Four meters. This is how long the surprise cucurbitacea near my potato patch has grown now. It must have sprouted some time in June, but I only started noticing it around the end of August when it started blooming and I could not mistake it for any old weed.
Pencasting: publication of manuscript content to the world-wide-web as scanned images of pen-and-paper text. The practice is not new, but the term was first coined in April 2007 by mandarine in Emily’s blog.
The underlying idea behind pencasting is that it can serve as a very nice complement to blogging, halfway between plain digital text publication and podcasting; halfway in terms of how much of the blogger’s personality is revealed, and halfway in terms of how much bandwidth is needed.
People reasonably comfortable with multimedia publication should have no difficulties inventing their own pencasting process. This tutorial is pencasting for dummies (well, not completely, for if you have a scanner, chances are you have already scanned stuff — if not, play with your scanner first).
I have jun run the math: if I try to have one picture of Mandarine every Monday, it will mean one picture of Mandarine in every second post (or every post sometimes). This would look like cult of personality, and she might grow arrogant.
There will be Mandarine on Monday, but only every first Monday in the month. Next installment: next Monday (October 2nd).
This is the fourth installment of the till death do us part series, to mark my ten years of marriage (only three weeks before the eleventh anniversary).
When one drives a car, when one pilots an airplane, when one rides a bike, one finds that even on the straightest road, in the stillest air, or on the smoothest track, one still has to make constant tiny adjustments. If one stops adjusting for a couple of seconds, one has an emergency situation. And if one misses this last opportunity to alter course, one crashes.
I am under the impression that lots of couples believe that their relationship is on autopilot. [more]
Let me take you on a detour through aerospace systems design: when we have to engineer spacecraft that will operate for twenty years in geostationary orbit without any maintenance (imagine your washing machine running 24/7 for 20 years without interruption), or when we have to design aircraft that will fly a billion flight hours without an accident (imagine your computer running for 117,000 years without hanging), we need fault-tolerance and robustness. The way we achieve this robustness is through redundancy and diversity. Whenever a system fails, there is a similar backup system that can take over (redundancy). Sometimes, even the redundant system fails eventually. The most frequent case is because there was a common design flaw in both the nominal and redundant systems. When we want to ensure robustness even against such unforeseeable events (we never know where our design will be flawed, but we always know it can be), we design another backup system that is completely dissimilar from the nominal system (diversity). Generally the backup system design is much less efficient, but much more rugged, therefore it has a lot more tolerance to off-nominal situations. This will allow the pilot to land the aircraft or give ground operators time to reconfigure the spacecraft. The more diversity we build into the system, the more robust the design will be.
I recently read an interesting analysis in a gardening book: the author was showing that there were always ‘magic’ weeds which showed up after an ecosystem had been upset, so that it always seems to be just the right weeds to improve the soil and make it ever more fertile. [more]
Over at Aerophant, Tai has established a very sound rule: a picture of Puck every friday. As a regular copycat, I am going to follow the same weekly rule, and start a regular feature entitled Mandarine on Monday. Here comes the first installment.
Call for volunteers: there are five other days of the week left for other cat bloggers.
I am slowly but steadily becoming addicted to audiobooks. In the meantime, the supply of free, public domain or otherwise copyleft audiobooks is skyrocketing, and this certainly fuels my addiction beyond the reasonable.
In the recent weeks, I have been ‘reading’ (all from www.Librivox.org):
As I was lying awake in the dark earlier tonight around midnight, [more]
All right, I know the domain name is pretentious, but let me just give a little background. For this, let me take you back a couple of years ago, when I hardly knew the word ‘blog’. My personal e-mail address has the classical structure first.last@provider.ext. After I sent a birth announcement message to all relatives and friends, I started to get spam mail in my inbox. It was too late when I realized that I should not have used my personal e-mail address for such a broad communication. Now my e-mail was out in the spam world, with my real name in it for everyone to see. I have a very rare name, so if someone looks up my name in Google, all the results are about me: they’ll know what I do and in what city I live, and then if they look up my name in the phone directory, it’ll tell them my personal address.
I do not know about you, [more]
