Notices by sajith (sajith@mastodon.social)

We have been watching monarchs this summer, so I read Anurag Agrawal's "Monarchs and Milkweed: a Migrating Butterfly, a Poisonous Plant, and Their Remarkable Story of Coevolution" with a lot of thrill. Milkweed is trying to kill monarchs with latex and cardenolides, but monarchs sequester cardenolides for their own defence.

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10944.html

The hardbound edition is excellently produced, well-written, and I want a copy for myself.

Agrawal's blog is great too:

http://www.eeb.cornell.edu/agrawal/

@wilfredh I remember reading somewhere (Basecamp's Signal v. Noise blog, maybe?) that they used to be profitable in their pre-VC days, back when they were bootstrapped. They raised money, took the high-growth path, and became unprofitable.

Today I planted a dogwood tree (cornus kousa), sowed some seeds, did some raking, etc.

Every time I dig up the yard a robin shows up to look for worms in the freshly dug soil. Sometimes he makes conversation in bird-speak. Sometimes he brings a friend.

I like to think of the two of us as friends.

But is it the same robin that I see every time? I have no idea.

The website nextdoor dot com is making me loathe my own suburban existence.

There is an endless stream of pansy suburbanites freaking out about an unfamiliar (and therefore threatening to the freaking out suburbanite) life form that had the misfortune of encountering the said pansy suburbanite just that day: a coyote! a skunk! a black person!

Except for work commitments, I am done being here.

😡

Exciting new developments!

Dear Internet: please turn down the Musk worshipping a little bit.

I do not find the man very interesting. I find Tesla cars pretty ugly. SpaceX stuff appears way too pompous to me. I don't know what's the matter with you folks. Mass delusion, perhaps?

Kthxbai.

@JordiGH Are you familiar with Kenneth Iverson's Turing award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought"?

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

He quotes A.N. Whitehead:

"By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race."

APL drives me nuts, but I think this point makes sense.

When websites disable paste in text entry fields, I can defeat that with Firefox:

- go to about:config
- set "dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled" to false
- paste away