Charlie Loyd 🎃

It’s got a lot of moving parts and I wanted to make it intelligible to several audiences, so the documentation gets pretty into things. I hope it makes good holiday reading.

(It is, forgive me, a bit funny that people writing programming languages competing with C have spent a decade agonizing about not being able to convincingly beat C’s speed specifically on Brotli compression, and now it turns out C’s fast Brotli was insecure.)

This kind of explainer usually contains horrible mistakes or load-bearing misleading simplifications that make it worse than nothing, Muphry’s law–style, so I am happy to repost a good one.

Anyone else noticing more Halloween stuff around these days? Seems like even a few months ago it would have been considered strange to have a skeleton or some pumpkins in your yard. Maybe just a California thing? Not complaining, only pointing it out!

The thing about measurements in recipes is I’m absolutely fine cooking by the seat of my pants. I’m not demanding precision everywhere. I just think it’s silly to say 375 g AP flour, then half a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of oregano. Don’t give 3 sig figs on some things and 0 on others.

I understand headline writers have to meet difficult constraints, but this should not be allowed. Just one netizen’s opinion.

Start your day with California condors on the Henrietta Peak ALERTCalifornia camera. Mornings and evenings are the best time to look for these endangered birds at https://bit.ly/4frDA4N Check IDs for Central CA flock tags at condorspotter.com

I’m against this.

I’m going to a Halloween party as linear algebra.

Good day to be a license-respecting Gaussian splat hobbyist, I suspect.

My parents both had high-end educations and chose economically low-end jobs, and I think a lot of people would wisely make similar decisions if it were safe enough to do so. (I remain agnostic on UBI as a specific route; I see plusses and minuses and am not interested in debating.)

I gotta find a way to keep up with my friends that isn’t The Site For People To Post About Things They Don’t Like.

"what are your infrastructure priorities" in one pic

A neat thing with historical Landsat data - you can go back to 25th of September 1983 and see the wispy high altitude clouds over North Dakota around 17:00 UTC, roughly 3-4 hours before the false alarm. On the left, the missile fields of Malmstrom overlaid on Landsat image from 26th of September.

Hurricane Polo yesterday. Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar, so we’re seeing the wind’s imprint on the water surface, not clouds. The sea-level air pressure in the eye is equivalent to ordinary pressure at about 1.1 km or 3,500 ft. Guerrero coast in the north; swath is ~410 km across.

The other day I stubbed my toe on a curb very badly and I have to say I kind of regret doing that.

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

In “Jurassic Park” (1993), Dr Sattler is realizing that they’re growing extinct plants just as we first see the dinosaurs. Yet the dinosaurs are eating eucalypts (E. camaldulensis?). But (1) eucs are post-K/Pg and (2) hyper-oily leaves were very likely basal. So what the hell?

Exciting times for everyone who intrusively thinks about the Fujiwhara effect every 36 hours anyway.

A post saying “China using bamboo to replace plastic” might mean it’s a high-priority government policy that’s measurably changing the manufacturing sector. Or that one hobbyist who happens to be Chinese was in a tourist’s widely reposted photo. Or anything in between. This post is not about China.

Oh, and you’re so cool you never learned an MGMT song on an iPod Touch ocarina app in 2011. I see. Sure.

My plan to move public opinion on matters important to me is to spend a portion of my day reposting every article and zinger I see go by that agrees with me to an audience of people who follow me because they find this behavior tolerable. I’m pretty sure this will work eventually.

Sad to see about Annie Dillard, a good writer. She used to live part-time on the island where I grew up. Oldtimers said she would often chop her firewood nude. They considered this unwise: there are splinters, and what if the axe hits a nail?

I’m about halfway convinced that the reason we haven’t had a proper Nasa mission to Uranus – one of the most interesting places in the solar system – is that Congress doesn’t want the hyuk-hyuk headlines.

Becoming a table-thumping Mercator projection advocate but when you press me on it I reveal that I’m talking about UTM zone 10 specifically.

I hooked it up to ADS-B.

When he moved a few years ago, @patricio.io gave me his dry-erase plotter. It’s been in a box since then. Today I finally had space to get it out and make it draw a (live-calculated) Lorenz system.

There’s a reason you don’t see me walking back old opinions and predictions on “AI” as the situation changes (with public opinion, market outlook, technical progress, etc.). It’s that I’ve been careful to only say true things and not talk out of my ass nonstop. Hope others find this inspiring!