History is written by the winners
July 10, 2020
if they can write: if they can't, then it is written by the losers.
More from 100 suns
reStructuredText: how not to do it
July 9, 2020
reStructuredText manages:
to be very painful to write compared to, for instance, Markdown (why double backquotes around code? I mean, seriously, what purpose does that serve?);
to be complicated enough that you often need to look things up, and end up using it in inconsistent ways ('what's the right syntax for a reference to a method in another class again?, oh, I'll just use ``...``: it's wrong but it will do');
to not be expressive enough that it becomes second nature in the way (La)TeX doe...
Planet 9
July 11, 2020
There's a fairly mad theory that planet 9 (which probably does not exist) is a primordial black hole, in this case meaning an object far too light to have formed from a collapsed star. I suspect primordial black holes may not exist, and we've already done measurements which show they are at least scarce if they do. Well, here's an experiment which will tell us if any exist in the outer Solar system. In the likely case that it finds none we have another data point which puts an upper bound on ...