Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • not a garden blog 7: asparagus feels like cheating; the weeds fight back

    There is no plant I grow that requires less work from me than asparagus. My asparagus crowns have been established for years. They're planted deeply enough I don't have to worry about hitting them with the tiller, nor do I have to water them. Asparagus just comes up. Every spring. And I eat it.

    Some plants are a lot of work. Many years I'm dropping individual leek seeds into cells with tweezers in February, fighting spider mites indoors and misting tiny plants multiple times a day for months until the vicissitudes of outdoor life even begin for them. Asparagus? nope. Asparagus just shows up.

  • All About Lily Chou-Chou

  • Sam Altman's Kitchen is Dull and Wasteful

    Your living space says a lot about who you are. Writing this at my dining room table and looking over at my kitchen, I hope it says that I'm messy but practical. A block of decent knives. A stainless steel Ikea utensil holder crammed to the brim with spoons, ladels, spatulas, whisks. A moka pot cooling at the edge of the stove, and a perpetually somewhat-full kettle sitting in the corner, ready at a moment's notice. There's probably more that you could glean: that I scraped a bunch of the finish off the moka pot accidentally (impractical, maybe a bit thoughtless), or that the toaster's still out instead of in a drawer despite not having made toast for days (lazy?). But that's neither here nor there.

    Today on my Bluesky feed I saw an article by Bryce Elder at the Financial Times, snarking about lessons learned about Altman during a video he did with, incredibly, also the Financial Times. In it we learn that Altman has expensive, trendy (and Instagram-approved) olive oil selected for its delicate fragrance, which doesn't matter at all when he cooks with it (heat deodorises olive oil). He has an incredibly expensive coffee maker (the Breville Oracle Touch) that the internet hates, but perhaps not surprisingly, is recommended by ChatGPT when you ask it what a good coffee maker is.

  • Novigrad, Rovinj, Poreč

    We’re spending a few days in Croatia. We took the plane to Zagreb, got a rental car and drove west to Istria. Our first station is Novigrad. The reputation for fabulous sunsets is well deserved.

  • Rathenau

    Speak up. Stand up. Get your hands dirty.

    No one is coming to save us.

    Just cowards sniping with speeches and policies.

    Grab hold — don’t let go.

    “Your house will burn if you let it smolder now.”

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming/Logic

    • Patterns

      Okay so this is a pretty banal theme, with some double counterpoint so the alternate notes can be played both above and below the initial line, which is then done. The theme, such as it is, is varied in various ways, notably inversion, retrograde (a fancy way to say "play it backwards") and augmentation (near the end, with free high notes to distract one from how bad the theme is). Augmentation is a fancy way to say "play it slower". The inversion probably needs more detail, as there are various ways to invert notes; see "Fugue and Invention in Theory and Practice" by John W. Verrall for more details. Lacking that text, some inversion charts should get you started: [...]