This is the house I grew up in. It was particularly challenging to render in one-meter increments, especially while preserving the positions of walls and staircases. The entire structure wanted to shift around in various dimensions; a tension which is only partly resolved by resizing the stair and kitchen.

I chose a site on a hill, facing west; echoing the original lot.

Continue reading (217 words)

Typically my taste in architecture is functional, spartan, and modern–but there’s a great deal to be said for “A Pattern Language”. As I approach the end of the book, I’ve started to question, apply, and practice these patterns in Minecraft structures. This structure is a cabin for a small family or group of friends.

Site

Continue reading (1281 words)

Saltillo

You guys, we have to talk about Saltillo.

This dude is nuts. He emits high-octane nightmare fuel as a byproduct from an inexplicable process of self-discovery the likes of which I’ve never seen. His art is disturbing as fuck. But the music–oh man, this is good stuff.

Continue reading (329 words)

This is total conjecture; please correct me in the comments, because I don’t understand finance at all. This is from a physics standpoint.

In markets, money flows against an information gradient. Traders with perfect knowledge of a stock’s value in the future can make trades with no risk, yielding the highest expectation values of returns E[R]. Traders with zero knowledge of the stock’s value have the worst expectation value. If the market is conservative–that is to say, there is no money added or lost inside the market itself; a stock sells for x dollars and is purchased for x dollars in each transaction, the sum of all expectation values over traders

Continue reading (681 words)

More from Hacker News. I figure this might be of interest to folks working on parallel systems. I’ll let KirinDave kick us off with:

Go scales quite well across multiple cores iff you decompose the problem in a way that's amenable to Go's strategy. Same with Erlang.

No one is making “excuses”. It’s important to understand these problems. Not understanding concurrency, parallelism, their relationship, and Amdahl’s Law is what has Node.js in such trouble right now.

Continue reading (1028 words)

Our last full day in New Zealand, I rented a Ninjette from the folks over at nzbike.com. $70 for a full day, maybe $90 with petrol included. I headed north from Auckland on 16, found mile after mile of well-paved, well-paced roads with good cadence and spectacular scenery. Enjoyed getting completely lost in a generally northeasterly direction, hit the eastern coast, took in the surf, and hugged the coast south. It’s all farms: one lane bridges over creeks, limestone hillocks, and the occasional jaw-dropping valley opened up in the sun. Hit some dirt, a few dead ends, and generally had a grand time of it.

Everyone, everywhere, was thrilled to say hello, tell me about their farm or flower shop, and give directions. I don’t think I met a single unfriendly soul in the whole darn country. Even petrol station attendants grinned, warned me about storms to the north and pointed a better route. Maybe it’s a factor of size, maybe it’s purely cultural, but I wish the rural US were anywhere near this friendly.

Continue reading (318 words)

Most applications have configuration: how to open a connection to the database, what file to log to, the locations of key data files, etc.

Configuration is hard to express correctly. It’s dynamic because you don’t know the configuration at compile time–instead it comes from a file, the network, command arguments, etc. Config is almost always implicit, because it affects your functions without being passed in as an explicit parameter. Most languages address this in two ways:

Continue reading (1530 words)