Ah, we now have a head of DHS who was never told that, yes, while you can pick your friends and pick your nose, you—without their consent at least—cannot pick your friends' noses.

It's funny that this came out of a distraction from outlining my last big paper of the quarter. "Huh, what do I need to bootstrap a kernel? Well, I need a process table, a handle table, a filesystem/object root, device drivers…" As I started hacking together Main(), it all kinda fell into place.

I was again reminded of the Inferno operating system and its accompanying Dis virtual machine, and I started thinking. Is it possible to lean on the CLR's type system and implement a similar kernel in C#? The answer, at first blush, appears to be yes.

English and many other languages, like Japanese if you're just learning and haven't gotten kanji down yet and Korean, incorporate space age technology.

The Ignalina NPP, before all of the constituent RBMKs were decommissioned, used to have a public dashboard whereby you could inspect the power output, and it had a cute little animation of the core doing its thing that was kind of reminiscent of a candle flickering.

Like, keeping up with a 5,000-10,000 words/week writing load is fine. I have to atone for waiting this long to finish the undergraduate rhetoric sequence somehow. I just wish the actual writing process didn't feel like scrubbing the floors with a toothbrush.

Oh, good. The Scientologists are here with their E-meters. The auditors don't like it when you explain what a Wheatstone bridge is, how it works, and how one is built in front of their preclears.

Wasserman, Anthony and Steven Gutz. "The Future of Programming." Communications of the ACM: vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 196-206, March 1982.

Opossums are extremely cool critters.

Sigh, (annotated) bibliographies without help from BibTeX.

Oh, huh. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostwald...

"Oh, hi, March."

Huh. Running csc causes dwm to crash. Windows, why?

Thema des Tages: „krass unfassbar“

Not a fan of the word "cabal." It's been used an awful lot lately, and I may have to take a walk before I do something decidedly not sober.

One of the kids in the larger Discord server for the school is serving as a reservist for the remainder of his enlistment contract. I'm not really digging the prospect that he'll be recalled into active duty and face the prospect of dying in a bullshit war.

Current catus "What're you thinkin'? Big cat thoughts? Like how you're going to keep me from going about my day by climbing up on me and falling asleep?"

I guess I'm writing about mathematics pedagogy, quantitative numeracy, and how they intersect with democracy this quarter? Alright.

Trans people are MechWarriors whether or not the larger BattleTech fandom likes it.

Current catus It's that point of the day during which Valérian can't decide if he wants lap time or shoulder time.

Current catus Laureline eventually relented with the understanding that she was allowed to use my backpack as a bed. (She really, really loves this bag.)

Current catus, addendum She has since jumped into my lap and is now making air biscuits.

Current catus I'd like to finish doing my laundry, but Laureline has other plans. She's been in here over an hour.

There are days when I think it'd be cool to have an inkjet into which I can load nice-ish 11-by-17 short-grain paper and bind my own notebooks, but then I look at the cost for a box of grid-ruled composition books and just shrug.

Blank BD-Rs seem to be inching toward becoming price-competitive with spinning rust. I need to look at tape later.

I really need a Zotero but for social media.

Current catus Valérian is, again, asleep on my feet. This time, however, he is not snoring.

Current catus Valérian is conked out on my feet and snoring very, very loudly.

"… debates now revolve around the validity of transgender identity." Sigh. That's manufactured consent.

Caturday catus Laureline is sleeping on my shins while I get some Yoko Ogawa reading done to close out the week. Valérian, as I was composing this post, came to join her.

Whoever did the translation of Marc-Uwe Kling's Känguru-Chroniken into English did a great job. There was some German meta in the original that I feared would be hard to translate, but I was pleased to see it handled well.

All primates are heart brachiators.

"Off in the distance, I can see a huge holographic Ronald McDonald walking between the grain elevators and trees." Man, I wish we had giant clowns just clowning around like this.

The power play seems to be to use Keisler's exercises as warmups for Stewart's. After spending half an hour warming up with the roughly equivalent Keisler exercises (and, often, finishing the section), Stewart's become way less arduous to work. What a bizarre psychological trick.

The kids really want to run Litestep, but the modern Redmond systems distribution says no.

Consider: Loren Mipsum and Dolores Itamet They're only pretending to be placeholders.

Current catus I have earned the honor of being furniture for two cats after having mediated this conflict.

Current catus I'm continuing to assert that this is a sinnamon bun-free household.

Sigh. Kurzgesagt has given us a genus 2 coffee mug.

Supposedly, both WD and Seagate have already sold their projected supply of spinning rust for 2026. I might have to haul ass to get to a point where I can spend time in integration hell and release the thing I've been tinkering with.

I finally have what looks like a nice pattern for give-up-on-life pants.

Consider: the SID sound hardware from the Commodore 64 is, more or less, a digitally-controlled Minimoog synthesizer

Plötzlich „Die drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass“ ganz am Ende. Na dann… Die Geschichte „Rhabarberbarbara“ als Zungenbrecher hört sich trotzdem eigentlich nicht schlecht. youtu.be/ZYkBf0dbs5I

I'm taking Rhetoric II this quarter because I'd somehow never managed to take it the first go-around, and the prof had an understanding that mathematics was just equations. I walked through a proof of $(ab)^(-1)=b^(-1)a^-(1)$ for $ a,b$ in any group, and she instantly recognized the reasoning.

Current catus Valérian has hopped up on my chest and loafed as if he owns the place.

Since this appears to be the time for intrusive thoughts: "But his jeemails," as a throwback to the scandal about Clinton's non-GSA-run mail server.

Current catus Laureline is following me around the house, making a point to steal my spot whenever I get up.

I appreciate how NT feels both a step up and a step down from Unix. It's had a systemd-alike since at least 3.51 in services.exe, but to run something like emacsclient with a persistent server process that starts at boot, you still need to use schtasks.exe's equivalent of cron's @reboot directive.

Oh, no, no. Don't mistake me for a creature with physical hands! What I have are narrative hands. They're the kind that you read about.

You have as many birthdays as St. Valentine's days, but while you grow older without working at it, the same can't be said about growing more loved.