I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong.
I was out on a walk yesterday, listening to the ’70s Hits Radio Station on Apple Music, when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to look at a text while the song was playing and was surprised at what the Music app told me about the song.
After I learned how to make a Mac widget with TerminalWidget and how to determine the locations of celestial objects with Astropy , the natural thing for me to do was combine the two into a widget that tracks the planets.
Through an odd coincidence, I started writing this post when the Sun was in Cancer, but by the time I’m done and get it published, the Sun will be in Leo. Don’t worry, this isn’t an astrology post—I don’t want to anger John Gruber —but it is a further coincidence that I’ve been puttering around with observational astronomy calculations at a time when there’s been some controversy in the Apple…
A few days ago, I posted this image on Mastodon :
My fundamental rule is Don’t , but a single word wouldn’t make for much of a blog post.
I noticed today that the Cubs and Yankees have the same record. I knew that the Cubs have had some extreme ups and downs this year, but I wasn’t sure if the Yankees had, so I decided to plot their progress over the course of the season so far.
The indispensable Michael Tsai has an interesting post up today about Apple Park and whether its design isolates the people who work there, despite its having been designed—in part, at least—to encourage collaboration.
Yesterday I watched the most recent Numberphile video , in which Ben Sparks explains a few finite series and the equations that simplify the calculation of their sums. He derives the formulas graphically, and it’s all very cleverly done, especially the one for the sum of cubes.
A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of . A similar bill passed the Senate a few years ago, and Donald Trump has said he will sign this one, so there’s a decent chance it’ll become law.…
You’ve probably seen somewhere that the density of Saturn is less than that of water. If there were a bathtub big enough to hold it, Saturn would float. I think I first read this in one of Isaac Asimov’s collections of science essays. If you do an image search, you can easily find many illustrations of Saturn floating in water. Most of these show no more than half of Saturn under the water. Could…
I saw this article at Inside Higher Ed this morning, guided by a Mastodon post from Techmeme. The title of the article is “Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat,” so if you’re sick to death of reading about AI—pro, con, or caveated—don’t feel obligated to follow the link. I’m interested in a plot included in the article more than the article itself.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Mac application icons and “squircle jail.” Inspired by this post from Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog, 1 many Mac-adjacent people have taken up his cause to “Free the Icons.”