Had a nice quiet day having lunch with my granddaughter and mother.  So cute together.

John Favini in Slate: What if competition isn't as "natural" as we think?  An interesting think piece but sadly misses the rather obvious truth that collaboration *is* a way to compete. 

Jason Kottke: The story of two monks and a woman.  A beautiful little fable. 

Heh, this was a literal LOL for me; I spent years working on JPEG2000.  And it was great for digital pathology images; qualitatively better than JPEG.  But... standard browsers do not support it, so... 

(BTW the xkcd image is a JPEG :)

Can you solve the two-fuse puzzle?  "Imagine that you're making a magic potion. You're a wizard with a long beard. But - the potion only works if you wait exactly 45 minutes before you stir it. If you stir it before or after the potion's totally ruined. You don't have a smartphone. You don't have a watch. You don't have any kind of time measuring device. What you have is two fuses of irregular consistency. The one thing you know for a fact is that it takes an hour for each of these fuses to burn from one end to the other. How do you use these to measure exactly 45 minutes?"  I'm a sucker for these ... stay tuned! 

[Update: solved!]

Paper airplanes.  Excellent. 
In which once again it is shown, that design flourishes in the presence of constraints... 

Seth Godin: toward the honest job interview. 

• The candidate thinks, “I really need this job.”
• The hiring manager thinks, “I'm tired of this, I really need to fill this job.”
• As a result, the candidate says what he thinks will get him hired.
• As a result, the hiring manager isn't really listening, not really.

It's so critical to hire the right people.  And so hard.

Had me at hello:  Rare, Mohawk-Wearing Fish Discovered ‘Walking’ on Seafloor. 

Joel Spolsky: the Stack Overflow age.  I've known Joel since his Joel-on-Software days, before his Citydesk days (and yes, this blog is *still* made with Citydesk), and Stack Overflow is just about the best thing ever.  Remember the days before you could Google for the answer to any technical question?  I do, and they were ... not as good. 

Apropos: RIP Citydesk. 

Jeff Atwood (Joel's partner for Stack Overflow): Let's encrypt everything.  I've always thought there was no reason to encrypt access to this blog ... but maybe ... I should? 

Jamie Zawinksi: offsite backup.  The Rosetta Disc is now safely installed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.  "In 2014 the Rosetta Probe landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it measured the comet's molecular composition.  It will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one."  Good to know. 

Powerline: better living through chemistry, the settled science.  GMOs are one of the miracles of the world, like vaccines; we've figured out how to feed way more people and have way fewer infectious diseases.  Like nuclear power, it's a complete mystery why environmentalists have ended up on the wrong side of this issue.  It's almost like they don't care about the science, they just want to be mad about something... 

Finally, in the wake of Australia's terrible bushfire season: "Hope" is born at Zoo Miami.  "For the third time in the zoo’s history and the first time in over 28 years, a surviving koala has been born at the zoo!! Though the actual “birth” took place on May 30th of last year, it was only yesterday that the joey (baby koala) first came completely out of the pouch!" 

Onward...