What the Ukraine flag signifies. A golden field of grain (Ukraine is the world’s 4th largest exporter of barley and corn, and the 5th largest exporter of wheat) beneath clear blue skies. Sky above grain, or freedom above bread (source1.) The story of Ukraine’s flag is rich and controversial. It appears to be true, however, that “blue sky over sunflowers” forms Ukrainians’ conception of their flag. [rss]: https://nicolaiarocci.com/index.xml [tw]: http://twitter....
The first preview of C# 11 is out, and well, I think I like what I see. I dig the new List patterns and am a fan of allowing newlines in the “holes” of interpolated strings. Parameter null-checking is a bit contentious, and it’s good that they are releasing it in preview one and asking for feedback. In a nutshell, they want to spare us a lot of boilerplate. Code like this:...
This book is not about the famous, daring, and in some ways fortunate capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires in 1960, nor about the covert transfer of the Nazi officer to Israel. Instead, the volume recounts the 1961 trial in Jerusalem, which ended with the defendant being sentenced to death. Hannah Arendt followed the trial as a correspondent for The New Yorker. She took notes, studied the papers, and reconstructed the many witnesses’ personal stories....
Kottke reports this juicy excerpt from Jonny Greenwood’s interview at npr: Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off....
Chelsea Wald in Nature: Scientists say that urine diversion would have huge environmental and public-health benefits if deployed on a large scale around the world. That’s in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or feed into industrial processes. According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’)....
Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries. […] Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust....
I’ve been back at the forge working on Eve 2.0. Version 2 will support Python 3.7+ and drop Python 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6. It will bring support for PyMongo 4+ as well, along with several other minor fixes and improvements (changelog). It would be nice if you guys and gals, users of Eve, would give it a spin before the release. I know. I recently stated that Eve was in maintenance mode....
When Giulia came home from school today, she was anxious to tell me what she learned about a Viking King and his legacy. She told me the story of King Harald Gormsson, who ruled Denmark and Norway from c. 958 to c. 986. Harald is mainly known for introducing Christianity to Denmark and consolidating his rule over most Jutland and Zealand. However, what sparked my interest is that Harald was nicknamed “Bluetooth”, and, in 1997, the Bluetooth wireless specification design was named after him....
I stumbled upon Modulations, a documentary on “the evolution of electronic music and its many genres. How the wide range of styles and scenes formed through experimentations on sound formation.” This short film (75 minutes) is packed with guest stars of all calibers1, some of them genuinely pivotal to the evolution of electronic music. Indeed, the uninitiated mind gets to know a lot of details and amenities on the first decade or so of electronic music....
One of my recent discoveries is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Bret Devereaux, an historian who’s been posting great content over the years. His Fireside Fridays, for example, provide intriguing musings on varied topics. In this week instalment, professor Devereaux takes on the different applications of blockchain technology as seen from a historian’s perspective. Really, this is less about the technologies themselves and more about the nature of states....