Enjoyed this write-up from Tom MacWright, if only because I spend a lot of my time writing Rails, still, even in 2020-1. It's nice to be reminded by somebody thoughtful, but coming from outside, that yes, there's still a lot to like in your part of the world, that it's not an ideological dead-end. And yes, that the _culture_ around the Ruby ecosystem really is, by and large, a good one. Sure, we don't have strong typing (well, we kinda do now), but we do have lots of great _practice_ around testing, and writing code in the first place. Not having IntelliSense™ is sometimes an advantage. Also, having wrapped a four-month Ruby contract recently, it's just such a nice language to write – and to *think* in.

(I'm with Tom on the whiffiness of all versions of the asset pipeline / webpacker / whatever it is we're doing this week.)

Excellent thread on the practical (ie: working) helmets built for Daft Punk back around… Discovery, I'm guessing? Gawping a little at the wiring, and the stress involved…

"The LM13600 has designed by Bill Gross and myself in less than 5 minutes." Which is a humbling anecdote about a classic OTA amplifier. But, as the story goes on, it makes sense: it's just "two of something else" with a buffer, and the design brief was "make something somebody can learn to layout 16-pin DIP with". Didn't matter what the thing was, just needed to have 16 pins. And there you are.

"The most notable “discovery” in the dataset was that if you simply plotted the number of steps versus the BMI, you would see an image of a gorilla waving at you (Fig. 1b). While we teach our students the benefits of visualization, answering the specific hypothesis-driven questions did not require plotting the data. We found that very often, the students driven by specific hypotheses skipped this simple step towards a broader exploration of the data. In fact, overall, students without a specific hypothesis were almost five times more likely to discover the gorilla when analyzing this dataset (odds ratio = 4.8, P = 0.034, N = 33, Fisher’s exact test; Fig. 1c). At least in this setting, the hypothesis indeed turned out to be a significant liability."

February 1940. "Black cat in snow. Ross County, Ohio." Medium format acetate negative by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.

“What we need as a nation, more than anything else I can think of, is a recommitment to basic competence, and, especially, a refusal to accept ideological justifications for plain old ineptitude. Too often Americans give a free pass to bunglers and bozos who belong to their tribe. We have for decades now operated under the assumption that our world will just function perfectly well on its own even if we cease to attend to it. It won’t.” And, also, in the UK.

"Separating the controls from the device does something interesting. It makes you listen. An unmarked, arbitrary control has to influence the sound somehow to make any sense. Otherwise it’s just moving a bit of plastic." Yes that. Not just linking for self-aggrandisement; more fodder for the "thinking about interfaces / spacing controls / control layout as instrument design" pile of documents.

"This site contains the original source code for Elite on the BBC Micro, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained."

Assembly is, it turns out, dark, dark magic. This is a very impressive thing to pore over – like Lions' Guide, but for Elite.

I enjoyed this, in part as analysis of the unique role of masterclasses as opposed to lessons or crits. Also, useful to think about the _many_ ways feedback can exist, and how 'changing it up' can sometimes just be useful.

"The truth is that if you say you want more children from deprived areas to be able to go to university, then don’t faff around with entry tariffs: invest in Sure Start centres, preschool groups, subsidised childcare and properly resourced primary schools. Make benefits genuinely accessible and life-supporting. Better still, stop whole sections of society being condemned to underpaid, vulnerable, soul-destroying labour while others cream off inordinate wealth from the profits of that labour." Stefan Collini talking a lot of sense about what universities are, and what the lurch towards consumerising them more than ever in the past ten years has led to. It is not pretty.