Lambda Calculus and the birth of computer science; computer science != algorithmic science; The limits of artificial intelligence; why learn and adapt is better than prevent and fix; Google clamps down on unflattering AI research; the Astley Paradox; the surprise end of CentOS; Why SecOps does not get invited to the holiday parties; and More! Click to Read More...

The clean geometric abstractions of Beverly Fishman are a brightly-colored, high-finish attack on the system, the pharmaceutical industry in particular. She borrows all the marketing from this field -- the colors, forms, materials, even the way surfaces are handled. It is a subtle form of cultural subversion that has been taking place at least since the 1980s. Click to Read More...

Here are few pages taken from the NYC zines of Jo Yeh. Yeh is an illustrator currently living in Taipei. We met her when she moved to New York. In series of spare but poignant byte-sized books, she captured all the confusion, loneliness and moments of compassion that everybody experiences living in NYC as a newcomer. My friend Jess and I interviewed her a few years back for Bushwick Nation. Click to Read More...

Most days I go running. Podcasts and video lectures help me pass the time. And to goose my dawdling mind, I try to remember one useful bit of information from each presentation. And by later Tweeting this micro-epiphany, I can properly understand the idea, in 280 characters or fewer, so as to recall it at social gatherings (when we have those again) and whatnot. So, here are my notes on information technology, technology, science and other matters, as taken from these podcasts and videos as well as from various other forms of online flotsam. Click to Read More...

Before phones, the internet and television even, people stared into the fire, endlessly examining the shape-shifting flames, searching for meaning. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military beamed swaths of light into the jungle, hoping nearby villagers would be frightened off by the appearance of ghosts. Monks in Thailand repurposed this technique to give people a way to communicate with their dead, a practice now known as Ghost Cinema. Click to Read More...

In this tutorial, I set up a virtual Linux server on DigitalOcean. This installment is part of a longer series on setting up a Web server in the cloud. Here, I review the hardware and software server options offered by DigitalOcean, and then go through the process of setting up a public-private key for securely accessing the server, by way of ssh. Click to Read More...

So my friend Steve had this freakishly good idea of bringing a blow-up couch to the Dark Star Orchestra Halloween show at the Frederick (MD) fairground. Keeping with social distancing guidelines for the pandemic, the organizations sold tickets by the car. Each car got two spaces in a field facing the stage, the second of which the car's group occupy in some form. In addition to the couch, Steve also brought a fold-up table, an LED lamp and a $30 rug from Amazon to tie it all together. I can not explain how surreal it felt watching the show from this vantage. Click to Read More...

This month: eBPF makes the Linux kernel programmable; feature flags can speed development; Darwin and the Origin of Species as technical writing; RSA vs. DSA for SSH; the challenges of spacing Web pages; share communications, not memory. Click to Read More...

U.S. Native Americans regarded the lands they lived upon from a vastly different perspective than the English who would appropriate these lands for themselves. When they arrived, the English brought with them the idea of land being a set of fixed boundaries, regardless of how it was used. The Indians saw the land only in how it could be useful, be it for hunting, gardening or gathering.That the English saw land as something that could be purchased literally undermined the entire Indian way of life. Click to Read More...

Opus 40, a sculpture garden located between Saugerties and Woodstock, NY, was created from an abandoned bluestone quarry that was purchased by a popular actor of the day, actor Harvey Fite. Originally, Fite purchased the land just for the stone, which he wanted to use for his sculpture. After visiting some Mayan ruins in Honduras, however, he returned resolved to learn to work with the bluestone, adopting the techniques of the Mayans. Click to Read More...

In the 1960s, Edward Avedisian was one of a number of abstract artists who moved beyond the tactility of abstract expressionism to focus instead on the optical experience of the painting, according to the Barry Campbell gallery, Soho, New York, which recently presented an exhibit of Avedisian works from that period. His style mixed freshness of pop art with the more measured properties of color field painting. Click to Read More...

Been a few years since we hung out, but news of my Airbnb mentor departing the city for greener pastures made me realize that NYC, the vibrant one I knew anyway, is fading into the past. The day I met Ginger is the day I learned how New York operated. Click to Read More...

More than two centuries on, James Rumsey still can not get credit for inventing the steamboat. That after hundreds of years, this West Virginian is still the victim of politics, piled under by the sediment of history, a centuries-old victim of cancel culture. And why would anyone care? The Rumsey story was such as wild ride that you get hooked in, if not for the shady lineage of steamboat, then the sheer improbability of it all. Click to Read More...

In the doc "Who is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him?", 1970s superstar-producer Richard Perry bemoaned that he never got to produce more than one album for Harry Nilsson. 1971's "Nilsson Schmilsson" turned out to be Harry's most successful, in fact. Had Nilsson not let his demons overtake him shortly thereafter, Perry argued, he would have been up there right alongside Elton John or James Taylor.

I think Perry is wrong in his assessment of Nilsson as a lost cause, though. Nilsson's talents were quirkier than could be easily contained within the top 40 format, even though his songs could be pop music at its most sublime. Click to Read More...

It was men who first adopted the first bikes, dangerous and perhaps-alluringly impractical high wheel "penny-farthings," but it was subsequent wide-demand from women for a more practical model, the "safety bike," that made this new form of transportation a household item. The rise of the bicycle is a perfect example of how a successful technology starts off as a novelty, is then adopted by a niche group of users before, finally, becoming an essential component of modern day life. It is also another technology that has been driven forward (literally) by our relentless push to make more efficient use of time. Click to Read More...

Notes: I started a music diary. TF else am I going to do these days? This week! I discovered, about 40 years too late, about Buffy Sainte-Marie's incredible run in music. I learned that Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, like Stevie Nicks, is quite popular amongst the younger set for some mysterious reason, and, by accident, how drummer Nick Mason drove that band. I took umbrage (again) at the player of the green tambourine. My friend Enne has a new single! Also, below is an in-car tribute to how WFMU is getting me through this bleak pandemic. I'm not crying; it's just raining. Click to Read More...

Ominous storm clouds rolled in the Saturday afternoon, March 7, when I went to the 2020 Armory Show, a NYC trade show-like gathering of galleries to display their artists. Here is some of the art that caught my eye, along with some more info about the artists I found, from around the Web. Click to Read More...

As a teenage fuck-up who had recently (and barely) graduated high school, I, of limited opportunities, joined the U.S. Army in the summer of 1983. I had never been outside the northeast U.S., and after advanced training, was first assigned to Fort Lee, New Jersey. Cool, I thought, I would be close to my girlfriend, who lived not too far away in Harrisburg, Pa. But then, in would I would later understand to be in true U.S. Army fashion, a last minute phone call came in: I would be instead be dispatched to South Korea, a place that seemed for my lovelorn heart to be on the other side of the planet. Click to Read More...

It was a very cold Saturday night, the weekend that the first U.S. death from COVID-19 was reported: No one was going to be touching anyone else that night. I was at the Knockdown Center, a new-ish arts space just across the Brooklyn border in Queens, to see John Maus play. Turned out, it was not so much John Maus "playing" the show as much as playing his favorite tracks for us in some basement while humming, screaming, and cavorting along in inarticulate primal ecstasy to songs indistinctly echoing of 80s gothpop, and synthpop. Even the light show was devoid of specifics, directing attention anywhere but to Maus himself. Click to Read More...

"Fortune favours the brave" Wire bassist-co-vocalist Graham Lewis promised the virus-wary audience in NYC's Music Hall of Williamsburg, March 11, 2020, days before the city would formally go into lockdown for COVID-19. The show reminded me that this English band was post-punk pretty much from the beginning of punk rock itself. Click to Read More...

For street artist ChrisRWK himself, the phrase "Robots Will Kill" is a reminder not to get into a rut, not to let routine kill creativity, not to be owned by your own processes. Robots Will Kill. Here is his latest at the 212 Gallery in the Lower East Side of New York City. Click to Read More...

Susan Fowler's "Whistleblower" should be required reading for any Silicon Valley start-up founder, or any company exec for that matter. The sexism/misogyny Fowler experienced at Uber and elsewhere derailed her career, multiple times. But it also damaged these organizations as well, in terms of lost talent and, later on, public goodwill. Click to Read More...

In 2019, I learned that everyone falls in love with the daughter of the shoemaker, even if they fear her a bit. That the technological advancement depends of a civilization on its ability to control microdimensions. I learned what automobiles the members Pink Floyd drove and about the English houses in which they lived, circa 1968. That people who bond in youth can stay friends in the ensuing decades of adulthood, even as they grow apart. That the success of music depends a great deal on where it is played, and that the Beastie Boys really were in the center of things during the birth of Hip-Hop in the early 1980s New York. Click to Read More...

The human body is moved by electricity, both emotionally and physically. Cells spark electrical pulses, which align to form movements, thoughts, behaviors, in a way that is not fully understood. And just as people are moved by internal electricity, they are also affected by external sources of energy as well. In his latest exhibit at the Perrotin NYC gallery, Danish artist Jesper Just looked how the electricity of the individual intersects with that generated from the outside. Click to Read More...

I have been using Twitter for the past several years as a note-taker of sorts, a place to squirrel away all the tidbits I have learned from the Internet about computer science, information technology and such. Epiphanies, observations, or factoids from blogs, podcasts, or video technical sessions are all captured there. Most of the information would not necessarily be considered news but in each case it is news to me. Sometimes, I can put together these random factoids into stories for my day job. Sometimes they are useful for personal projects. Sometimes they just end up as dead ends, albeit interesting ones. This column will serve as a compendium to all of them. Click to Read More...

Old age is bullshit, Cicero said, sorta. Growing old is inevitable. How you live out your senior years is entirely up to you, Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero argued in his Jesus-era self-help booklet, How to Grow Old. There are many who grow old without complaint. Those who are good-tempered in youth and middle age will take that with them into their senior years. And those who are irritable now will continue to be so into their own golden years. Age has little with any of that. Click to Read More...

Life in New York City: My friend Jess and I have basically been trading the same $100 back and forth across Venmo for the past three years now. Here is a visual accounting...