Strap yourself in and prepare to be inundated with evidence of my weird interests, much of which I found thanks to my RSS feeds.
Books
I just finished reading Blindsight by Peter Watts and enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately. audiobooks can be slow going for me these days since I typically only commute to work once a week. My drives to work and time spent mowing each week are often my only opportunities to listen to audiobooks.
I also finished reading Jimmy Buffett: A Good Life All the Way by Ryan White. This is one of the books I was happier to read in Kindle format because that makes it so easy to look up the many musicians referenced in the book.
I've been working my way through a re-read of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman graphic novels. I just finished volume 7, The Sandman: Brief Lives. Gaiman's books are usually heavy with references and reading them on my iPad is perfect for researching unfamiliar references.
Music
Since I've been reading a biography of Jimmy Buffett, I've been listening to his music this week. I've been a Buffett fan for a long time. I'm also watching a Youtube video of one of his concerts at the moment.Once of the musicians mentioned in the Buffett book was Todd Snider. His song Talking Seattle Grunge Blues was amusing.
Youtube also recommended this video interview with Larkin Poe to me which features a few performances. They're one of my favorite bands.
Television/Movies
Last week I finished reading Dances With Wolves by Michael Blake. I enjoyed it so much that this week we watched the movie. I thought the movie was good but I still preferred the book. For me, the best performance in the movie was that of Graham Greene as Kicking Bird. He's been great in every movie of his I've seen.
We also watched Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, a comedy special which I found funny. I'm always amazed how Michael Che manages to be provocative while continuing to be funny and thought provoking. Plus he seems to enjoy performing and the audience in this special definitely responded to his performance.
Beer
I was happy to learn that the original founders of Stone Brewing have taken over Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens in Escondido, California. That beer garden was a legendary destination for beer lovers. It will be interesting to see what beers they decide to brew in that location.
It seems weird that non-alcoholic beer is growing in popularity at Oktoberfest. Supposedly some drinkers are practicing "zebra striping" which involves interspersing non-alcoholic beers with more traditional brews to avoid getting too tipsy.
https://allaboutbeer.com/non-alcoholic-oktoberfest/
https://allaboutbeer.com/non-alcoholic-oktoberfest/
Links
I was sad to hear that Margaret Hamilton passed away. The picture of her with the stack of assembly language listings on fan fold paper which her team developed is the way I always think of her. She headed up the software engineering team responsible for all on-board in-flight computers on Apollo space missions and helped achieve levels of software reliability unheard of in the 1960s. The video clips of her oral history in the article linked to below are quite interesting. She also worked for Dr Edward Norton Lorenz at MIT prior to her Apollo program work. I'm fascinated by his work on Chaos Theory including Lorenz Attractors.
Here's a thought provoking and at times humorous talk given at Cambridge by Sandi Toksvig called Eve's Byte of the Apple. I know Sandi mostly from her time hosting the quiz show QI which is my favorite quiz show after Jeopardy.
I've been using Quad9 as our DNS service since I first heard about it many years ago. They use strong security to guard against domain name hijacking. They also block malware and phishing domains which helps protect users. And it's free to use so there's no reason not to use it.
I've got fond memories of using BBS (bulletin board systems) in the 1980s and 1990s. People with retrocomputers have resorted to using WiFi to serial port adapters to allow these older computers to connect to BBSes over the Internet. This project which resembles an old school analog modem to accomplish that is very cool.
https://www.hackster.io/news/relive-the-dial-up-era-with-this-raspberry-pi-modem-d860a24ffb1e
https://www.hackster.io/news/relive-the-dial-up-era-with-this-raspberry-pi-modem-d860a24ffb1e
Pringles is running a very strange promotion for Halloween. You can win 200 years of chips and a Pringles canister shaped burial urn. Apparently you can pass the chips along to future generations. I can't imagine people wondering why there's a ceramic chips container sitting on the mantle in the house they inherited.
According to this article winning a Nobel Prize can give people delusions of grandeur. I've seen people get promoted or get a financial windfall of some sort and get similarly enlarged opinions of their skills due to their good luck.
The origins of the term snake oil are interesting. Apparently it started out as something more useful than the fraudulent products which the term now implies.
A museum in Spain has created a replica of a Cray-1 supercomputer using 30 Mac Mini computers from 2012. Mac Minis are also popular for local AI applications. I've been interested in Cray's computers for a long time. 40+ years ago I worked on mainframe computers which were powerful for their time but Cray computers put those to shame.
I found this video of an AI interviewer interviewing a video AI agent. I've never been stuck talking with an AI interviewer but some of the human interviews I've had conducted over Zoom calls have been nearly as bad. I also haven't enjoyed interacting with customer service AI bots and sometimes that's impossible to avoid.
Apparently a few hardware wallets for cryptocurrency have spy chips installed to enable them to steal your funds.
I've never seen this older version of a movie based on Melville's Moby Dick. Apparently it's notable for its depiction of Ahab's evil half brother Derek. I don't recall that character in either the 1956 film or the novel.
It's worrisome that produce in the UK is 20-50% less nutritious than in the 1960s. I wonder whether farmers are no longer rotating crops the way they used to do to optimize the soil nutrients or if the soil is truly getting depleted?
For the first 13 years of my computer career, most of the equipment I worked on had interesting control panels with lots of switches and blinking lights. Modern computers may be faster but they're less interesting visually. This Flickr group helps fill that void.
My favorite web comic xkcd had a comic not too long ago showing a diagram of how much of the Internet is dependent upon the work of some individual developer who isn't recognized or appreciated. The presentation at the link below shows that it's not just a single developer stuck in that boat.
The Navy has revived Morse code training. Electronic communications are subject to more threat from jamming and other interference than used to be the case. Simpler methods like Morse might be required in certain situations.
