Oh, so Altair BASIC (later to become MBASIC/M$-BASIC) manual (https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_mitsMITSAl_6669937/page/n60/mode/1up, Appendix F) has a whole page of one-liner math functions defined from built-in intrinsics (SIN, COS, TAN, ATN, LOG, SQR, and EXP). So my idea for math library (however smart and precise) is neither original nor necessary. So I don't have to understand trigonometry again!

“The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.”

– Arthur Ransome

[from Racundra's Third Cruise, 1922]

for @rek and @neauoire

"10. I hope that by reading this manual, you will be thoroughly encouraged to become a farmer."

-- Meti's Sword Manual, but also should be appended to most technical documentation and probably many legal texts too.
cc #KillSixBillionDemons #theLibrary

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

– Joseph Conrad

[from Heart of Darkness, 1899]

“I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea.”

– Bernard Moitessier

[from his book, The Long Way, 1974]

Oh no, I lost my bookmark for #KillSixBillionDemons, so now I *have* to read it from the beginning if I want to pick it up again. Which I very much want to do.
#theLibrary

reading microsound by Curtis Roads, loving these diagrams

Recently read this relatively obscure title by Ursula K. LeGuin.

It is a novella-length story of women surviving across multiple generations - fighting for their lives against the environment and against violence and societal limitations that men impose. A native woman in the Pacific Northwest in ~1900 through an artist in the 1970s. Mother-daughter lineage and relationships. The prose is poetic, and there's even a bit of actual poetry thrown in, which is fictionally written by a main character. The story is written in a non-linear way, with fractured timelines that the reader then puts back together.

LeGuin's estate is apparently quite generous when it comes to small publishers producing limited-run copies of her works. This one was printed in an edition of just 150 copies by Winter Texts, in Port Townsend, WA.

(I think I recently saw another small press here on the fedi is bringing out another book by LeGuin, having gotten similar permission from the estate...?)

Several years ago, George Dyson – author and canoe builder – found contemporary relevance in the fundamental differences between First Peoples' canoe-building techniques in the Pacific North-West:

"In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.

"The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results - maximum boat / minimum material— by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

"I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't will be left paddling logs, not canoes."

Son of the late British-American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, George dropped out of high school and moved to the Pacific Northwest. He lived for three years in a treehouse 95 feet above Burrard Inlet, B.C., where he built voyaging kayaks or 'baidarkas'. He is now a respected science historian.

My favorite non-fiction book, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship And The Canoe (1978), is a memoir of time spent with both Dysons, juxtaposing Freeman's dreams of manned rockets to the edge of our galaxy with George's ambitious voyages in fragile, traditional, paddled craft towards the frozen north.

“Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.”

― Nick Tosches

[from Me and the Devil, 2012]

Unsettled, deeply fretful, stayed up until 05.00 (re)reading Kristin Hersh's sad, poetic memoir, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt.

It's blowing a hoolie across the decks so I'm holed up below, (re)reading Phil Baker's Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist, from 2010.

Upload the English version of Disaster Preparedness Tokyo to Libgen and Archive.
https://archive.org/download/disaster-preparedness-tokyo/DisasterPreparednessTokyo.pdf
https://library.bz/main/uploads/4CE20BFFC1529D0BEF525D705FCCD4ED
username: genesis
password: upload
#theLibrary

George Eliot's Middlemarch is so good, @rek reads it out loud to me at night, and there's moments in it when we just burst out laughing, the characters are fantastic. It's a bit like Shirley Jackson's novels, but without the ghosts.
#theLibrary

#TIL that there's a #LambdaCalculus based language called brujin (for obvious reasons) and that it's absolutely unreadable! The standard library and the amount of work that went into it is extremely impressive though, so go give it a read:

https://bruijn.marvinborner.de/

and show some love to Marvin Borner, the creator of brujin!

I'm stealing parts of it (like Maybe monad) into #Lamber, my own applicative #LambdaCalculus compiling #Lua like language.

Just finished reading "Negative Space" by B.R. Yeager. It's a beautifully haunting and intense mindfuck. Highly recommend it. Please check for trigger warnings before reading.

https://rotten.caffeine.wiki/archive/1737650265.384017/threecrowsmagazine.com/review-negative-space-by-b-r-yeager/index.html

Woo, finished my Year In Review post before the end of January for the first time in... four years?

https://writing.natwelch.com/post/750

"A very commonplace little murder", said Holmes. "You've got something better I fancy. You're the stormy petrel of crime, Watston"
#theLibrary