Feb 12, 2026 from Kev Quirk The Internet is a Hamster Wheel I was listening to a recent episode of The Rest is Science (fantastic Podcast, by the way - go listen), and in this particular episode Michael and Hannah were discussing boredom. At one point in th...
Feb 12, 2026 from It's FOSS Linux Mint Wants Fewer Releases Each Year (For Good Reasons) Lead developer says frequent releases leave little time for development.
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Willie Singletary will you please go now? (Previously: [1] [2]) Welcome to Philadelphia! We have a lot of political corruption here. I recently wrote about the unusually corrupt Philadelphia Traffic Court, where four of the judges went to ...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Proof by insufficient information Content warning: rambly Given the coordinates of the three vertices of a triangle, can we find the area? Yes. If by no other method, we can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the lengths of the ed...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse A puzzle about balancing test tubes in a centrifuge Suppose a centrifuge has slots, arranged in a circle around the center, and we have test tubes we wish to place into the slots. If the tubes are not arranged symmetrically around the center, the ce...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Claude and I write a utility program Then I had two problems… A few days ago I got angry at xargs for the hundredth time, because for me xargs is one of those "then he had two problems" technologies. It never does what I want by defau...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse A descriptive theory of seasons in the Mid-Atlantic [ I started thinking about this about twenty years ago, and then writing it down in 2019, but it seems to be obsolete. I am publishing it anyway. ] The canonical division of the year into seasons i...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse The fivefold symmetry of the quince The quince is so-named because, like other fruits in the apple family, it has a natural fivefold symmetry: This is because their fruits develop from five-petaled flowers, and the symmetry persists ...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Mystery of the quincunx's missing quincunx A quincunx is the X-shaped pattern of pips on the #5 face of a die. It's so-called because the Romans had a common copper coin called an as, and it was divided (monetarily, not physically) into twe...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse My new git utility `what-changed-twice` needs a new name As I have explained in the past, my typical workflow is to go along commiting stuff that might or might not make sense, then clean it all up at the end, doing multiple passes with git-add and git-r...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse An anecdote about backward compatibility A long time ago I worked on a debugger program that our company used to debug software that it sold that ran on IBM System 370. We had IBM 3270 CRT terminals that could display (I think) eight colo...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Almost-trivial theorems A couple of years back I wrote an article about this bit of mathematical folklore: Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia published a paper proving that all partially unifo...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse Crooked politicians love crab cakes! I recently posted an article about the 2013 Philadelphia Traffic Court fiasco, in which most of the Traffic Court judges were convicted of accepting bribes: According to the indictment, Perri accep...
Feb 12, 2026 from The Universe of Discourse John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds BuyArtificial Intelligence from Bookshop.org(with kickback)(without kickback) One of the better books I read in college was Artifical Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) by philosopher John Haugelan...
Feb 12, 2026 from Dev Blog Convert a React app to a Desktop app with Electron Convert a React app to a Desktop app with Electron
Feb 12, 2026 from Dev Blog Create a simple server with Node.js, Express and Typescript Create a simple server with Node.js, Express and Typescript
