Monthly Archives: October 2020

A New Organ?

Posted on 2020-10-22 by jcs

If you’re like me, you probably think that medical science has long since identified all the organs in the human body. Indeed, no new human organs have been identified for about 300 years. Until now. The New York Times is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Hardware vs. Software

Posted on 2020-10-21 by jcs

Everyone who’s been around for a while recognizes that computing has gotten more powerful. Problems that were once intractable now seem almost trivial. It’s not really surprising; it’s progress. It’s what we expect. But it does suggest the question: is … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Wizard Book Cover Explained

Posted on 2020-10-20 by jcs

A lot of you probably know that Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, SICP, is also called “The Wizard Book.” A glace at its cover explains the alternate name but Conor Hoekstra has a more thorough explanation of the cover: … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Programmatic Programming with Graphviz

Posted on 2020-10-19 by jcs

Correl Roush has a very nice post that beautifully illustrates the idea of writing code to write code. It’s a tremendously powerful idea because it lets you leverage some other program or programming language to do a task that requires … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Emacs Shells

Posted on 2020-10-18 by jcs

One of the things that’s harder than it should be in Emacs is embedded shells. You can type Meta+x shell and sort of have a shell. Except it doesn’t work very well. There are other options but it can be … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Voting in Estonia

Posted on 2020-10-17 by jcs

Almost every expert says that you can’t vote online safely. You see the opinion so often it’s become received wisdom. Yet that’s exactly what happens in Estonia. Estonians can vote from anywhere in the world and can vote as often … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

How To Get Rid of Cookie Popups

Posted on 2020-10-16 by jcs

One of the annoying consequences of the GDPR is the popups asking you if it’s okay to set cookies. Mostly, those cookies are used to track us and are something we definitely don’t want to enable. Sadly, some of those … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Medievalist Uses Emacs

Posted on 2020-10-15 by jcs

The title almost sounds like something you’d see headlining a parody but it turns out that a medievalist using Emacs is really what this post is about. Joseph R. Johnson is a medievalist at Georgetown who spends a great deal … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Everyday Carry Progress Report

Posted on 2020-10-14 by jcs

Regular readers know that I’m all in on living a digital life and in particular on getting my everyday carry down to my smartphone (see here and here). This post is a progress report. Ironically, COVID-19 has helped advance my … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Org Code Block Results

Posted on 2020-10-13 by jcs

John Herrlin has a followup to his previous post about Org-mode code blocks. This one deals with controlling the output of a block’s execution. I usually think of the :results parameter as a way of choosing where the results from … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment