Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Gratitudes part 4: Nikki, true to herself

    If we are among the lucky ones, we have friends in our lives that inspire us to be better versions of ourselves. These friends live their truths in ways that shine like beacons, illuminating the way ahead, beckoning us to follow their examples as we stumble through our own personal journeys of self-discovery, searching for fulfillment.

    I am fortunate to count myself among these lucky ones. I have a wonderful friend who I find to be impressive and inspiring in exactly this way. Over the years, the more I've gotten to know her, the more I've come to realize that she is in fact a role model for something that I've been thinking a lot about lately: integrity. Loosely, integrity is about knowing your values, and living and acting in a way that is true to those values. Let me be clear: this can be a hard thing. Integrity doesn't just happen; you have to put in the work. It is a lifelong pursuit, a lifelong practice.

• Poetry

  • lighter

    nights are getting darker
    but somehow at times
    my heart is lighter
    the dream 
    still here
    alive
    

  • A wish (poe/en)

    there will always, every day
    be someone that disagrees
    so it does not really matter
    what i'll choose in the end.
    

  • The second realm (poe/en)

    i might feel alright
    being underwhelmed
    but i became a girl
    in the second realm
    

  • Faith (poe/en)

    took a leap of faith to see
    over treetops, vast blue seas
    went nowhere to seek a star
    a spark that might once break the mist
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • These 3D-Printed "Microflier" Drones Are Powered, And Controlled, By Sound Alone

    Researchers from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)'s MicroBioRobotic Systems lab have built ultra-tiny drones capable of controlled flight under the power of nothing but sound.

    "Instead of pushing devices around with sound waves," MicroBioRobotic Systems lab head Selman Sakar explains of the team's work, "we have created acoustic resonators that are tuned to harness sound at specific frequencies to generate directional thrust and controlled motion. Our work shows the feasibility of transforming a simple, cleverly designed mechanical piece into robotic matter."

    That small objects can be levitated by sound is nothing new — makers the world over have performance feats of floating magic using ultrasonic levitators — but what the team has produced is: the drones aren't just riding a shockwave but responding to specific frequencies in the sound. As a result, they not only fly but can be controlled by varying the frequencies.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • i like reading smolpub posts

      i like reading smolpub posts

• Programming

  • Literate Programming

    I don’t think it’s possible to have an informed discussion about human code, code-as-artform, without bringing up the concept of Literate Programming, which is nearly synonymous with the view that program source code can be an artform. Literate Programming is both a declaration that program source code is a form of literature, and should be treated as such—and also an exhortation to structure your programs as literature.

    Literate Programming was (is) a paradigm for structuring source code in such a way as to maximise both the comprehension, and the pleasure, of anyone reading the program code. Rather than writing code in a way that best suits a compiler, one writes code in a way that best suits an explanation of the program’s workings, building it up by gently introducing the code, one concept at a time, explaining as one goes. Rather than writing a lot of code and peppering it with comments to explain things here and there, the entirety of a “literate program” tends to be verbose English, peppered with the code. A literate program tends to read exactly like an article or a book, one that just happens to contain little snippets of code to concretely illustrate the explanations. It just so happens that the source text for the formatted article, can not only be processed to form that pleasantly-readable article, but also the actually-compilable source code for the program described by it.

  • Literate Programming

    Following onto my previous post on "Human Code", here's a link to a post on the subject of Literate Program, a paradigm conceived by Dr Donald E. Knuth, for writing code in a form targeted at human consumption, for comprehension and pleasure—code as literature!