Nuttymilkshakedreamland-blog - Welcome

Creativity is not a rare insight, that comes to you suddenly, once in a lifetime, to change the world. It’s just the opposite…The key is to learn how to bring your ideas together, over time.

Keith Sawyer (via creativesomething)

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 September 4 

Io over Jupiter from Voyager 1 

Back in 1979, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter and its moons. The images in this mosaic, featuring the moon Io against a background of gas giant Jupiter’s diffuse swirling cloud bands, were recorded by Voyager’s camera from a distance of about 8.3 million kilometers. The Io image from this mosaic may be the first to show curious round features on Io’s surface with dark centers and bright rims more than 60 kilometers across. Now known to be volcanic in origin, these features were then thought likely to be impact craters, commonly seen on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System. But as Voyager continued to approach Io, close-up pictures revealed a bizarre world devoid of impact craters, frequently resurfaced by volcanic activity. Earlier this year a new robotic spacecraft, NASA’s Juno, began to orbit Jupiter and last week made a pass within 5,000 kilometers of Jupiter’s clouds. During the next two years, it is hoped that Juno will discover new things about Jupiter, for example what’s in Jupiter’s core.

Power Macintosh 7100/80

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde (via story-dj)

6 Tumblr shortcuts for blogging on a computer

Quick scroll, like, and view notes of a post on your dashboard: Keys J, K, L and N come very handy. Hit J for next post, K for previous post, L to like a post and N to show post’s notes 

Quickly compose a new post from anywhere on your Dashboard:  key combo Z + C (Option + Z for Mac)

Quickly reblog a post: Shift + R (Not working? Make sure you are on the right post by pressing J or K)

Quickly add a post to your Queue: Shift + E

Quickly play a video: Just click Enter

Quickly switch between your Dashboard and your Blogs: key combo Z+ Tab

A software problem which has already been solved, but not everywhere.

In the early days of the WWW, some websites were a lot better than others. Some places you would fill out a form and it would log you out and forget your stuff; the meaning of icons varied across the web; ….

Nowadays, there are a lot of Standards. There’s a certain way things generally work. Visual cues consistently mean the same thing and work the way I, as a semi-daft user with a lisp and a peg leg, would expect it to, without any further thought or research.

How did this wonderful increase in usability and optimisation happen? I think it’s due to JQuery.

For those who don’t know, JQuery is a bunch of software libraries that do common tasks like “initiate twitter-like pagination” or “build a form” the right way. In other words, some people who had seen a lot of good and bad choices, wrote some functions that any other programmer can use, and wrote down all the best 500-line programs so that other people could do them with just 1 line. (If you still don’t understand what I mean by a “library”, look at the third or fourth lesson on an introduction to C++ tutorial – somewhere in the beginning the instructor will explain why sometimes you want to take a long program and split off bits of the code as separate functions.)

  So here are several problems that have all been solved very nicely. The problems were that:

not everyone has the time/funds to perfect every last nanometer of their website

not everyone has the expertise to do everything perfectly

consequently, users had a bad experience

consequently, less business was transacted online

many people were solving the same problem

too much code was being written to solve the same problem in different places

consequently, management’s and programmers’ interests were disaligned.

The problem was solved through specialisation, as well as programming techniques like abstraction, callbacks, encapsulation, so on.

How far can this Library solution be taken? I mean both in the sense of economic viability and in the sense of programmability.

If I’m typing in some random stuff into R, I kind of expect that sparse matrices are multiplying in the best way possible, or in general that calculations are being done as quick as they could be.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every data structure could automatically tap into any relevant mathematical theorems that reduce calculation time or provide insights? For example the computer shouldn’t literally add the numbers 1+2+3+…+97+98+99+100 because mathematicians already know that 1+100 + 2+99 + 3+98 + 4+97 … = 101 × 50, which is way quicker to calculate. Wouldn’t it be great if data structures could automatically “know” (via libraries) any theorem about curvature, graph traversal, Yoneda lemma, and so on, without the programmer having to be a maths textbook him/herself?

Is this impossible? Or has it just not been done yet?

is it a good idea to drink redbull when you are prone to anxiety induced by F1 races

me: anime is saved thanks to SGRS

SGRS: season 2 episode 12

me: I was a fool to ever believe