deathmtn

My new newsletter is out! However, if you've been reading this weblog, there isn't any actual news that is new. If you like summaries of what you've already read, though, go forth and read!

The equation to determine two bodies' velocities after an elastic collision looks messy. So, it seemed like it'd be easy to derive from the conservation of momentum and the conservation of kinetic energy equations. But I spent an hour trying to derive it (well, that and watching a thing about the Black Death on Kanopy), and every time, I ended up with something with a square root in it. So, there's obviously a smoother way to derive, which I'll look up tomorrow.

The guy is five today. He still seems new! Once in a while, we're like, whoa, he's a real person who lives in our house.

10-4-4-4-4-4. Admittedly, I took a pretty long break between the third and fourth sets, but I also did burpees on that break.

My bake is definitely raw in the middle. I don't know what happened to my sleep. It seemed OK, but I've been up since 7:30 and wanting to go back to sleep the whole time.

I wrote about all the stuff I had to do to get this automated mailing list working, including setting up a mail server.

It took about three hours, and I didn't really want to use precious alone time to write that. I am just not excited about configuring servers.

But I also feel that it would be criminal to go through all that and not capture the knowledge in case I or anyone has to go through that again. So, I put it on my list, glared at it all week, then finally did it.

Felix wrote about his colonoscopy. It sounds terrifying, even though he wrote at the end not to worry about it. He also didn't write about any "butt stuff", which I'm also not concerned about.

Basically, you don’t quite go “under” like you would for things like surgery. Twilight still enables the patient to be responsive to verbal commands, and can communicate (I think). But the thing with Twilight is that the patient has no memory of the procedure. The drug inhibits the creation of new memories.

Honestly, in addition to the process itself… the administration of this drug was also fairly unsettling to me. I heard stories of people emerging from this having said or blurted out all manner of crazy things.

I had no idea this drug was involved, or that it had as creepy a name as Twilight. Anything can happen to you while the drug is active, and you won't know it.

I wrote my D&D recap in Council.

I don't know that the format helps with readability, but it does make it more fun to read as you write.

Pull-ups yesterday: 10-4-3-2-3-3.

Hey, I finished a song called There Is Something Outside. If you'd rather not listen on SoundCloud, it's also on GitHub, with previous versions, in case you're interested.

The title comes from this post, though the song was written without anything in particular in mind. It was called spring-02 for a long time because I had started it by recording some guitar arpeggios way back then. I forgot about it for quite a while until I accidentally opened NanoStudio on my phone this past weekend. The birds I came across this Sunday while listening to it walking around outside, so I stopped to sample them.

Eartheater is weird and amazing. Strange musique concrete stuff mixed in with "regular music." I really should explain this better, but I'm short on time.

Oh, yeah. 10-4-3-3-3-3 today. It was all I had.

Eutelic organisms have a fixed number of somatic cells when they reach maturity, the exact number being constant for any one species.

Freaky!

Rough night. The guy woke me up a couple times in the dead of night to ask me for 1) water and then 2) air conditioner.

In the morning, he busted in to our room to tell us 1) Dr. Wily came out of the litter box and 2) he made some discovery. (Later, this turned out to be being able to stick Lego side studs into the holes in the Technics bricks.) This was in breach of our agreement to not wake us up before his light turns green unless it's an emergency.

Post-green-light, he wanted to build a Lego scale from this book from the library. I also think this thing is cool, which helped a lot with easing into conconsciousness being much less brutal. I guess it's nice to want to do something. Helps a lot with getting through life!

Good news! I added waiting messages that pulse while you're waiting for a network operation to complete (mostly, it's the Flickr API). It's amazing to me how you can do that with such little CSS these days.

That feature is something I figured I could ignore since I'm the only user of that app, and I know what's going on during those new dead, no-response seconds. But no, I couldn't take it, it turns out.

I work from home a couple days a week, and on the way back from getting a coffee, I unwittingly walked in front of the guy's preschool class, who were all out on the playground. I tried to creep by, but then some kid yelled, 'IT'S 'S DAD! OVER THERE!"

Then, the whole class all ran over to me, and I awkwardly had to explain that I have to get back to work. They kept narrating (with yelling) my whole walk out of their view.

I was just reading about tardigrades the other day, courtesy of John Naughton's blog, and today, someone on a Slack instance posted this amazingly weird news that an Israeli lunar lander crashed on the moon, leaving tardigrades and human knowledge records.

The tardigrades are encased in resin, though. Also, I have doubts that any non-human will be able to understand the language lessons in the records or even use knowledge the way we do.

This, I didn't know, though:

In fact, Spivack isn’t even the first to leave DNA on the moon. This honor belongs to the Apollo astronauts, who left nearly 100 bags of human feces on the lunar surface before they returned to Earth.

Those guys did a lot of poopin'!