Category: Currently Reading

Currently reading Hot Earth Dreams: What if severe climate change happens, and humans survive? by Frank Landis.

Currently reading Hot Earth Dreams: What if severe climate change happens, and humans survive? by Frank Landis.

Update: I forgot to mention that you can read a sample of it here: https://heteromeles.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/hot-earth-dreams-sample/

Black humor abounds in this pessimistic but realistic look at the future. Landis has a background in plant ecology and he describes what appears to be a fairly realistic research based view of the changes the earth is likely to undergo over the next 400,000 years. That’s the length of time that human created changes to the atmosphere will take to work themselves out.

What sort of planet will our immediate descendants have to face (keeping in mind that a lot of people who will live to see the year 2100 have already been born. The author assumes that we will probably be unable to constrain ourselves from emitting the 1.4 gigatons of carbon currently locked up in the world’s estimated fossil fuel reserves. This may be overly pessimistic but Landis does have recent history on his side. Even if we manage to change our behaviour today, we are still in for a bumpy ride.

Rather than try to put that future out of our minds as most of us would doubtlessly prefer, we need to start thinking about it and dreaming about it. Our science fiction needs to embrace it. We need to be able to talk about it and to start planning for it because a whole lot of bad stuff is going to start happening. And like many bad things they are going to start happening all at the same time.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017S5NDK8

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/11/hot-earth-dreams.html

Currently reading: Clojure made simple.

Currently reading: Clojure made simple.

It’s a six chapter eBook which you can read for free (just get the sample). It’s worth kicking the author a few bucks for it though.

After reading a few books on LISP, I’ve decided that Clojure remains the nicest. This book which the author says he wrote using Google Docs gets through to the useful nitty gritty stuff in a short clear waffle free text.

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=yqfBJYhvqJcC

Flexbox is a gnarly complex piece of CSS but it needn’t be too hard to come to grips with.

Flexbox is a gnarly complex piece of CSS but it needn’t be too hard to come to grips with. Opera’s Bruce Lawson explains how to best understand flexbox via an analogy.

As a quick tip, I find a helpful way of coming to grips with it is by likening Flexbox to String Theory. Thus, flex-basis is analogous to a Calabi–Yau manifold, and think of flex-shrink as like the 7 compactified dimensions propagating from one point to another by summing probability amplitudes.