Seona Dancing was a 1980s British pop group best known for providing Ricky Gervais with his first taste of fame. The band was formed in 1982 by aspiring pop stars Bill Macrae and Ricky Gervais. Their single "More to Lose", released in 1983, only made it to number 70 on the Billboard charts, and the band quickly disbanded in 1984. A year later, in 1985, a DJ from 99.5 DWRT-FM in Manila in the Philippines started playing a song called "Fade" by Medium (also billed as "Medium" by Fade). It became a runaway hit, and the angsty theme song for many Filipino teenagers in the mid 1980s. Eventually, the identity of the song was revealed as "More to Lose" by Seona Dancing. Bill Macrae faded into obscurity, but years later Ricky Gervais found new fame as the co-writer and star of the hit BBC comedy The Office.
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👓 Solomon Golomb (1932–2016) | Stephen Wolfram
The Most-Used Mathematical Algorithm Idea in History
An octillion. A billion billion billion. That’s a fairly conservative estimate of the number of times a cellphone or other device somewhere in the world has generated a bit using a maximum-length linear-feedback shift register sequence. It’s probably the single most-used mathematical algorithm idea in history. And the main originator of this idea was Solomon Golomb, who died on May 1—and whom I knew for 35 years.
Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences, published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—went out of print long ago. But its content lives on in pretty much every modern communications system. Read the specifications for 3G, LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or for that matter GPS, and you’ll find mentions of polynomials that determine the shift register sequences these systems use to encode the data they send. Solomon Golomb is the person who figured out how to construct all these polynomials.
Many of the fantastical seeming stories here, as well as Sol’s personality read very true to me with respect to the man I knew for almost two decades.
👓 How I Twitter | Leo Laporte
As you may know I deactivated my half-million follower/bot twitter account last August. I don’t miss it at all except as a newsfeed. Twitter practically killed RSS readers by providing a firehose of instantaneously “curated” news. With all its flaws, that firehose is useful for a variety of re...
👓 #44067 (Refactor get_avatar and related functions to make Gravatar a Hook instead of a Default) | WordPress Trac
👓 #36669 (Update SimplePie to Latest Version and possibly include PHP-MF2) | WordPress Trac
👓 #20977 (Add Dynamic Comment Statuses) | WordPress Trac
👓 Reverting the Bulk Ticket Closing | Make WordPress Core
Recently, a bulk modification was performed on Trac affecting 2,300+ tickets that had not seen any activity in 2 years or more. These tickets were closed and marked as wontfix. To read a more detai…
👓 #35214 (Custom Comment Types) | WordPress Trac
👓 #38200 (Store a `comment_type` for all Comments, not just custom comment types) | WordPress Trac
Burrowing owl by Scott Gruber | Dribbble
Charley Harper inspired
👓 WP5.3: Open Call for Tickets | WordPress
As we were discussing plans for the next major release in last week’s devchat, it was made clear to me that a great first step would be to have an open call for tickets. Although iterating an…
👓 Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career l Nature
Open science can lead to greater collaboration, increased confidence in findings and goodwill between researchers.
👓 Why Are So Many Longtime L.A. Bookstores Closing? | Hollywood Reporter
Despite the recent shuttering of Circus of Books, Caravan Book Store and Samuel French, bookstore experts say the end for the city's brick-and-mortar stores isn't nigh: "There is a sea change happening, and it is noteworthy."
👓 Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones l Brainpickings
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
👓 My Library of Unread Books | Rhoneisms
“A library of mostly unread books is far more inspiring than a library of books already read. There’s nothing more exciting than finishing a book, and walking over to your shelves to figure out what you’re going to read next.” — Gabe Habash Here’s an incomplete sampling of mine (and many...
