deerpig

The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.

Web Style Guide – Basic Design Principles for Creating Website Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton 2nd edition, page 97.

I disagree, perseverance is not the same as goal-seeking for goal seeking's sake, or at least, it doesn't have to be.

Twenty years ago I set a thirty year goal, literally bet my life on it. It wasn't until two years ago that I was reasonably sure it had a chance of success. I had to, and continue to basically give up everything, no one funds very long term research, so I had to learn to live on less than $200 a month. No healthcare, not being able to buy a new pair of glasses, only being able to buy clothes once a year or so. But I found a university who believed in my work, gave me an office and a flat on campus outside of Phnom Penh and the freedom to follow the project wherever it went. No salary, but it's been enough.

Perseverance is what keeps you sane, gets you up in the morning. It gets you through whatever is thrown at you. I have not had a happy or easy life, but it has been a life full of purpose. I have seen and done things that most people couldn't imagine, that has been, many times, too weird to be believable even as fiction.

Perseverance is a skill you practice every day for the rest of your life. But there are many small compensations. You find kindness and beauty and from time to time pleasure in unexpected places along the way.

With the university's help we will go to press with the first volume later this year, with a volume every year or so until it's finished on or about 2030. No one would willingly choose such a life, you fall into such things, and I was one of the stupid one's who took on such a ridiculously ambitious challenge. With a little luck I will live to see it through to the end.

So for some, purpose and perseverance, trump happiness and comfort and security. Though I admit I am likely and edge case.

I must say though, my wife and I sure as shit would like to live on a little more than $200 a month. :)

Physical Review D is not a light weight journal. You don't get published there unless you are being taken seriously in the scientific community.

And "stochastic superoptimization" sounds so much cooler than their original term; "super-duper random improvement."

Yahoo, when it was a single page with a couple of dozen links. I think that was before there was a browser for Windows -- I was using the Omniweb browser on a NeXT Color workstation. I still miss the original Wired and later Wired News.

So it's sort of the opposite of Field of Dreams, which often results in vaporware. Just because people come, doesn't mean they know what they want or know how to express a problem or need that could be solved and result in a viable product. It's a big risk to gather people using a human interest story in order to sell them that you haven't made, or really formulated yet. Is your story compelling enough to keep interest long enough for you to build and launch a product? How will you find the time to keep them engaged while building the product? You may well luck out, and if you do that's great for you. But it doesn't make it a good idea.

It's in elisp? Of course it is. It's emacs!

Great music. I want one.

Site is down for me....

I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block and yes it is noisy. I will eventually gut it and install a six node linux cluster inside.

I used these boxes in Hong Kong in the early 90's, then later in Japan in the late 90's for a number of projects and I was still using an Indy as my main desktop until 2001.

SGI created hardware that almost took your breath away, you knew you were seeing a future that not many people had the privilege to see back then in person. To me, having the box sitting next to me every day, with "infinite reality" label on the top reminds me of those days when anything seemed possible and all of it was magical. I miss that sense of wonder and infinite possibilities...

SGI famously converted one of their Crimsons (which was a commercial failure) into a fridge and beer tap...

I've noticed that over the last few years it's become increasingly difficult to do things with US based services (especially banking) if you are outside of the US. And this goes double if you are a US citizen with no ties to the States other than citizenship. Americans as a general rule have never been terribly adept at anything international; banking, languages, or even base geography. We have offices in Cambodia and Laos and I have been told by more than one US based-service/company that Laos is not a real country. I suppose they think the .la domain stands for Los Angeles :) We are looking to set up an office in Hong Kong or Singapore and use that to deal with Western countries. But we're a small not-for-profit operation and HK and Singapore are EXPENSIVE.

Sounds like a pun from the Wake. I would be surprised if it wasn't. I loved the Wake. Only read it once all the way through but I dip into it from time to time.

It's a fantastic place to find memorable phrases that make good passwords.

Gitlab requires a lot of resources. We have a local Openstack cluster and were running GitLab on a small instance. It was a beast. Moved to a larger instance and it works beautifully even over the Internet from another ISP.

This just makes me sad. When class material, which is supposed to be the antithesis of closed and proprietary is treated as property, then there is something very wrong with the educational system you are working in. Education is about spreading knowledge as far and wide as possible, not controlling it.

All of the course material we are developing for a new four year IT, information literacy and Big History program for a Cambodian university is licensed under a twin MIT/CC license for all media (there will be a lot of video), code and text and will be downloadable from GitHub. We hope this material can be used and adapted for use anywhere. We've done this to prevent anyone from trying to make make the material proprietary and ensure it stays free, not because we were worried about what students might do with it.

I had never heard of an "academic integrity agreement" before. I just googled it and found this:

  "Some schools have created an honor code -- a school-wide 
  agreement about ethical behavior -- that parents sign in 
  September and students sign each time they turn in an 
  assignment, quiz or exam."  
  -- https://www.edutopia.org/blog/academic-integrity-cheat-or-be-cheated-denise-pope

Sign a statement for every assignment, quiz or exam? WTF! An honor code that takes out the "honor" and replaces it with "legal" is no longer an honor code, it is a contract. This is the sign of a broken society.

To paraphrase Monty Python, "America is a silly place, let's not go there."