The Simple Algorithm That Ants Use to Build Bridges (2018)
Army ants form colonies of millions yet have no permanent home. They march through the jungle each night in search of new foraging ground. Along the way they perform logistical feats that would make a four-star general proud, including building bridges with their own bodies. Much like the swarms of cheap, dumb robots that I […]
You are not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites
Home ▸ Blog ▸ Current Page Aug 19, 2024 / Read time: 1 min I always thought I was too “dumb” to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult. This belief shadowed me for years, a constant […]
A $10k stipend is available for anyone moving to Cumberland, MD
Considering moving to Cumberland? The City is offering a new program designed to attract families to live inside City limits. The package, offering up to $20,000 is comprised of $10,000 in relocation cash, PLUS up to $10,000, dollar for dollar match, for approved renovations on an existing home, OR for a down payment on a […]
Firewalling Your Code
When writing code, you can call any function as long as it’s public, and similarly, you can access any object’s public properties or methods. Usually, access to code is all or none – a piece of code can be either public or private. Access to private code is typically controlled by the upper layer that […]
Show HN: Firebuilder: A complete Firefox customization tool
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Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway
Enlarge / The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing. Astro Forge When I first spoke with space entrepreneurs Jose Acain and Matt Gialich a little more than two years ago, I wondered whether I would ever talk to them again. That is not meant to be offensive; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that […]
Out of Your Head
Explore Oliver Sacks wasn’t always the beloved neurologist we remember today, sleuthing around the backwaters of the mind in search of mysterious mental disorders. For a few years in the 1960s, he was a committed psychonaut, often spending entire weekends blitzed out of his mind on weed, LSD, morning glory seeds, or mescaline. Once, after […]
Contempt for the Glue People
The clip below is from a lecture from 2008(?) that then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave to a Stanford class. [embedded content] Here’s a transcript, emphasis mine. When I was at Novell, I had learned that there were people who I call “glue people”. The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries […]
Knockknock: Simple, secure, and stealthy port knocking implementation
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They don’t make ’em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Borland’s Turbo Pascal was one of the most successful programming tools of all time. It introduced development techniques, such as integrated source-level debugging, that we take for granted today; but which were radical at the time. TP 7, also known as Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, was the pinnacle of the Turbo Pascal line, and […]