'In a defining essay titled "Sacred Sociology," Bataille posited two basic types of communities, traditional and elective, suggesting that the elective works to satisfy all the hopes and desires that the traditional cannot.'

There are several conspicuous race conditions in Duolingo's UI. For example, I was doing a timed challenge and completed it with 0 seconds on the clock. The app flashed up the "do you want to buy more time" screen and then switched to the successful completion screen. I bet the code is spaghetti.

"Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship." I don't understand this claim, and I'm not sure it's a precise statement of anything. www.marxists.org/reference/su...

This is Mastodon content, really: On experimenting, I was impressed and not really surprised to see that jujutsu corrects git's behaviour in this inexcusable data loss case (and this is while still using git as the backend, and the .gitignore mechanism!) Blessed. stackoverflow.com/questions/48...

Image by 川原瑞丸 (Mizmaru Kawahara)

This project is impressive. Was it motivated by hastily overlooking the effect of inflation since the 80s? "Somehow aviation became an inverted pricing model compared to all other industries, wherein the older and more worn a plane is, the more it cost to rent." airfactsjournal.com/2020/11/the-...

"I asked [him] whether there seemed to be a dominant vernacular at Harvard. [He said yes]: the language of statistics. One of the leading courses at Harvard is introductory statistics, enrolling some seven hundred students a semester, up from ninety in 2005." (2023) www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Hmmm. Take the colour scheme from Hinton's views of the tesseract, and throw away the logical structure. Designerly behaviour at its least authoritative, or close to it.

I usually know when some school is reading a book of mine because I will get messages from teenagers on social media that go like: "Hey, I really liked your book X, but can you tell me, is it in first person or third person and who would you say are the main characters?"

Eggleston as a misanthropic eye: the fairground without people or joy

Underlying: "This adjective is overwhelmingly often (if not always) found in attributive rather than predicative use." en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underly... OTOH "Most adjectives starting with a- are predicative only."

Ulrich Wüst Köln

"Move slow and fix things"? I call it "barely tikkun over"

Some version control enthusiasts conclude that, because changes to a codebase form a partial order, it's interesting or illuminating to consider the case where two changes commute (i.e. are unrelated). I'm dubious: the group model is a stretch and meaningful changes aren't closed under composition.

Only realised just now that the 'serrat' in Montserrat has to do with serration/jaggedness. It's a Catalan name.

You know the way a post will sometimes have newline characters "hidden" at the end of one or more lines in the composer, and then annoyingly when the text is wrapped differently after posting, the newlines become premature line breaks?

"The street in front of the Helsinki Central Railway Station is planned to be a pedestrian friendly area and an inviting main entrance to the city."

"I ... grew up with video games whose typefaces were almost always monospaced, not only because of technical limitations at the time but probably because they were made by Japanese developers." granshan.com/insights/thr...

Not shocked that fifteen years after the improvements in CG realism tapered off, Pixar seem to be losing their touch. Wasn't Pixar's popularity an Information Age phenomenon, linked to technological demonstrations as much as storytelling? That's why Pixar Adults weren't cringe, unlike Disney Adults.

"There is an extensive reconstructed vocabulary relating to brightness, so much so that a perusal of some etymological dictionaries gives one the impression that the central concepts of the Indo-Europeans might be reduced to ‘bright’ and ‘swell’." academic.oup.com/book/48521

I've had a Wikipedia account for 20 years, today.

"Zoo dikwijls ook in het verleden heeft een bezoek aan een boekwinkel mij opgewekt en herinnerd dat er goede dingen in de wereld zijn." (So often, in the past as well, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me up and reminded me that there are good things in the world.) vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/l...

A smart idea to make the images of these flower stems extend all the way to the bottom edge of the paper, as if freshly cut (or not cut at all!)

"If you could go back in time and give advice to your younger self what would it be?" Some doozies here. My harmless favourite is the deadpan science-fictional "I’d tell her nothing because I wouldn’t want to risk influencing what happens in her future." www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Why do you choose to work with paint? (2024) www.artmonthly.org.au/blog/why-wor...

Victor Hugo's octopus commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vi...

Paintings by Seth Birchall www.sethbirchall.com

One of the three towers of a columbarium in Bateman, Western Australia. www.simonpendal.com/projects/st-...

A very large Guastavino vault. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baird_A...

Photo of St. Petersburg by Dmitry Ivanov. via commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pe...

The "nerd font" concept is essentially an alternative to the Unicode consortium's silly emoji process: let the market sort out codes for frivolous icons. Using private use code points is analogous to running a network behind a NAT; each user needs to select a vendor, but it seems to work.

Bryan Schutmaat Abandoned Homestead, 2011 news.artnet.com/market/bryan...

As ever, @annamerlan.bsky.social has written something timely and resonant. The quote from Dmytro Iarovyi had the odd effect of galvanizing me, by reminding me that my despair is not simply a defect, but is evoked by design.

Three falls, linocut on kitakata paper

This case could be mentioned on the Wiki page for Conway's Law: "Kahan attributes the 8087's stack problems to the time difference between California ... and Israel, where the 8087 was implemented. Due to a lack of communication, each team thought the other was implementing the overflow software."

it’s genuinely bonkers how every billboard in San Francisco is like: “Zirping your Pingos got you buggin? Yeah, Fnarf’s on that 🤖🦾”

"adulthood breaks you down until you have no choice but to bask in the majesty of spring. pretty sure i didn’t notice a magnolia until i was 29." (Tweet by Cara Weinberger, 26 April, 2022) Magnolias are coming out again now, at least in my neighborhood.

Bizarre argument that astronomy subsumes all other hard sciences www.jstor.org/stable/44616...

A professional coffee machine that costs €15k* should be able to anticipate when it will run out of milk. WMF machines suck the milk up through a tube from bottles (in a fridge) and there's nothing stopping them from running out of milk half-way through filling a cup! *they may typically be rented

Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks: one of several observations on on smoke www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5000

The Joycean category "neither my arse nor my elbow" suggests an application of de Morgan's laws. We can't tell the difference between our arse and our elbow, but from ¬(arse ∨ elbow) we can infer (¬arse) ∧ (¬elbow) which is in conjunctive normal form

Cherry blossom season is upon us in Vancouver. Want to find the best spots for viewing? Interested in specific species of cherry trees? My treemap has you covered. mountainmath.ca/vantrees

Ligne 6 vue d’en bas Paris / Métro #Photography #MobilePhotography

A few years ago I noticed that NCAD had a rule that students could not show work that was untitled. I don't know if this is still the case. It feels typically brutal and authoritarian, a failure to appreciate the importance of freedom in an art education that can be put down to geographic isolation.

Karl Eduard Biermann Borsig’s Maschinenbau-Anstalt zu Berlin (1847) commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ma... via de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industr....

Radio interview with James Hawes on his new history of Ireland www.rte.ie/radio/radio1...