The Golden 20s of the 20th century began with the end of WW1 and ended with the stock market crash of 1929. It was considered the decade that was the calm before the storm. However, it was a decade of sweeping technological change and innovation that transformed industrial productivity, life in general and in turn the world economy. It improved the general well-being of many. Electricity, the internal combustion engine and radio changed everyday life forever.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is a leap forward not just for the Pi but for single-board computers across the board. It’s a great light-weight desktop replacement. It’s even surprised me as a viable Rust / Ada development environment. Raspberry Pi 4 running MATE desktop My setup includes a Raspberry Pi 4 FLIRC case which is basically a giant aluminum heat sink. This allows for a completely silent setup running at an average of 54’C.

From a recent Dr. Dobbs interview : On adults – Binstock: So you called them on the lying. Kay: Yeah. But the thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years later, when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret Bourke-White photos from Buchenwald. This was in the 1940s — no TV, living on a farm. That’s when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous.

Exhibit A, My 11″ MacBook Air (Late 2010) benchmark rating :   Exhibit B, My 11″ MacBook Air (Mid 2012) benchmark rating :  

Ted Nelson‘s latest video series called “Computers for Cynics” calls it like it is. How refreshing in contrast with the pervasive garbage called ‘information’ that we get fed in the second decade of the 21st century. I laughed and wept at part 1 : The Myth of Technology Quite timely considering the recent round of UI design atrocities spread under the mask of ‘good design’. As if a bunch of over-payed(Windows), over-stroked(Gnome), over-controlling(Mac) middle-managed programmers can do what Steve Jobs did.

How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye.

Cory Doctorow’s latest talk ‘The Coming War on General Purpose Computing’ really puts things in perspective about life in the 21st century. This got me thinking more about functional programming languages and how they could be a future casualty in a similar way that we currently see the intentional limitation/crippling of turing machines. What if Paul Graham missed something very dark in his essay The Hundred-Year Language ? The essay does not mention the potential role that government, industry and academia might play in the development, legality and distortion of such a language.

In 1972 Ed Catmull (founder of Pixar) and his colleagues created the world’s first 3D rendered movie, an animated version of Ed’s left hand. This is the film that they produced. It includes some “making of” footage (around 1:30) and some other early experiments.

Quotes from Don E. Knuth : “If we make an unbiased examination of the accomplishments made by mathematicians to the real world of computer programming, we are forced to conclude that, so far, the theory has actually done more harm than good. There are numerous instances in which theoretical “advances” have actually stifled the development of computer programming, and in some cases they have even made it take several steps backward!

Sonoluminescence: A Galaxy of Nanostars Created in a Beaker (NASA) The Idea Factory – Learning to Think at MIT, Pepper White : “This is a personal story of the educational process at one of the world’s great technological universities. Pepper White entered MIT in 1981 and received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1984. His account of his experiences, written in diary form, offers insight into graduate school life in general—including the loneliness and even desperation that can result from the intense pressure to succeed—and the purposes of engineering education in particular.