but fade into irrelevance, other things maybe didn't even pass notice in their time but are interesting in retrospect.
And blogs are still a thing! Just now Twitter is all the news, with Elon Musk having bought them, and with significant revelations about how left-leaning filtering policies might have influenced the recent elections. I've never tweeted much, although at times I've manually or automatically tweeted links to my blog posts as a sort of alternative RSS. I have Facebooked, more at some times less at others; it is a cool place to stay in touch with friends, but it remains a walled garden; it's hard to "link to posts" on FB, an ongoing and key limitation. I will might try to "echo back" cool stuff I posted about on FB during my recent-ish non-blogging periods, for completeness.
So! Stay tuned, let's see what I do. There is a meta-Ole watching the real Ole, and meta-Ole is most interested in the real Ole's follow through on this :) As always I welcome your feedback; I've never hosted comments and don't have plans to do now, but you are most welcome to email me and I'll definitely play back interesting thoughts you might share. Onward!
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 If you're a longtime reader you know, I haven't particularly taken to Twitter. At first I didn't get it, and now that I do, I realize there's less there than one might have thought. It's microblogging - anyone can post [just about] anything, and it's easy, so a lot of people do it. The value comes from the aggregation and ease, and that's not nothing.
Also, many have used it as a form of "manual RSS"; posting links to deeper content elsewhere. That's another real use case. Why not use RSS? That's another real question.
Perhaps the most interesting thing on Twitter just now is the debates about Twitter. Elon Musk himself has observed this, and he's not wrong; even critics of all the changes he's making are mostly using Twitter to complain.
I've found it most interesting to see who is supportive of these changes, and who isn't. I follow a bunch of bloggers from all over the political spectrum, and many who don't post about politics have revealed their political proclivities by how they view these changes. So be it. That's exactly what Elon seems to have wanted, and he's getting it.
In the meantime, pass the popcorn! - it's great theater, and I can't wait to see what's next... on Twitter.
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 Well, I'm doing it, I'm going boldly where many have gone before*: I'm upgrading my daily system from Win 10 to Win 11. I'm doing this for a few reasons, only one of which is to "stay current"; I have a few bugs I'm hoping will get cured in the process, and I'm definitely counting on leaving Internet Explorer behind forever. (Somehow in my Win 10 system Chrome is the default and Edge gets used sometimes but there are some kinds of links which still launch IE.)
Oh, and can we agree, the Win 11 logo is awful. Seriously? A clear case of lack of patience... (When I wrote "Patience" back in 2016, I was hoping the pendulum would swing back, but here it is nearly seven years later and we still suffer from ugly no-design.)
* grammar note: "to boldly go" is probably the most prominent split infinitive of all time. Ouch.
[Update: well, the good news is that it was easy and (seemingly) non-destructive to go back to Win 10. Thank you Microsoft for making it possible and easy. The bad news is that it was immediately obvious that Win 11 would have problems; many programs I use often did not work (including an ancient copy of Photoshop), settings were all over the place and messed up, and worst of all, IE was still there! I kid you not, first link I clicked launched IE. Bah. Anyway I will go again - someday it will be a must - but for now I'm baack...]
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 A compendium of "interesting stuff", as the Ole filter makes a pass...
I must say I am disappointed with my Win 11 upgrade failure. I had high hopes it would cure some ills, but it didn't, and so now what? I guess I have to figure out these problems with logic instead ofstochastic debugging...
Picture of the day: My Tesla loaner, eight years ago. Wow. At that time - no so long ago - Tesla wasn't mainstream at all, and these cars were amazing curiosities. Now everyone in my neighborhood has one.
 So Air New Zealand are looking to buy electric planes. How optimistic of them! They seem inevitable, but many years away. Still the industry will need optimistic investors to make progress. 
 Seemingly, "Holiday experiences" are all the rage, Astro Lumina among them. My Facebook feed's ads are all such things, uses of time and money but non-material. I'm tempted!
 SpaceX: three launches in two days are planned. Wow. Time was every launch was a major event. They've actually nailed this reusability thing.
Ann Althouse notes Volodymyr Zelenskyy makes a Jewish joke to David Letterman. He's a comedian, and he's Jewish, so yeah. He's also most impressive, a good choice for Time's person of the year.
 Last year I had an opportunity to attend the HLTH conference (in Boston), didn't go to this year's (in Las Vegas), but have been following some of the news; this video interview with Glen Tullman is interesting, perhaps mostly because Glen and his new company Transcarent are interesting... the consumerism of healthcare, and routing around the established healthcare delivery value chain.
From May 2016: The amazing 1969 prophecy that racial preferences would cause the exact grievances of protesters today. [via Instapundit] I noted this long before the 2020 riots, which only reinforce the conclusion.
There are two subjects on which I differ from most of my friends, guaranteed to provide for some, er, interesting conversations at the Holiday dinner table: illegal immigration, and climate change. Yeah, I just don't get it, where by "it" I mean the pervasive politically correct view of these things. Somehow we are supposed to share everything we have with people with whom we have nothing in common. Where by "we", I mean, other people. This is just madness to me, I don't get it. And climate change, okay, it's real, and okay, some of it is anthropogenic, but it's not a crisis, it's mostly a means of virtue signaling. There, that should make me unpopular (or at least, interesting) at the dinner table!
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 Well no feedback on yesterday's post, from the five of you who read it :) - I guess it was okay. Though in media, no news is not good news, even if it isn't bad news.
The pic above was auto-generated by DALL-E, "sailboat racing watercolor". I quite like it, what a tool. My only complaint isn't about the tool, it's about the website; the reCAPTCHA required to sign in everything is truly annoying. I get the need for a "verify this is a human" test, but this one is awful. You'd think OpenAI could do better - some kind of reverse Turning test :)
A further update on Win11, I've been doing a project for a company who've provided me a laptop which is running Win11. So I have a place to learn about it. I did this with Win 10 too, and it's the right way to do it; get familiar, learn all the config options, figure out how to do the things you want to do, and meanwhile have your old environment for doing important stuff (like blogging). Anyway stay tuned.
(Of course, this doesn't solve the "sometimes launches IE" problem, which so far has never occurred on the guest Win11 laptop...)
 Jon Gruber urged me to watch the new teaser trailer for Barbie. Okay, I did. And yeah, I urge you to do it too :) Starring Margot Robbie as Barbie, who else?
Observation: how iconic is the opening to 2001, right?
 In case you think the recent news about nuclear fusion was important, Visual Capitalist helpfully posted this Explainer about The Science of Nuclear Fusion. Turns out that while the payoff will be amazing, this is a hard problem, as indicated by the fact that the recent news highlighted a situation when 300X the energy was required to get 1.5X the output. (Where X was the power of the laser input to the reactor.)
Things I love about blogging: posting about Barbie and then Nuclear Fusion.
 Boing Boing: People who shaped science in 2022 and ones to watch in 2023. Yeah, climate change, but also Covid, Ukraine, etc!
BTW this is a beautiful picture, click to enbiggen!
Not surprising: The Strange Attack on Blind Reviewing. Similar to the strange way blind auditions have fallen from favor. Turns out these institutions don't want "blind", they want control while appearing virtuous. Yeah, we get it.
I can't do justice to the whole ongoing "Twitter Files" saga, but it's great theater. Especially interesting has been the relative silence in the media about it; they're hoping it will just go away, apparently. Powerline have been following too, and posted this footnote: "Our press would bring these stories to light if it could refute them, but it can't so it ignores them".
 From April 2015: The problem with affirmative action in one picture. "The true story of an Indian American who got into medical school by pretending to be an African American. This is from well before the now-famous lawsuit against Harvard for discriminating against Asians.
Onward ... Happy Holidays! This is the Friday before the last weekend before Christmas - have fun :)
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 It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ... and feel like it too, Brr..!
Big change around here, I've experimented with a new feed reader, Feedly, to replace my venerable SharpReader. So far I like it, especially that I can read feeds on my iPad and my PC, and they're synced. More on this...
Meanwhile, it's all happening!
 It was big news when DeepMind's Alpha Zero learned to play Go - beating top humans and even devising new strategies - and ever bigger news when it became the strongest chess program. But now it has mastered Stratego, which is even more difficult due to the number of move combinations and the fact that each player defines their own starting position - unlike Go or Chess, where the starting position is fixed. Cool!
 Jean-Louis Gassée gives thanks to Silicon Valley. "Now a happy grandfather, I have the time and freedom of mind to gratefully reflect upon my move to Silicon Valley more than 35 years ago." Amen.
Also Jean-Louie Gassée: ChatGPT: Its Nothing, You Don't Need It. And We'll Have It In Six Months. After years of work, suddenly the tip of the AI-ML iceberg becomes visible in a way that gets everyone's attention. It sure got mine!
Philip Greenspun: ChatGPT agrees with me about Lisp. Hard to disagree, actually.
Ah but can it code? Ars Technica: DeepMind’s latest AI project solves programming challenges like a newb. I'm waiting for an AI bot which codes a stronger version of itself.
 Jon Udell: Mastodon, Steampipe, and RSS. Quite interesting. In the wake of Elon Musk's acquisition of, and subsequent changes to, Twitter, many have experimented with Mastodon, a would-be open Twitter competitor. Definitely a lot to play with here. I question whether anything can overcome the network effect of Twitter however; the Twitterverse is just so large now.
I have a Mastodon account, but don't use it to "follow" anything. Should I relay my posts here to there? Probably could ... but dlvr.it, my current Twitter cross-posting tool, doesn't yet support it. Maybe I have to create my own bot to do it.
 Ars Technica: Mastodon is hurtling toward a tipping point. Nah. It's doing fine but "tipping" is going to require a massive rate of adoption way beyond what's happening now.
Tim Bray wonders: Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical? A strangely non-technical take from him, that does not seem like the right question.
Bari Weiss on Twitter. "We did not selectively retrieve, or cherry-pick, files with an eye toward servicing a particular agenda. Our goal was simply to figure out what had happened at crucial moments in the history of the country and the company." One of the journalists selected by Elon Musk to publish "the Twitter files".
Elon Musk: Should I step down as head of Twitter? ... of course he never planned to lead Twitter forever, any more than he runs SpaceX day-to-day.
Dave Winer: Advice for Elon Musk. It's fascinating how so many people think they know better than Elon, when he's the world richest person and arguably the world's most successful. He started or was an early investor in PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Maybe he can figure this out :)
 Related: Clive Thompson: Tiny Snippets of Code that Changed the World. "Only a few short lines can have a massive, global impact" ... like the first pop up ad! (ugh)...
 With Christmas shopping upon us, we ponder: Popular Retail stores that no longer exist. Sniff.
I was just in Macy's, they're still very much alive, and I wondered: what allowed them to survive when so many others did not?
Ottmar Liebert: 17 Years Ago. "What is the purpose of millions of years of evolution? Let me tell you a secret: it’s YOU! It’s all so you can experience this life." Not sure evolution has a purpose, perhaps result would be more accurate.
Well that's a lot - I guess my new Feedly RSS system causes me to review a lot, and share a lot too. Onward.
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 I mentioned I've switched from SharpReader to Feedly for my daily reading of RSS feeds. It's a big change; I've been using SharpReader for years and years, and it served me well.
Time was, I didn't "believe" in RSS, sigh. But that was long ago, and I've seen the light. Even created some nice cookbooks for you to get started. RSS is the single biggest productivity gain I've ever had. But I digress.
First reference to RSS: in Feb 2003, right after I started blogging.
Later in Feb 2003: Why Aggregators are not good. How wrong could I be?
April 2003: I'm tempted to give it a try. And then: I bit the bullet and tried it. But then: I'm giving it up. By May 2003 I was back, never to leave again.
August 2003, a survey: Do you use an RSS reader? 60% yes, 30% no, 9% uh, what's RSS. I bet if I did this today, "yes" would win, but "what's RSS" would compete with "no" for second. To be tried?
November 2003: blogrollcleaning. In which I found blogrolls were superfluous given RSS readers (and especially, OPML, which I discovered in Jan 2004).
May 2004: My first RSS Cookbook. Perhaps zero of you were reading me then, and tried it, but I know some of my colleagues at the time did. I don't know why but back then it was just slightly too hard to get started. Maybe it still is, despite the best efforts of Feedly and it's competitive kin.
(Love, love, being able to find all these old posts with my Simple Search. Same as it ever was...)
This change was driven by two wants and one horrible need.
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Read RSS feeds on my iPad. My morning routine is to check email, review my calendar, and read "the news" on my iPad, away from my desk. Adding review of my RSS feeds to this was becoming a must, since I get most of my news that way.
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Easily sync feeds and read items between my iPad and my desktop PC. Definitely did not want to read things twice - already such a huge volume of items to skim - and if I found things I wanted to save (e.g. for posting to my blog), wanted that to move from one to the other.
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Stop launching IE! For "reasons" the 20-year-old version of SharpReader cannot be taught not to launch IE when links are clicked. It's an early .NET program and must use some facility that never contemplated the possibility of a different default browser. For a while it did launch Chrome - I think - but now I can't get it do to this, nor to launch Edge (which would be okay).
Anyway I'm trying Feedly, it works on my iPad, works on my PC (via a web interface), enables me to sync back and forth easily, and launches Safari on the iPad and Chrome on the PC. Yay!
So far there is one huge unexpected benefit to this switch. Feedly automatically marks reviewed items as "read" and won't display them anymore. At first I was afraid this would cause me to miss things, but with literally thousands of items flowing through each day, it's better this way. I can consume more items faster. Onward!
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 So I've started blogging again, after a two-year gap, and during those two years I was reading RSS feeds and saving items, and I now have a compendium of about 70+ items saved for posting. (I've been ruthless; there were originally way more.) These have been sitting in SharpReader, patiently waiting for me to post about them, and I will dribble them out as appropriate. Here you go!
Loved this picture I saw online - on Facebook, so yeah can't link to it :( - it's been cold enough in the Netherlands for the canals to freeze, enabling ice skating. How great would that be to do? Definitely on my list!
 Apr 2016: Amanda Peet via Salon: Never crossing the Botox Rubicon. "What's the point of doing it if everyone can tell? I want the thing that makes me look younger, not the thing that makes me look like I did the thing." Such a tough choice.
Noted May 2016: StoryWorth via Daring Fireball. "Invite your mom, and each week they'll send her a question. She replies with a story through the app, email, or even a landline. After a year, they'll bind her stories in a hardcover book." Such a good idea. I didn't follow though, but I should do, now...
I left this item in my saved feeds mainly so I wouldn't forget it. Need another way to remember. Although, since it is now seven years old, I guess it didn't work that well, did it?
 Nov 2016 from Digby Parton on Salon: After a bitter election, a new America: Our first female president and the most diverse coalition in history. It precelebrates a Hillary Clinton victory. I saved this because it was so wrong, but OTOH it wasn't as wrong as I thought at the time; did not expect Biden to defeat Trump.
Interesting to note how many new portals like Salon now protest when you have an ad blocker; back then, nobody cared. They're easily defeated but annoying.
Dec 2016: Not another MNIST tutorial with TensorFlow. I was obsessed with TensorFlow back then, and still am; a wonderful tool for solving the toughest problems in unusual ways. ChatGPT and all the rest are children of this breakthrough.
 Apr 2017: Doc Searls: Open Word - the Podcasting Story. For reasons Podcasting never rose to the level of blogging or especially microblogging, nor of video, but it's still out there, and it's open. Weirdly unlike microblogging and video there haven't been walled gardens housing podcasts. I guess Apple kind of tried, but it didn't take.
 May 2017: The incomparable xkcd: Machine Learning.
This is one site where virtually every post is worth reading. Still.
Oct 2018: Instapundit: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship. I was enthusiastically supportive of this - still am - but it didn't happen. Right now the US is flooded with illegal immigrants who are (among other things) having "beachhead babies".
Dec 2018: Jon Udell: Where's my Net dashboard? On RSS readers and infoglut. Same as it ever was, but I think Feedly and it's brethren are helping. The amount of inbound is incredible.
One approach, as taken by many of my friends and colleagues: let others do the filtering, and use social media as their inbound. I do this a bit too, but OTOH I'm one of those "others" doing the filtering :) It works a bit like the layers in a neural network ...
Feb 2019: Joi Ito: Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. On the nature of "success".
Sept 2019: Instapundit recalls the NYTimes: Airplanes took Aim. The NYTimes have been a flawed and prejudiced source of "news" for so long now, it's a wonder anyone regards them as credible.
 March 2020: Become a Master of Python Programming. I did, or at least I tried. It's been the latest hotness since ... well since 2004 when Bittorrent was coded in it by Bram Cohen at least, and it's stayed hot due to AI. Definitely the 2020s version of "one word: plastics".
Well, that takes us up to the Covid pandemic, aka [to me] as the Wuhan flu pandemic. There are more to follow ... stay tuned!
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 Hi all, Merry Christmas Eve Eve!
Yes of course there is such a thing ... my family always celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, so today is the Night before ... Christmas Eve, aka Christmas Eve Eve. We have a house full of people, the table is set, presents are positioned under the tree, and there is some last minute wrapping and indeed shopping going on.
I spent the day blogging - excited about Feedly and my new RSS-to-blog-via-Ole-filter pipeline - and also coding. I figured out how to call a C++ DLL that uses CUDA directly from Python, so that was fun. An image array operation that ran at about 6/s now runs at about 600/s. Yippee.
I can't say the world looks like it's in great shape right now, many things are not perfect, and unfortunately it feels like the trend of many things is down. But ... who knows what 2023 will bring? I choose to be optimistic.
In the meantime, tonight's Christmas Eve Eve! I hope you're having a nice one, and are spending it quietly and peacefully with those you love...
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 A lot of my posts are basically links to other stuff I found interesting, maybe with a pithy comment or two. I assume you and others find these fun, and I've characterized my role in bringing these to you as "the Ole Filter". Obviously if I passed everything through it would be too much. I may be moving in that direction :) Now adjusting filter granularity...
The 2023 505 World Championship is in San Francisco this year, and I am planning to go. How - in which boat, with which crew, and whether I am accepted to sail - is yet to be determined. But in 2021 I sailed in the J/70 and Moth worlds, and this year in the J/70 Worlds in Monaco (!), so I have hope.
Oh yeah, this picture is a 505 racing sailboat :) - 505 centimeters long, or about 16', a two-person racing dinghy which has been around since time zero but remains a wonderful boat to sail and race.
 News you can use: The World's 50 Best Restaurants. Aka, my bucket list. I have not dined at any of them, although I've been in many of those cities and have enjoyed many of their competitors... #1 is Geranium in Copenhagen. So be it!
 A contest: you pick a word, change one letter to make a new one, and add the definition. OMG is this hilarious. My favorite is Sarchasm. (click to enbiggen...)
Mark Suster: Praying to the God of Valuation. In which people often built companies to do something, and only incidentally to make money, and often did anyway, but now it's just all about money and many companies do not do anything. At all. It's great to read that the pendulum is swinging back.
 Wired: The year the NFT died and came back to life. Crypto - I don't get it. Yeah, I get how it works - probably better than most - but I don't understand why you need blockchains and crypto protocols to associate value to digital assets. Alternate headline: "the year the crypto emperor was revealed to be naked". Anyway...
From Instapundit: The 21st Century is stupid. In which a Norwegian actress faces 3 years in prison for saying men can't be lesbians.
Chris Dixon interviews Bob Iger, the ex- and now again CEO of Disney. I just read his book, Journey of a Lifetime, and found it to be most interesting. The people stuff is so fascinating, imagine doing deals with Steve Jobs, Stan Lee, and George Lucas...
 Essential travel tips for the Holidays ... if you're visiting The Shire, Hogwarts, Endor, Emerald City, Westeros, etc.
 Wow! That's just about all I can say about this picture of Nasa's Orion spacecraft, with the Moon and the Earth in the background. This is not CGI (at least, I don't think so). Oh yeah, click to enbiggen.
Joel Spolsky reports: Progress on the Block Protocol. A year into his project to define an API for incorporation of "blocks" into websites, essentially, ways to display and interact with specific types of data. Who would underestimate Joel - after Fogdogs and Stack Overflow (and oh-by-the-way Citydesk, the venerable publishing tool I still use for this blog) - but this seems like a tough problem.
 Gerard Vanderleun: the Gift of the WalMagi. In this rerun of a great old post, he revisits the incredible efficiencies of value chains and scale which enable a great winter jacket to be made in China and sold at Walmart in the US ... for $7. It is truly amazing. And of course now you can get that same coat delivered to your door by Amazon :)
 Still think the NYTimes are respectable journalists? Here's their crossword puzzle last Sunday, the first day of Hanukkah. They actually denied it was a swastika. What can you say?
 Via Instapundit: Happy Hanukkah.
AI-based information management tools like DALL-E and OpenGPT have been in the news lately, but the impact of AI on Robotic services is even more profound. Combine this with the counterproductive efforts to raise minimum wages for people, and we get: Robots at McDonalds and Robots cleaning your hotel room. And if you can't roboticize, you might have to go out of business.
 And finally, some truly important news you can use: How to track Santa on Christmas Eve. I'll be using the NORAD tracker as always, and maybe even blogging about it :)
BTW that picture at the top came from Facebook, and I would love to link to the post, but, I can't. Weird that Facebook became so popular despite not having this capability. But I wonder how much more popular it would have been if it had it?
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 Happy Christmas everyone! Hope all is well for you, and that you've having a wonderful day with your friend and family, in whatever way you celebrate.
I think Santa is likely taking the day off today, maybe going sailing. That's a great idea. I may do myself :)
Cheers!
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 An Xmas filter pass ... picking up some old stuff along the way ... still liking Feedly and this new way of doing things ... and yes, I've updated my OPML correspondingly (Feedly only allows folders not subfolders so did a slight reorg).
This awesome picture came from a Wired article about Euler's equations for fluid flow, and I love it. I also love ezgif.com which converted it from MP4 to animated GIF. How great is the Internet with all these free tools?
 From a note taken a long time ago: finally watched The Least Expected Day on Netflix, about the Movistar pro cycling team's 2019 season. It's great. If you're interested in cycle racing or think you might be, give it a try. I love the differences in attitude between the racers on the team, and it's so apparent how it affects their performance.
 Roger Kimball: Stanford's Naughty and Nice List. "Note that the version of this pathetic document I link to exists on a server at the Wall Street Journal. Stanford, facing blowback (that word must certainly offend someone!) hid it from public scrutiny." Stanford!
The longer this wokeness crap lasts, the less my original hope that saner heads would prevail seems likely to be fulfilled. What's the endgame here? Do we just all pretend forever?
Dave Barry's 2022 year in review. "The best thing we can say about 2022 is: It could have been worse." Well, yeah. But it could have been better, too!
 So know we know: How Jamiroquai did it. The effect is awesome, and the method is obvious in retrospect. But even knowing the trick, it works, right?
 I love this sort of thing: PCalc turns 30. "PCalc actually started out in 1992 as a design for a central heating control panel." But of course!
Clive Thompson: The awesome power of well-documented code. Definitely part of my religion. The opposite is mostly true too; poorly documented code just can't make it in the wild. I have a story about this to tell, and will do...
In case you're looking for some light reading: The 20 most-read stories on Ars Technica in 2022.
 Via Jason Kottke: The Sea's strangest square mile. Amid heavy competition, seems like while there are millions of boring square miles, some of them are pretty amazing, too...
 Yes, Virginia ... Getting it right about a legendary newspaper editorial. I proposed to consider the question: "Is there a Santa Claus?"... from 1897. Spoiler: Yes!
Oct 2020: Mark Steyn: The last copier in the woods arrives sooner than expected. He is no doubt reading the Twitter files with great interest :)
I wonder whether - in future years - the people responsible for banning the President's press secretary, the Trump campaign, Republican Senate candidates, and Republican House members from Twitter just before the 2020 election will feel they did the right thing. They no doubt contributed to President Biden being elected, so perhaps they will feel that they did (although with hindsight, maybe they won't feel that was such a great thing, but they will likely always feel preventing President Trump from being re-elected was worthwhile.) But IMHO it led somewhat directly to Elon Musk buying Twitter.
 From Aug 2020: Kottke: The User Experience design of Lego interface panels. Pretty great. It is hard and revealing to communicate with such a tiny amount of information.
Onward into the day! Merry Christmas to all. The interesting and contemplative week between Christmas and New Year lies ahead ...
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 Hi all Happy Boxing day to you - historically in England in the big houses the staff worked on Christmas, so the day after Christmas was the staffs' Holiday, they received their presents in boxes (?) hence the name ... anyway hope you have a great one.
We're traveling to a friend's for a celebration, she's from Marin County where apparently celebrating Boxing Day is a thing.
Are you reading this via RSS? No? Not too late to vote in my survey about this ... glad to see the creaky old ksh script which manages surveys still works (written long before such things were plug-and-play from the web).
An interesting side-effect of my switch to Feedly and consequent higher bandwidth for inbound links has been monitoring more Twitter feeds, which can be imported just like RSS. For many Twitter *is* their blogging platform, for others, Twitter is their RSS, an index to their content elsewhere. Yeah I do it too, via dlvr.it, so you might be getting this there?
 Behind the Black notes: The Wuhan panic underlines how scientists have abandoned the search for truth. Yeah, sadly.
Related: Elon Musk notes re the latest "Twitter Files": How Twitter rigged the Covid debate. We just knew the government were wrong.
Also related: Marc Andreessen quotes Michael Crichton: "Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward––reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them." When was the last time you read a mainstream media article about something you knew which was correct?
 From Ottmar Liebert: Know the difference :)
Space.com asks: Can space-based solar power really work? (Spoiler: yes)
Meanwhile, Powerline notes: Guess what: Electricity isn't free. It's a screed against EVs, but actually EVs aren't the problem, it's generating clean power. Which cannot be done at scale with wind or solar - well unless it's solar from space :)
 Oh, and per Wired: Dear Electric Vehicle owners: you don't need that giant battery. I get the point, most of the time you'd don't need them, but when you do...
Meanwhile, Watt's Up with That: Japan embraces nuclear power, cancels phase out plans. Good for them. Entropy will be a major competitive advantage.
Okay, off to do a ride - indoors, via Zwift - and then off to Santa Barbara in my EV...
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Merry day-after-day-after Christmas! Whew, we made it. And now into a quiet week of contemplation, eating, and blogging...
Still loving Feedly. And like being able to easily incorporate Twitter feeds alongside RSS.
RSS survey update: currently 76% yes, 16% no. Clearly my readership are not typical :)
 Rarely better put: WSJ: Crypto is money without a purpose. Do those who think the FTX crash was "it", sorry, but there's more reckoning ahead.
Among the interesting Twitter-ers I've been following is Marc Andreessen, the A in A16Z. ("We invest in software eating the world.) Not all think their many investments in crypto will work out. As VCs they are among the first in the pyramid, so maybe they'll be okay. Stay tuned.
 Have you seen Avatar 2 aka The Way of Water? It's pretty great, a must see, and like Avatar a must see in a theater for the full 3D experience. It's epic. (Yeah, the story, meh, but still!)
I'm sure James Cameron just made a movie - message was secondary - but now he's getting flack for the message some people see in it: you can never be woke enough. I think trying to be woke is the best way to be criticized by the woke police.
 CNN compiles a list of the most satisfying movies of 2022. Yes, Avatar 2 is there, as is my personal fav, Top Gun 2. As they note "satisfying" implies a relationship to expectation, and Top Gun was perfect in this regard. What was your favorite?
 Cult of Mac explains why Apple's [upcoming] VR headset won't be the next iPhone. Well, the iPhone was arguably the most successful consumer product of all time, so ... yeah. But the list of people who nay-say-ed Apple is long.
The main point of the article is that AR will be bigger than VR. Okayyy. Noted for future backchecking :)
Meanwhile, Magic Leap raised $450M in 2022. Not a typo. Whatever can a software startup need that much money to do? They're not building cars! I rate their eventual success unlikely based on this fact alone. Also they have been around a long time now and we haven't heard boo from them yet.
 This is pretty cool: Classic WIRED covers - regenerated by AI. Not bad, right?
Powerline: Discrimination at Stanford, then and now. Sigh. An internal report on their discrimination practices against Jews in the 1950s has resulted in an apology, but as the article notes, it's no better now (since Jews are white).
Related: the war on Merit takes a bizarre turn. "For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships." WTAF, right?
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 Filter Pass!
The Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Accelerates. "Denying research opportunities because they do not align with an agenda is inane and potentially destructive." Not good.
Real Clear Politics: CDC Funding Decisions Based Largely on Politics, Not Science. This is why the government should not be charged with allocating funds to science.
Behind the Black: Today’s blacklisted American: Black scientist blacklisted for doing good research. His subject was discovering the truth behind the slurs insinuated against James Webb, after whom the space telescope was named. He found the allegations to be baseless.
Richard Feynman via Marc Andreessen: What is science? A great read.
 This looks cool: the Black and Decker cocktail machine. A sort of Keurig cartridge machine for mixed drinks. You supply the alcohol, it supplies everything else. What will they think of next?
InsideHook asks: What's causing so many people to leave California? How long do you have? /)
Their subhead is "it's not necessarily what you might expect", and they go on to suppose it's a housing issue. Yeah okayyy.
This looks interesting: Universal control, from Apple. "If you haven't been following the news, Universal Control is Apple’s feature that lets you control multiple iPads and Macs using a single mouse, keyboard, and trackpad. You can move the cursor and keyboard seamlessly between the devices, and iCloud infers the positioning based on your cursor activity." Cool.
Long read of the day: What can we learn from Barnes & Noble's surprising turnaround? The TL;DR is: they focused on books, including rejecting publishers' paid promotions. I'm happy for them. But this seems more like an outlier than a harbinger.
 xkcd: Game night ordering. Hehe...
Yay: SpaceX aces 60th orbital launch of 2022. Pretty amazing, up from 31 in 2021. How many in 2023?
 New Yorker: An evocative year in illustrations. Pretty great, as always.
Paul Krugman explains why Tesla is like Bitcoin. It's hard work to be this stupid, but somehow he manages to do it. The only way in which they are alike is they're both things Paul Krugman does not like.
Since you asked, I am in favor of one, and not the other. I liked Tesla from the first, and Bitcoin too, but now I have to admit that 10 years have passed and still nobody has found a compelling use case for blockchains. And the "proof of work" thing which burns entropy just doesn't make sense.
 The anthropic principle at work: We've Never Found Anything Like The Solar System. Is It a Freak in Space? Well... it turns out, it's much easier to detect the kinds of planetary systems we've found than it would be to detect ones like ours. This seems more like a selection artifact than a genuine data point. There are so many galaxies each with so many stars that it's impossible to know whether we're an exception.
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 Trying to figure out if I should make any New Year's Resolutions. Last year I did: 1) cuss less, 2) work out daily, 3) better work/life balance. I think I did (1) pretty well, (2) okay - well, not daily, and (3) probably overdid life since I stopped working in May. For this year ... huh, I don't know yet. I am planning to start working again, so (3) might kick in again!
 I'm probably the last one to discover Queen's Gambit, which came out on Netflix in 2020. Brad Feld was the first to bring it to my attention, I ignored it then, watched it now. Excellent. Of course it catapulted Anya Taylor-Joy to stardom, and she's great, but the whole thing is most excellent.
 Also great, and from the same era: Emily in Paris, also on Netflix. I'm sure there are French people up in arms about the stereotypes, but also I'm sure many agree they're mostly valid. And Paris is the star. Overall quite fun.
 Check this out, from Jousef Murad: the new outpainting capability of DALL-E-2. Serious magic!
 Also from Jousef Murad: Maze Fluid Dynamics. Yet another cool way, if one were needed., to solve 2D mazes. This one is more fun than most :)
 Who knew? Hike to these hot sprints in Santa Barbara and soak in cascading aqua pools. What a nice thing to try. No clue though about what the "unmarked trail" is like...
 Aug 2020: Mark Frauenfelder: my fascination with these confounding dice. Yeah, the non-transitivity is just ... weird.
 Also Aug 2020: Visual Capitalist: all of the world's borders by age. Supercool.
 Oct 2020: Tal Backman remembers Eddie Van Halen. The greatest guitarist of all time? Certainly in the conversation. Can't believe this is already three years ago...
 Also Oct 2020: Laughing squid: Incredible animation shows how the Charles Bridge in Prague was built. The ingenuity of architects through history has been amazing. I love the way all those ancient cathedrals were built, too.
Maybe my favorite saved item of the Covid era, Oct 2020: Not the Bee*: Babylon Bee retracts retraction after US Navy confirms USA Today fact check is false. How great is this?
* Note that Not the Bee is a site featuring real news that only seems like it should be on the Babylon Bee :)
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 It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, ... it was 2022, another year. Was it good for you?
At this time each year we are inundated with everyone's "best of" and "worst of" lists. But those are their opinions. Sometimes they are fun, sometimes they are useful. But for me it's more fun and useful to make my own lists, what was 2022 all about for me? And then how can I use that information to help me in 2023...
So what was great about 2022 for you? What was terrible? And what will you do in 2023?
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 My resolution for 2023 is to be more open. That's it. More open to ideas, more open to change. And more transparent, more open to the people around me, which includes you. And more open to myself, more self-aware. We'll see if it works, stay tuned :)
I have a friend - a longtime, good friend - who Facebooks. He's smart and interesting and a lot of his posts are cool and fun. But he hates Trump, and [for him, by extension] he hates Republicans. And he can't help posting about his hate. I would snooze him but then I'd miss out on the cool stuff too. It's a puzzle.
As I think about my friend, I wonder; does he think he's changing minds? Is he asserting what he perceives to be true? Or is he secretly convincing himself?
I don't know, and maybe he doesn't either. But is that me? I can be pretty single-minded on certain subjects: climate change, affirmative action, and government intervention, to name a few.
When I post about these things, do you feel as I do about my friend? Maybe you do ... maybe I'm fun and interesting but also pedantic. Do not want to be. I do not think I'm changing minds, but sometimes I do think I'm asserting [what I perceive to be] truth. Not sure if I'm secretly convincing myself :)
 Related: Now that I'm blogging again and gathering inbound with Feedly, I'm aware that I'm not filtering enough. Before that was a limitation on my ability to handle input, now, I need a throttle on the output. Something like ... 10 links a day :) Heh.
But it's hard, because so many people on the Internet are wrong, all the time...
Stay tuned and Happy 2023!
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