I once abseiled into a crevasse while in Antarctica. The colours I saw in there were utterly breathtaking and I never knew why. Now I do, and this also tells mewhy the photos don't even remotely do it justice (aside from not being as big and three dimensional!)
Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)
A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator.
I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?
It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.
Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.
This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...
I can certainly appreciate the frustrations with newer elements of the language that introduce functionality, I was the same with typing in particular. That said, I came to realise two things: firstly the new elements in the language are not required to write idiosyncratic python the way I like and, secondly, they haven't fundamentally changed anything in the way Python operates as a language.
Python has been around a long time. It's no surprise that it's getting more bloated as an ecosystem. I was anti uv for a time as well, as well as annoyed at the plethora of tools for linting that seemed to ALL get introduced into some projects, conflicting with one another.
I became happier when I remembered to just ignore the things I didn't need or wasn't interested in. uv became a friend, linting I ignore as something I forget about in a pre-commit hook that is configured once across my projects if I use it at all. Typing I've actually realised can be helpful now it's becoming more natively implemented (e.g. no more "import typing"), because I'm getting more forgetful!
The pessimism is justified, so you're not being too pessimistic, but you might want to remember why you love python and ask whether or not it's still able to fundamentally achieve that thing...
I really liked it, but still need to give it a full straight through listen.
What I love more than anything else, is it's an ALBUM. Not a 45 minute jumble of tracks, but a proper 70 minute sonic tour de force with a narrative. Don't know what it is, but it feels like it's there.
Life gets more distracting as we get older, and I suspect BoC care more about the art and less about the need to keep their brand alive.
Another before 13 years is up would be lush, I'm getting old! If they don't I won't be surprised, but hopefully they'll make sure more of their non-album works make it out and about. Like you, I love what they do and how they do it, and they've been in my life for a similar amount of time.
It's nice that BoC leave the art to speak for itself! As such, it's good to look at those inspired by them too methinks :)
Sadly the website is offline, but if you like a hard copy cloud book I can heartily recommend the following. During my spell in Antarctica, I had to act as a meteorological observer (clouds are still manually encoded into METOBS that are entered in by WMO stations). This required learning the 10 types and being able to characterise the full picture of the sky.
It made me a total cloud addict, and spurred a far deeper interest in the role of the atmosphere in environmental science which has persisted ever since.
I heartily recommend looking up at the sky, dividing into oktas (eighths) and trying to classify how much of the low, medium and high clouds there are. If you do it regularly enough, the changes begin to astound. Getting your kids to do it too is also wonderful, because it's always there as an activity... :)
It is amazing how much of 'it' is going on in the skies once you start noticing.
There was a thread this winter on solstices, with commenters expressing wonder at how could humans figure those out. If you notice sunrises/sunsets day after day over the years, it is inescapable. It's sad that we the modern humans spend so much time hunkered below opaque ceilings.
But I will say this, having interest in cloud-spotting and amateur astronomy is very very rewarding. Clouds stop being an impediment to you and grow into a phenomena worth appreciating on their own terms.
During my time in Antarctica we had a (Turbo Pascal, I think) program on the met computer that prompted for weather conditions and sent it off to the satellite terminal. The UI was not great, it was surprisingly easy to report sandstorms.
I wouldn't say conclusively, but certainly they're an indicator for things like what you mention. Nimbostratus are typically associated with rain, cumulonimbus for thunderstorms: both of these are indicators for the atmospheric conditions and thermal upwellings that will cause sudden precipitation and / or electrostatic discharge.
We also did air observations for pilots. If you saw certain types of cumulus near peaks, called lenticulars, pilots wouldn't go near them because they're caused by pretty dangerous winds dynamics.
It's all connected, which is why it gets so fascinating. Sadly, I never pursued meteorology beyond hobbyist, but I'd love to!
I would suggest that the default to enrolling people in supplying such information is the issue. In a world driven by surveillance capitalism, even "anonymous" data can be used for much broader purposes (think, for example, of when and where people are using tools geographically and at what times: you can start to track the behaviour of people in this way).
Users should never be opted in through usage alone of free or paid-for tooling to supply information that isn't part of the function of the tool. Where that is required for a service or product, you should opt-in explicitly, not implicitly.
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