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Nothing Ventured
The wave towered over me. Then the sound filled my ears. Not the calm breath of the waves; but it was surf music. I was maybe 3. Song names and artist names were beyond me. There was only the blue-green wave and the twang of the guitar.
The Very Best of the Ventures Album I have chased music all my life. Just had to figure out the tools. The record player and the giant speakers taught my first lesson: pressing buttons was joy. In my pursuit I learned in about records, tapes, CDs, mp3, flac, streaming, Napster, torrents, Winamp, VLC, blanks, CD-R/RWs, compression, bit rates, conversion, transfer, backups, VPN, networking, impedance matching, DACs, amplifiers, calibration, ARC, fibre, buying, licensing, and streaming in approximate order.
I discovered that they were called The Ventures by accident. Late in the college years I watched Pulp Fiction and wanted all the music. This one wasn’t quite home but it was the right street. It was surf music.
The hunt was on. Only a notion of the song and the confidence that I would know it when I heard it. I didn’t know the name of the album only that it had a big wave on the cover. It took me the better part of 6 months, on slow DSL, trawling all the sources I knew. Listening for that drum fade-in. Then one day I found it.
It’s been decades since the record player stopped spinning. I’ve moved a dozen times, the records were lost. I am the default A/V guy and love the role. Now I live in one of the surfiest places on the planet, the current still pulls but I walk, don’t run.
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20250605 links
Causality Podcast
Just discovered this it promises to be promising:
https://causalbanditspodcast.com/
AI deals show no signs of slowing
https://www.nature.com/articles/d43747-025-00027-z
Collectively, four notable trends are emerging;
– an increase in upfront commitments
– specialization in new therapeutic modalities (such as biologics rather than small molecules)
– the rise of niche dataset providers
– increasing participation from mid-to large-cap biotechs that are following the early adopters.
Brain cells compute cluster
https://spectrum.ieee.org/biological-computer-for-sale
Australian startup Cortical Labs has released what it calls the world’s first code-deployable biological computer. The CL1, which debuted in March, fuses human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops.
A great discussion on the Indian SME state
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On the rheology of cats
Probably the cutest paper you’ll read today.
The wetting and general tribology of cats has not progressed enough to give a definitive answer to the capillary
dependence of the feline relaxation time. Fig. 2b gives
an example of a lotus effect of Felis catus, suggesting
that the substrate is superfelidaphobic. […]
cats are proving to be a rich model system for rheological research, both in the linear and nonlinear regimes. -
It seems monstrosity requires an organic element. When there isn’t one, monster is more often an adjective than a noun qualifying an incomplete potential for monstrosity.
[…]
Monumentality embodies distant, impersonal forces at work, that pose a terrifying threat because they don’t care about us. Monsters on the other hand, care enough to be deliberately threatening to us.
Includes a recipe for making the perfect monster!
— Reading on contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/monsters-and-mediocrity -
Every few years decentralization and RSS feeds come back into the ligh. Usually this happens when one otherwise functional social media site dies in a real or practical way. Google Reader being my, and my generation’s, touchstone.
During these times of turmoil, a beautiful soul puts together a guide for how to use RSS. This is a good guide for this iteration: -
AI-generated image of The old Doge Enrico Dandolo sacking Constantinople I’m taking part in the Contraptions Book Club where we are reading City of Fortune which is about Venice. I was struck by the character of Doge Dandolo. Dude was 80+ when we saw a trade opportunity in the 4th Crusades. In the book, the author, Roger Crowley describes a brief moment when Dandolo makes a heroic rush on the banks of Constantinople’s Golden Horn during the Sack of Constantinople.
I found both the Doge and the imagery interesting so went looking for art depicting the art, there’s supposed to be lots. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any and nothing in the public domain. So I asked AI to generate something.There are other paintings like the one below, but not the one I was looking for.
The siege of Constantinople in 1204, by Palma il Giovane -
Came across a heartwarming fan-made comic of a collaborative story told on tumblr. A farmer makes a temple to see who shows up and it’s a self-doubting god of transient beauty. This immediately brought back the Small Gods from Discworld, but also the poem Worm by Gail Mcconnell.
The comic and the story are beautiful. Perhaps there is some sense to shrines…
via metafilter
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Trying something different for a few days. Instead of spamming all the social media accounts with daily links, I will post links only on the blog everyday. Maybe even multiple times a day.
Still thinking about doing a weekly digest or something. Let’s see.
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Jan 17, 2025
Table Turpentine
Came across the gt package for better tables in R. Might sound silly but it’s one of those cheap turpentine things.
Who made the train?
via ChiPa
Yunus Emre-The Watermill
via harvard blogs
Translation
Why do you groan, O Watermill; For I’ve troubles, I groan
I fell in love with the Lord; For It do I groan
They found me on a mountain; My arms and wings they plucked
Saw me fit for a watermill; For I’ve troubles, I groan
From the mountain they cut my wood; My disparate order they ruined
But an unwearied poet I am; For I’ve troubles, I groan
I am The Troubled Watermill; My water flows, roaring and rumbling
Thus has God commanded; For I’ve troubles, I groan
I am but a mountain’s tree; Neither am I bitter, nor sweet
I am but a pleader to the Lord; For I’ve troubles, I groan
Yunus, whoever comes here will find no joy, will not reach his desire
Nobody stays in this fleeting abode; For I’ve troubles, I groan -
Jan 16, 2025
Hardbreak: Hardware Hacking Wiki
This was a cool little find. I’ve always played with software in one form or another, but besides building PCs actual hardware hacking felt out of reach. Maybe I can start with some simple things like radio hacking.
The beauty of understanding
My love for science seems to always involve some sort of rube goldberg machine: you set things up just so and discoveries magically flow out. Sure, designing pretty experiments is difficult and there is a lot of literal and metaphorical heartbreak along the way but to finally discover the way is all frisson.
Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan conducted a study about that feeling. From the study website:
From the easier to digest Aeon article by the same authors, How the search for beauty drives scientific-enquiry:
At the deepest level, what motivates scientists to pursue and persist in their work is the aesthetic experience of understanding itself. Centring the beauty of understanding presents an image of science more recognisable to scientists themselves and with greater appeal for future scientists.
Do you hate it when scientists unbraid a moonbeam? Well, there’s three types of happiness scientists feel, apparently:
- Sensory beauty – what is visually or aurally striking
- Useful beauty – involves treating aesthetic properties such as simplicity, symmetry, aptness or elegance as heuristics or guides to truth.
- Beauty of understanding – grasping the hidden order, inner logic or causal mechanisms of natural phenomena.
Perhaps Edward Tufte knew a thing or two when he named his book Beautiful Evidence.
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Aneesh Sathe 