📺 Watched Varsity Blues

Watched Varsity Blues from Paramount, January 15, 1999
Directed by Brian Robbins. With James Van Der Beek, Jon Voight, Paul Walker, Ron Lester. A back-up quarterback is chosen to lead a Texas football team to victory after the star quarterback is injured.
One of those times that I get wrapped up in a cheeseball movie just because it happens to be on cable.

📺 "Blue Bloods" Genetics

Watched "Blue Bloods" Genetics S7 | E11 from CBS, January 6, 2017
Directed by Alex Chapple. With Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, Len Cariou. When Eddie and Jamie become overly involved in a complicated adoption case between the birth and adoptive parents, they ask Erin to help them settle the dispute without going to court. Also, Frank looks into reports of NYPD cadets cheating on their psychological exams, and Danny learns that Jack plans to enlist in the Marines after graduation.
Biological parents come back 5 years later to try to get their adopted son back?!

totes profesh: how to blog about code and give zero fucks

Read totes profesh: how to blog about code and give zero fucks by Garann Means (garann.com)

I'm frustrated right now. I've been looking for someone to write about a technology that tons of people have no doubt used and am coming up short. Really, this is my own fault, because I was hoping I'd find someone who wasn't a white male to address the topic. There's nothing wrong with a white male addressing the topic, but I've been recommending a lot of white males to write about technologies and I was hoping to put my money where my mouth is in terms of my hopes for the diversity of the field in which I work.

I checked a bunch of related repos on GitHub and found that the maintainers were white guys and the committers were white guys and the people filing issues were white guys. So I checked the Following lists of related Twitter accounts and found.. more white guys. The few women I found either didn't blog or had Tumblrs full of inspirational quotes and cupcake photos and shit. (Which is fine. But not what I happened to be looking for an expert on.)

And so this is how I became frustrated, because I don't want to hit up people I know over and over again, and I need a way to know people are interested in and knowledgeable about certain topics, and the internet was giving me fuck-all.

Which brings me to the subject of this post, which is that you, developer in an underrepresented group who hopefully received this link somehow through the magical machinations of social media, should be blogging more. I need you to blog more. Little future developers who look or act or dress or think like you need you to blog more. Your slightly confused and defensive developer community needs you to blog more. Please please please please. And if you are like, "I give zero fucks about what those people need, I need to get off work at six and build charming birdhouses or customize my bicycle or something," the best part is giving zero fucks is totally fine.

See, if you were an ambitious type, you wouldn't need me to prevail upon you to blog more. You would be doing that and speaking at conferences and merrily on your way to becoming the next Marissa Mayer and that would be just fine for everyone. But there are a lot more not-Marissa-Mayers in the world than there are Marissa Mayers and those people need representation, lest we get it into our obsessive little developer heads that if you are not constantly being the very best at everything you should just go home. We need blog posts that aren't about big fluffy TED topics like programmer diversity and are instead about that fucking stubborn and reprehensible bug you spent five hours on today because you couldn't find a goddamned thing on StackOverflow.

A Secondary Meaning for POSSE

I’d meant to document this back in November when it was discussed at IndieWebCamp Los Angeles, but it was a busy weekend.

In conversation with Tantek Çelik, I asked if a double entendre meaning to POSSE was originally intended when it was coined?

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (or Everywhere), a content publishing model that starts with posting content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with permashortlinks back to the original on your site.

When I originally heard about POSSE, I considered the original post on my own site as the Sheriff or “leader” and the ensuing syndicated copies as the (literal and figurative) traditional posse which follows along behind it adding ideas, conversation, and help in accomplishing the original post’s mission.

The posse, one tough looking gang of o’n’ry corporate silos! Let’s mount ’em up!

If that second meaning didn’t exist before, it does now…

Reply to Ben Hanowell about Hypothes.is, Fragmentions, and Annotations

Replied to a tweet by Brash EquilibriumBrash Equilibrium (Twitter)
@ChrisAldrich is this the fragmentions plugin along with @hypothes_is or just the latter? Link to instructions por favor!!!!
Hypothes.is’ reply will get you most of the way, but I’ll add some additional thoughts below.

There are a couple of fragmentions plugins in the WordPress repository. I use and recommend WP Fragmention. Mostly it comes down to supporting a chunk of javascript that is the brainchild of Kevin Marks.

For Hypothes.is, I use the plugin referenced in the tweet above, but I’ve also been using Hypothes.is Aggregator by Kris Shaffer. I will note that the latter broke for me recently (possibly with the upgrade to WP 4.7, but I’ve filed a ticket and hopefully it’ll get sorted shortly). Shaffer’s plugin also makes using and posting with Hypothes.is’ Chrome extension more useful and interesting to me, since I can own copies of my highlights/annotations on my own website.

I’m hoping that sometime soon that Hypothes.is highlights and annotations on pages will also support sending webmentions so that when someone annotates one of my pages that I’ll receive a notification about it, almost as if it were a comment. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, Kartik Prabhu has a fantastic write up and some code on mixing marginalia and webmentions which I’m hoping to implement sometime soon myself.

If you need any help with any of the above, I (and surely others) are happy to help you via IndieWeb Chat.

GoodReads 2017 Reading Challenge: 42 Books

I want to read at least 42 books this year.

I totally fell down on the job last year (compared to my goal), but I did read a lot of additional material online instead and lot of what I did read, (but didn’t necessarily finish toward my goal) was of a highly dense/technical nature. We’ll do better this year.

Basic Category Theory by Tom Leinster | Free Ebook Download

Bookmarked Basic Category Theory (arxiv.org)
This short introduction to category theory is for readers with relatively little mathematical background. At its heart is the concept of a universal property, important throughout mathematics. After a chapter introducing the basic definitions, separate chapters present three ways of expressing universal properties: via adjoint functors, representable functors, and limits. A final chapter ties the three together. For each new categorical concept, a generous supply of examples is provided, taken from different parts of mathematics. At points where the leap in abstraction is particularly great (such as the Yoneda lemma), the reader will find careful and extensive explanations.
Tom Leinster has released a digital e-book copy of his textbook Basic Category Theory on arXiv [1]

h/t to John Carlos Baez for the notice:

My friend Tom Leinster has written a great introduction to that wonderful branch of math called category theory! It’s free:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09375

It starts with the basics and it leads up to a trio of related concepts, which are all ways of talking about universal properties.

Huh? What’s a ‘universal property’?

In category theory, we try to describe things by saying what they do, not what they’re made of. The reason is that you can often make things out of different ingredients that still do the same thing! And then, even though they will not be strictly the same, they will be isomorphic: the same in what they do.

A universal property amounts to a precise description of what an object does.

Universal properties show up in three closely connected ways in category theory, and Tom’s book explains these in detail:

through representable functors (which are how you actually hand someone a universal property),

through limits (which are ways of building a new object out of a bunch of old ones),

through adjoint functors (which give ways to ‘freely’ build an object in one category starting from an object in another).

If you want to see this vague wordy mush here transformed into precise, crystalline beauty, read Tom’s book! It’s not easy to learn this stuff – but it’s good for your brain. It literally rewires your neurons.

Here’s what he wrote, over on the category theory mailing list:

…………………………………………………………………..

Dear all,

My introductory textbook “Basic Category Theory” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. By arrangement with them, it’s now also free online:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09375

It’s also freely editable, under a Creative Commons licence. For instance, if you want to teach a class from it but some of the examples aren’t suitable, you can delete them or add your own. Or if you don’t like the notation (and when have two category theorists ever agreed on that?), you can easily change the Latex macros. Just go the arXiv, download, and edit to your heart’s content.

There are lots of good introductions to category theory out there. The particular features of this one are:
• It’s short.
• It doesn’t assume much.
• It sticks to the basics.

 

References

[1]
T. Leinster, Basic Category Theory, 1st ed. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

The Seattle Review of Books – Sherman Alexie, Lindy West, and Ta-Nehisi Coates all quit Twitter this week

Read Sherman Alexie, Lindy West, and Ta-Nehisi Coates all quit Twitter this week by Paul Constant (seattlereviewofbooks.com)
Sooner or later, enough people I like are going to abandon the service, and the pain-to-pleasure ratio will tip unfavorably. I don't know how Twitter will survive 2017 without making some drastic changes to its service. Maybe it's already too late.

Primes as a Service on Twitter

Our friend Andrew Eckford has spent some time over the holiday improving his Twitter bot Primes as a Service. He launched it in late Spring of 2016, but has added some new functionality over the holidays. It can be relatively handy if you need a quick answer during a class, taking an exam(?!), to settle a bet at a mathematics tea, while livetweeting a conference, or are hacking into your favorite cryptosystems.

General Instructions

Tweet a positive 9-digit (or smaller) integer at @PrimesAsAService. It will reply via Twitter to tell you if the number prime or not.

Some of the usable commands one can tweet to the bot for answers follow. (Hint: Click on the buttons with the tweet text to auto-generate the relevant Tweet.)

If you ask about a prime number with a twin prime, it should provide the twin.

Pro tip: You should be able to drag and drop any of the buttons above to your bookmark bar for easy access/use in the future.

Happy prime tweeting!

The Daily 202: Key dates to put on your calendar for 2017 | The Washington Post

Read The Daily 202: Key dates to put on your calendar for 2017 by James Hohmann (Washington Post)
Summits, elections, anniversaries and other momentous dates for Trump’s first year

David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump | The Washington Post

Read David Fahrenthold tells the behind-the-scenes story of his year covering Trump by David Fahrenthold (Washington Post)
A reporter reveals how he investigated Trump’s claims on his donations to charity.

The dirty secret about your clothes | The Washington Post

Read The dirty secret about your clothes: Making them is toxic to people and the environment. Start-ups in India see a better way. But will we pay for it? by Esha Chhabra (Washington Post)

AUROVILLE, India — In the Colours of Nature dye house, Vijayakumar Varathan is busy prepping a vat of indigo. At 51, he looks frail, with a tanned body made mostly of bones, but he runs to and fro, setting up an open fire where he’ll brew cauldrons of natural colorants made from plants.He’s worked here for 15 years. But until his early 30s, Varathan mixed chemicals in a conventional clothing factory in the same region of southern India. There he developed a disease that caused layers of his skin to peel off. Even today, it is discolored. “It was pretty bad,” he says, in his fragmented English. “But I didn’t have a choice.”