Small harbours.
Tags: hd
30
Saturday, September 2nd, 2023
Wednesday, August 9th, 2023
Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React - Josh Collinsworth blog
I don’t think most people using React on a regular basis realize quite how much it’s fallen behind.
Following on from Josh’s earlier post where he said “React isn’t great at anything except being popular”, here are the details.
Every decision React’s made since its inception circa 2013 is another layer of tech debt—one that its newer contemporaries aren’t constrained by.
This is particularly damning:
No other modern frontend framework is as stubbornly incompatible with the platform as React is.
The good news:
React is a bit like a git branch that’s fallen well behind
main
. You might not realize it, if React is the star your galaxy orbits around, but…well, frontend has moved on. The ecosystem has taken those ideas and run with them to make things that are even better.
Friday, February 11th, 2022
Awesome astrophotography from the South Downs | Science | The Guardian
To mark the start of the Dark Skies Festival today, here are some fantastic photographics taken not that far from Brighton.
Thursday, February 25th, 2021
Fifty
Today is my birthday. I am one twentieth of a millenium old. I am eighteen and a quarter kilo-days old. I am six hundred months old. I am somewhere in the order of 26.28 mega-minutes old. I am fifty years old.
The reflected light of the sun that left Earth when I was born has passed Alpha Cephei and will soon reach Delta Aquilae. In that time, our solar system has completed 0.00002% of its orbit around the centre of our galaxy.
I was born into a world with the Berlin Wall. That world ended when I turned eighteen.
Fifty years before I was born, the Irish war of independence was fought while the world was recovering from an influenza pandemic.
Fifty years after I was born, the UK is beginning its post-Brexit splintering while the world is in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.
In the past few years, I started to speculate about what I might do for the big Five Oh. Should I travel somewhere nice? Or should I throw a big party and invite everyone I know?
Neither of those are options now. The decision has been made for me. I will have a birthday (and subsequent weekend) filled with the pleasures of home. I plan to over-indulge with all my favourite foods, lovingly prepared by Jessica. And I want the finest wines available to humanity—I want them here and I want them now.
I will also, inevitably, be contemplating the passage of time. I’m definitely of an age now where I’ve shifted from “explore” to “exploit.” In other words, I’ve pretty much figured out what I like doing. That is in contrast to the many years spent trying to figure out how I should be spending my time. Now my plans are more about maximising what I know I like and minimising everything else. What I like mostly involves Irish traditional music and good food.
So that’s what I’ll be doubling down on for my birthday weekend.
Friday, October 2nd, 2020
Playing The Kid On The Mountain (slip jig) on mandolin:
Monday, September 28th, 2020
Playing The Coleraine (jig) on mandolin:
Monday, August 31st, 2020
Playing The Connaughtman’s Rambles (jig) on mandolin:
Tuesday, June 9th, 2020
Playing Castle Kelly (reel) on bouzouki:
Friday, May 1st, 2020
Playing Sonny Brogan’s (jig) on mandolin:
Saturday, March 21st, 2020

Playing Swinging On The Gate (reel) on mandolin:
Tuesday, January 1st, 2019
Tuesday, April 18th, 2017
PhD Thesis: Cascading Style Sheets
Håkon wrote his doctoral thesis on CSS …which is kinda like Einstein writing a thesis on relativity. There’s some fascinating historical insight into the creation of the standards we use today.
Wednesday, September 14th, 2016

Tagliere di salumi.
Friday, June 24th, 2016

Bavette with salad and charred cauliflower.
Thursday, February 4th, 2016
The Many Faces Of… Punch Dancing
Last time I was in Austin I met up with Trent who got very animated when as he described a childhood strapping shinguards to his arms and recreating the montage fighting/dancing scenes from the finest of 80s movies.
That explains where this website is coming from.
Saturday, November 21st, 2015

Cooking Coq au Vin.
Sunday, June 21st, 2015
100 words 091
It’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the day.
Last year I spent the summer solstice visiting a telescope in the woods outside Riga:
we were inside the observatory getting a tour of the telescope at the precise moment that the astronomical summer began.
Later that evening, when I was back in my hotel room, I fired off a quick DM to Chloe, simply saying “Happy Birthday!” (it’s an easy date to remember).
She responded the next day with a curiously distant message. “Thanks Jeremy. Hope you’re well.”
And that was the last DM I ever got from Chloe.
Thursday, January 22nd, 2015

Ben’s coffee, made on the new Clearleft coffee machine.
Sunday, October 12th, 2014
Habitasteroids
Science Hack Day San Francisco was held in the Github offices last weekend. It was brilliant!
This was the fifth Science Hack Day in San Francisco and the 40th worldwide. That’s truly incredible. I mean, I literally can’t believe it. When I organised the very first Science Hack Day back in 2010, I had no idea how far it would go. But Ariel has been indefatigable in making it a truly global event. She is amazing. And at this year’s San Francisco event, she outdid herself in putting together a fantastic cross-section of scientists, designers, and developers: paleontology, marine biology, geology, astronomy, particle physics, and many, many more disciplines were represented in the truly diverse attendees.
After an inspiring set of lightning talks on the first day, ideas started getting bounced around and the hacking began to take shape. I had a vague idea for—yet another—space-related hack. What clinched it was picking the brains of NASA’s Keri Bean. She’d help me get hold of the dataset I needed for my silly little hack.
So here’s the background…
There are many possibilities for human habitats in space: Stanford tori, O’Neill cylinders, Bernal spheres. Another idea, explored in science fiction, is hollowing out asteroids (Larry Niven’s bubbleworlds). Kim Stanley Robinson explores this idea in depth in his book 2312, where he describes the process of building an asteroid terrarium. The website of the book has a delightful walkthrough of the engineering processes involved. It’s not entirely implausible.
I wanted to make that idea approachable, so I thought about the kinds of people we might want to have living with us on the interior shell of a rotating hollowed-out asteroid. How about the people you follow on Twitter?
The only question that remains then is: which asteroid is the right one for you and your Twitter friends? Keri tracked down the motherlode of asteroid data and I started hacking the simplest of mashups—Twitter meets space rocks.
Here’s the result…
Give it your Twitter username and it will tell you exactly which one of the asteroids in the main belt is right for you (I considered adding an enterprise option that would tell you where you could store your social network in the cloud …the Oort cloud, that is).
Be default, your asteroid will have the population density of Earth, which is quite generously. But if you want a more sparsely-populated habitat—say, the population density of Australia—or a more densely-populated world—with something like the population density of Japan—then you will be assigned a larger or smaller asteroid accordingly.
You’ll also be told by how much you should increase or decrease the rotation of the asteroid to get one gee of centrifugal force on the interior. Figuring out the equations for calculating centrifugal force almost broke me, but luckily I had help from a rocket scientist and a particle physicist …I’m not even kidding. And I should point out that the calculations take some liberties—I’m assuming a spherical body, which is quite a stretch, given the lumpy nature of most asteroids.
At 13:37 on the second day, the demos began. Keri and I were first up.
Give Habitasteroids a whirl for yourself. It’s a silly little thing, but I quite like how it turned out.
Speaking of silly things …at some point in the proceedings, Keri put the call out for asteroid data to her fellow space enthusiasts on Twitter. They responded with asteroid-related puns.
@PlanetaryKeri So you’re not as investa’d in Ceres as the rest of the team? @motorbikematt @adactio #LordOfThePuns
— J.L. Galache (@JLGalache) October 5, 2014
@jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio Don’t Juno better than to make puns like that? @brianwolven
— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014
@lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Recruiting the rest of your astro Pallas to get in on the asteroid pun action?
— Brian Wolven (@brianwolven) October 5, 2014
@brianwolven @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Your puns give me the Hebe jeebies.
— brx0 (@brx0) October 5, 2014
@brx0 @brianwolven @jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio @paix120 At this point we’ve all been led Astraea :-(
— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014
@brx0 @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Ida feeling that might happen eventually.
— Brian Wolven (@brianwolven) October 5, 2014
@brianwolven @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio It’ like you’re Psyche or something.
— brx0 (@brx0) October 5, 2014
@lukedones @brx0 @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio @paix120 With this crew, at least the pun Themis pretty obvious.
— Brian Wolven (@brianwolven) October 5, 2014
@brianwolven @lukedones @brx0 @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio You guys sure know Alauda asteroid names.
— Renee (@paix120) October 5, 2014
@brianwolven @lukedones @brx0 @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Europa creek if u’re Wikipedia’ing like me. Thisbe the end.
— Renee (@paix120) October 5, 2014
@paix120 @brianwolven @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio The end? So this is the last Gaspra?
— brx0 (@brx0) October 5, 2014
@brx0 @paix120 @brianwolven @jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio We should probably stop at Gaspra before we reach Eros.
— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014
@brianwolven @paix120 @lukedones @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio I Echo this sentiment.
— brx0 (@brx0) October 5, 2014
@lukedones @paix120 @brianwolven @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Too late. Pandora’s box has been opened.
— brx0 (@brx0) October 5, 2014
@brx0 @lukedones @brianwolven @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio tho, someone might Summanus to the Psyche ward.
— Renee (@paix120) October 5, 2014
@paix120 @brx0 @brianwolven @jlgalache @planetarykeri @motorbikematt @adactio Have Merxia on us all!
— lukemonster (@lukedones) October 5, 2014
@paix120 @lukedones @brianwolven @JLGalache @PlanetaryKeri @motorbikematt @adactio Every other Twitter pun game Pales in comparison.
— brx0 (@brx0) October 5, 2014
They have nice asteroids though: @brianwolven, @lukedones, @paix120, @LGalache, @motorbikematt, @brx0.
Oh, and while Habitasteroids might be a silly little hack, WRANGLER just might work.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2014
The Internet of Things Will Ruin Birthdays — The Message — Medium
A peak at a near-future mundane dystopia from Joanne McNeil that reminds me of Brian’s spime story