Zach Whalen

A hand-crafted directory of web desktops (by Simone Marzulli): https://simone.computer/#/webdesktops

About a month ago, I attempted (unsuccessfully) to create a digital poem / tool to submit to Taper, "an online literary magazine for small computational pieces." My idea worked, but I wasn't able to fit that idea into the 2KB constraint enforced by the editors.

Instead, I am simply posting it on my website and sharing it now for you to enjoy. I call it "The Menard-O-Tron": http://zachwhalen.net/pg/menard-o-tron/

A Visual Survey of Text Visualization Techniques https://textvis.lnu.se/

You know how some people have recurring anxiety dreams where they realize they forgot to take a class and they have to go back to high school? The professor version of that is "I forgot I was supposed to be teaching that class," and this actually happened to me today...

I have a colleague going on leave, and I am taking over her class for the rest of the semester. I forgot that started today!

Fortunately I remembered in time, and she has a very detailed plan for me to follow. So it was fine.

This is my first time I've gotten to see aurora directly, something I've wanted to experience for a long time. With photos, it's always so obvious that what you see is heavily mediated by the technology of photography, much like long exposure photos of the Milky Way.

By the way, I resurrected one of my bots from that other site into a new and improved form on Blue Sky. I have it running on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi in my backyard.

Check it out here, if you are inclined: https://bsky.app/profile/crookedcosmos.bsky.social

I am posting something because I haven't updated here for a while.

@artcollisions@vis.social I can see it from my front yard! (a little) On campus, I'd say the athletic fields are probably the darkest spot with a good view of the sky

I trust there is a good reason behind this, but it still feels weird that in Python:

any([])
-> False

but

all([])
-> True

@artcollisions@vis.social I haven't looked into that yet, but it's a definite possibility. I feel like it wouldn't be a good fit for the Mastodon server I'm on, but I saw your post earlier about Pixelfed, which looks interesting.

@artcollisions@vis.social You should stop by some time!

This is interesting: In the subreddit r/mushrooms -- where the stakes for correct ID are very high -- one commenter was suspected of being an AI. Another user tested this theory by asking it to write poetry, which it did.

The main comments from the alleged bot account (SeriousPerson9) have been deleted, but here's the original thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mushrooms/comments/1chtcag/

... and the comments restored via reveddit: https://www.reveddit.com/v/Mushrooms/comments/1chtcag/found_the_delicious_umbrella_polypore_today_left/?add_user=SeriousPerson9...new.all.t1_l24pq9z..

Also, I am currently at the @keystonedh@hcommons.social conference where I just shared a work in progress, "Wilderness Walk." Here are the relevant files, if you're interested: http://bit.ly/zw-wilderness-files

The code is an absolute mess, by the way, so I don't recommend looking at it. Otherwise, the book is coming together well enough that I consider this a "beta" release.

I just walked smack into a wall that I thought was a door.

"Everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere spring had come and gone. The season had swept far to the north; it had climbed mountains; it had passed into the sky. Like a sound, spring spreads and spreads until it is swallowed up in space.... It appears like the tracks of the breeze on a field of wheat, like shadows of wind-blown clouds, like tossing branches that reveal the presence of the invisible, the passing of the unseen." Edwin Way Teale, 1951.

#TheLongestMonth #NorthWithTheSpring

"Here in this wild and beautiful spot amid the mountains, the dark woods, the rising mist, the new moon hanging above the silhouettes of the peaks, we waited, in spite of the night chill, until the last sunlight of the spring had ebbed from the sky." Edwin Way Teale watching the end of June 22, 1947 from the bridge over Lafayette Brooke, near Franconia Notch, NH.

Photo by Flickr user Nedster78, CC BY-NC-SA, July 5, 2008.

44.1838558, -71.6849077

#TheLongestMonth #NorthWithTheSpring