Public

Paper about the problems with the English contract-tracing scheme, with particular emphasis on the issues with the use of Excel.

While I'm not convinced that it makes sense to focus on the idea of "marriage" in this article -- it seems to approach it as if it's the only sensible and viable long-term form of relationship -- I do like the main thrust of it; the idea that the best relationships are those where each partner can make space for the other(s).

Very readable article that explains the purpose and the content of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, from the point of view of the actual sequence of it, and done in terms that a developer can relate to.

The story behind the infamous lava/fire photograph.

On the surface: an article about how to open files in Emacs. Not so on the surface: an article about why Emacs is.

Bandcamp's pick of songs from artists on the site; with the subject being... well, this subject of this bookmark. Some really neat stuff here.

Good essay that gives plenty of reasons why HR are not there for you; they're 100% there for the company and nothing else.

Excellent description of everything that goes into making a COVID-19 vaccine.

Useful wiki that details each of the muscles in the body and how you can develop them.

The Genomics Boot Camp is a resource that helps you to start your journey in practical analysis of genomic data, with a focus on SNP data. The chapters follow the same structure all the time: provide background information and practical insight to the topic, and when appropriate exercises to reinforce the obtained knowledge. The Genomics Boot Camp as a whole was designed to cater to various learning preferences with written text, video demonstrations, and the possibility of hands-on exercises. There is a certain overlap between the book and the YouTube channel contents, but each has unique pieces of information as well. So for the full experience, I suggest checking out both.

Tweet that contains an image of a reddit post (I know!) that explains the whole solution with hedge funds, GameStop and r/WSB, and does it in a very short and easy to understand way.

Comprehensive explanation of the situation with r/WSB, GameStop shares and the taking down of some hedge funds.

This broad introductory book gives you an overview of the computer graphics field with a focus on two core areas of modern graphics: raytracing and rasterization. Links to interactive demos throughout bring the algorithms alive. Every algorithm is built up without the use of external libraries or APIs and is presented with language agnostic pseudocode, allowing anyone with a basic understanding of programming and high school math to follow along.

This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. (Of course, the more practical purpose of this document is to describe a few of the inner workings of the ELF file format and the Linux operating system. But hopefully you can also learn something about how to make really teensy ELF executables in the process.)

Handy view of the state of the Common Lisp ecosystem as of 2020.

Webinar covering information about Benchling's "Validated Cloud" offering.

Very useful support resource I wish I'd found when I needed it most. The second best time to have discovered it is now, of course.

One of the classics of the Internet. I like this alot.

Quote: "The number-one complaint among loved ones isn’t manipulation, splitting, mood swings, rage, jealousy, devaluation, triangulation, the victim Olympics, or really any of the well-known drama/trauma/abuse. It’s the pervasive lack of accountability."

Interesting explanation of the idea of "reactive abuse", where an abuser keeps abusing someone until they get to the point that they react and then the reaction is called abuse.

Interesting-looking tutorial on making VR apps with the Web.

Fortran wasn't dead, but it did smell a bit funny. Some work to make it a bit more "modern".

My son's EchoVR team.

As per the title: an open letting calling for the removal of RMS from all Free Software leadership positions; especially now that he's been let back into one within the FSF.

Kilts are awesome. Skirts are awesome. Isn’t it about time we removed gender-associations from pretty much all clothing and just have… clothes?

As this article says, I've always tended to drop down to the CLI to delete a branch, and ensure it's cleaned from the remote, etc. Somehow I'd never picked up on the fact that Magit just handles this. And of course, it does, Magit does so much!

A group's collective intelligence reflects its capacity to perform well across a variety of cognitive tasks and it transcends the individual intelligence of its members. Previous research shows that group members' social sensitivity is a potential antecedent of collective intelligence, yet it is still unclear whether individual or group-level indices are responsible for the positive association between social sensitivity and collective intelligence. In a comprehensive manner, we test the extent to which both compositional (lowest and highest individual score) and compilational aspects (emergent group level) of social sensitivity are associated with collective intelligence. This study has implications for research that explores groups as information processors, and for group design as it indicates how a group should be composed with respect to social sensitivity if the group is to reach high levels of collective intelligence. Our empirical results indicate that collectively intelligent groups are those in which the least socially sensitive group member has a rather high score on social sensitivity. Differently stated, (socially sensitive) group members cannot compensate for the lack of social sensitivity of the other group members.

This is a great description of why the Emacs virgins "joke" is so problematic, and why it helpfully demonstrates so many of the problems with RMS' influence over Emacs and Free Software culture.