deerpig

The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.

Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Website Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton 2nd edition, page 97.

I disagree, perseverance is not the same as goal-seeking for goal seeking's sake, or at least, it doesn't have to be.

Twenty years ago I set a thirty year goal, literally bet my life on it. It wasn't until two years ago that I was reasonably sure it had a chance of success. I had to, and continue to basically give up everything, no one funds very long term research, so I had to learn to live on less than $200 a month. No healthcare, not being able to buy a new pair of glasses, only being able to buy clothes once a year or so. But I found a university who believed in my work, gave me an office and a flat on campus outside of Phnom Penh and the freedom to follow the project wherever it went. No salary, but it's been enough.

Perseverance is what keeps you sane, gets you up in the morning. It gets you through whatever is thrown at you. I have not had a happy or easy life, but it has been a life full of purpose. I have seen and done things that most people couldn't imagine, that has been, many times, too weird to be believable even as fiction.

Perseverance is a skill you practice every day for the rest of your life. But there are many small compensations. You find kindness and beauty and from time to time pleasure in unexpected places along the way.

With the university's help we will go to press with the first volume later this year, with a volume every year or so until it's finished on or about 2030. No one would willingly choose such a life, you fall into such things, and I was one of the stupid one's who took on such a ridiculously ambitious challenge. With a little luck I will live to see it through to the end.

So for some, purpose and perseverance, trump happiness and comfort and security. Though I admit I am likely and edge case.

I must say though, my wife and I sure as shit would like to live on a little more than $200 a month. :)

Physical Review D is not a light weight journal. You don't get published there unless you are being taken seriously in the scientific community.

And "stochastic superoptimization" sounds so much cooler than their original term; "super-duper random improvement."

Yahoo, when it was a single page with a couple of dozen links. I think that was before there was a browser for Windows -- I was using the Omniweb browser on a NeXT Color workstation. I still miss the original Wired and later Wired News.

So it's sort of the opposite of Field of Dreams, which often results in vaporware. Just because people come, doesn't mean they know what they want or know how to express a problem or need that could be solved and result in a viable product. It's a big risk to gather people using a human interest story in order to sell them that you haven't made, or really formulated yet. Is your story compelling enough to keep interest long enough for you to build and launch a product? How will you find the time to keep them engaged while building the product? You may well luck out, and if you do that's great for you. But it doesn't make it a good idea.

It's in elisp? Of course it is. It's emacs!

Great music. I want one.

Site is down for me....

I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside.

I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a number of projects and I was still using an Indy as my main desktop until 2001.

SGI created hardware that almost took your breath away, you knew you were seeing a future that not many people had the privilege to see back then in person. To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities...

SGI famously converted one of their Crimsons (which was a commercial failure) into a fridge and beer tap...

I've noticed that over the last few years it's become increasingly difficult to do things with US based services (especially banking) if you are outside of the US. And this goes double if you are a US citizen with no ties to the States other than citizenship. Americans as a general rule have never been terribly adept at anything international; banking, languages, or even base geography. We have offices in Cambodia and Laos and I have been told by more than one US based-service/company that Laos is not a real country. I suppose they think the .la domain stands for Los Angeles :) We are looking to set up an office in Hong Kong or Singapore and use that to deal with Western countries. But we're a small not-for-profit operation and HK and Singapore are EXPENSIVE.

Sounds like a pun from the Wake. I would be surprised if it wasn't. I loved the Wake. Only read it once all the way through but I dip into it from time to time.

It's a fantastic place to find memorable phrases that make good passwords.

Gitlab requires a lot of resources. We have a local Openstack cluster and were running GitLab on a small instance. It was a beast. Moved to a larger instance and it works beautifully even over the Internet from another ISP.

This just makes me sad. When class material, which is supposed to be the antithesis of closed and proprietary is treated as property, then there is something very wrong with the educational system you are working in. Education is about spreading knowledge as far and wide as possible, not controlling it.

All of the course material we are developing for a new four year IT, information literacy and Big History program for a Cambodian university is licensed under a twin MIT/CC license for all media (there will be a lot of video), code and text and will be downloadable from GitHub. We hope this material can be used and adapted for use anywhere. We've done this to prevent anyone from trying to make make the material proprietary and ensure it stays free, not because we were worried about what students might do with it.

I had never heard of an "academic integrity agreement" before. I just googled it and found this:

  "Some schools have created an honor code -- a school-wide 
  agreement about ethical behavior -- that parents sign in 
  September and students sign each time they turn in an 
  assignment, quiz or exam."  
  -- https://www.edutopia.org/blog/academic-integrity-cheat-or-be-cheated-denise-pope

To paraphrase Monty Python, "America is a silly place, let's not go there."

You aren't kidding about it being hard to find anything about that paper. I tried finding it a couple of years ago and just spent an hour now and had no luck. Thanks for the link I hadn't seen that before...

When I was a kid we had the whole set. I assume that it was something tied together with Britannica -- we had an early 60's set. I tried to read them but the font faces were so small that they were terrible reading copies. If memory serves, I remember really, really trying to read Moby Dick and Darwin (are they both on the list?) but the tiny type and terrible formatting defeated me.

More than 45 years later, I've read maybe 70% of the books in the list (maybe more), but all in different, more readable editions. Today almost everything I read is in epub, and pdf for technical and scientific papers.

The breakup of Ma Bell required a regulatory breakup. Bell Telephone was just too entrenched to break up on decentralize on it's own, short of a collapse.

No amount of innovation outside of Bell Telephone could have broken it up. TBL might be correct that we are near that point today with the Internet. The big players either buy you our or copy your innovation and crush you.

In fact it's worse than that. Look at all the advise given to startups. Create something that one of the big players will need and get bought out -- that's been the dream for most startups for a long time now. This is reinforced and required by VC investors. The whole idea of building an small or medium sized Internet company that intends to become profitable and remain in business is now the exception rather than the rule.

Everything in the Silicon Valley ecosystem is designed to reinforce the big players.

TBL might be right that it could take a Ma Bell breakup kind of intervention to space where innovation outside of the big companies can have a chance. It's not that there isn't a level playing field. There isn't a playing field left at all -- it's branded multi-billion dollar stadiums all the way down.

It's byzantine

How so? Can existing tools achieve the goals that SOLID is trying to deliver?

Distributed is hard, but it's not impossible.

The Whole Internet has become so centralized that it's about due for something to come along that will blow it up and move power back to the edges of the network. That's what happen when mini-computers shattered centralized mainframes, and then when PCs shattered centralized minis. The Internet leveraged all of those PCs to move even farther out to the edge for a time and now it's back to a centralized system again.

You almost sound like the voice of the status quo tech investment establishment. I'm not saying you are, but back in the late 80's we were repeatedly turned down for funding using almost the same language that you're using.

And I agree, from that point of view whatever the next BIG thing that comes along and shatters the existing system will look at first like a bad investment whose ROI is unclear.

I don't know if SOLID is the next big thing or not. From what I've seen from the spec I don't think it's likely. But these ideas which have been around for 20 years are starting to gain traction among the smartest people in the industry.

As Kevin Kelly said, something can be inevitable, but no one knows the form it will take. Distributed is one of those things. We don't know what it will look like when it does take off, but most of the pieces are in place and waiting for the right implementation at the right time to catch fire and move power back to the edge of the network again. ROI will soon follow after that as all of the late comers pile on with the only goal of making money and try to stop others from making money from it. And so the cycle will start again towards centralization again.

Not simply that the West bought more. China refused to accept anything except silver and gold in payment for their Tea. There is only so much silver and gold so they looked for something else they could trade for and found that there was a demand for Opium. Of course this isn't mentioned much when you read about the period when you are in China.

When living in Hong Kong in the years running up to the handover in 97 the Chinese government used the Opium Wars as an excuse to accuse the British of all sorts of bizzare things during the negotiations. My favorite was calling the governor Chris Patten the "son of a running dog" which has a bit more bite in Chinese. A lot of the knashing of teeth on the Chinese side of the table was repeatedly justified by the dastardly deeds of the British in the Opium Wars to a country that was then still under the rule of an Emperor, which later turned into a corrupt republic and then overthrown again by the Communists and now seems to have been overthrown by the combined forces of Louis Vuitton, Rolex and Channel.

In case you weren't being snarky, the article was talking about Claude Levi-Strauss who was a French Anthropologist, not not the maker of jeans...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss

China is 92% Han

Only because the government keeps redefining what is Han.

I lived in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Ghongzhou for over ten years. There were Hakka, Canton and Chui Chow people but few ethnic Han. That has since changed as factories are filled from all over China.

The government desperately wants everyone to think that China is for all intents and purposes one people, but it's a patch-work quilt of different ethnic groups, cultures and languages who are often at odds with each other.

He really pushed identi.ca, there was a nice community there back in the day. It became a bit of a refuge from the noise on twitter. I had my identi.ca account in my sig file up until a couple of years ago. But I have largely lost interest in any of the social media platforms though I use twitter from time to time.

The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world.

Is philosophy about proof or understanding? Math and the sciences are there to look for proof. Remember that Science used to be called Natural Philosophy, which has now become a philosophical enterprise based on conjecture and empirical reproducible observation.

We need philosophers through their teachings to make sense of all that messiness and let those branches of philosophy such as the sciences gradually work out how it works in ways that can be confirmed and proven.

So you would prefer JFK to have said: "We choose to send robots to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, because they are easy and cheaper and faster..."

It's worth reading the whole speech: https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm

It ends with:

"Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."

There will as many robots as you want in space, but man will be out there right along with them, no matter how difficult or dangerous or expensive it is.

I am charged with the task of returning a university that used to be a research school before the Khmer Rouge to be a national research university. Professors are paid a little over US$500 a month by the government. Staff often have to buy their own office supplies, computers and even light bulbs. We're finally getting some foreign grants from China to rebuild some of the laboratories, but there is no budget for paying subscriptions to journals. JSTOR provides reasonable discounts for developing countries, as does APNIC (for IP blocks) but it's difficult to try to build something when US45,000 a year is considered to be a low paying job and used as a baseline for access to information.

Thankfully there is lib-gen and sci-hub. Sadly, the United States is trying to force developing countries to support copyright measures that will lock us out if we adopt them.

Here in Phnom Penh, for all intents and purposes there are no rules of the road. So there are no sidewalks. Sidewalks are for rich people to park their monster second-hand imported American gas guzzlers. Going up the wrong side in the wrong direction of the road? No problem. Do you want to do a U turn from slow lane on a 4 lane highway -- stopping all traffic to do so is the way to do it. What you find is that it's the 3% of assholes who make a mess for everyone else.

In Thailand people follow the rules a bit more, but they drive recklessly at insane speeds. If you're a teenager, it's not cool to use headlights at night and the first thing you do is remove your mirrors, which no one uses anyway....

But if you go over the border into Laos there are no rules there either, but traffic is completely different from Thailand or Cambodia. People drive slowly, patiently and politely. Lao drivers even put the Japanese to shame and that's a pretty high bar. Laos is a very laid back place. It's too much effort for most people to not do otherwise.

Over the last twenty years I've seen things changing in both mainland China and in Thailand. People are slowly internalizing the rules of the road and following them more with each new generation. You stay in your lane, and your side of the road. You don't run stop signs. You wait for the traffic light to chain to green (or blue in Japan) before you cross a road.

What it comes down to is that rules of the road and road behavior is a collective body of knowledge that takes time to develop in a society. Once that knowledge has been internalized and becomes the cultural norm, then getting rid of traffic signs can work. But there is a learning curve to master that body of knowledge and a correspondingly greater responsibility that goes with it.

That is likely based on the Japanese story of the dog Hachiko, (sort of the Japanese version of Lassie) the dog who waited for his master at the train station every day. And when the master, a university professor, died while at school, the dog continued to go to the station every day until his death. There is a statue outside the train station where he waited. There were two movies made about the story, the Japanese original reduces everyone to tears. The American one with Richard Gere, not so much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D

It costs more to live the same lifestyle you had from your home country. If you cook and eat local food, don't indulge in expensive imports, use fans instead of aircons 24/7, drive a moto and not a car etc. Too many expats move out here and live in expat ghettos where it is expensive. Move to an area that is at least 10km from the nearest Western Style coffee shop and you'll find it's a lot cheaper. Sadly, two weeks ago a chain coffee shop opened across the street from the university where our office is, so there goes the neighborhood....

As for electronics? Stay away from ecosystems like Apple, they are expensive everywhere. Twenty years ago, our Thai office used Macs because we needed to run Japanese software that only ran on Macs. We needed to go to Penang (in Malaysia) to buy new Macs or get them fixed. But the prices there were about the same as in Hong Kong. Was it as easy going down to Golden Shopping Center in HK? No, but life was a lot more pleasant and overall a lot cheaper. We moved shop to Phnom Penh five years ago and haven't had any serious problems running a cloud service here except for the power outages.

Literate programing is used to tangle text and code. You tangle the document and the code blocks are pulled out to create a working program. But Orgmode's Babel, iPython and Wolfram's Computational Essays are literate computing, with code being executed in the document. Howard Abrams has extended the concept to create literate devops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljNabciEGg) using orgmode babel where the code in the document is used to configure software running on local or remote servers.

I use Babel as part of my daily workflow. Very cool stuff.