I really like using (and making!) programming playgrounds, and I got thinking the other day about how I didn’t have a great list of playgrounds to refer to. So I asked on Mastodon for links to cool playgrounds.

Here’s what I came up with. I’d love to know what I missed.

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco.

The long rap sheet only tells part of the tale.
By Martha Lunken

Arguments passed to a script are processed in the same order in which they’re sent. The indexing of the arguments starts at one, and the first argument can be accessed inside the script using $1. Similarly, the second argument can be accessed using $2, and so on. The positional parameter refers to this representation of the arguments using their position. //

Using flags is a common way of passing input to a script. When passing input to the script, there’s a flag (usually a single letter) starting with a hyphen (-) before each argument.

Let’s take a look at the userReg-flags.sh script, which takes three arguments: username (-u), age (-a), and full name (-f).

We’ll modify the earlier script to use flags instead of relying on positional parameters. The getopts function reads the flags in the input, and OPTARG refers to the corresponding values:

Magnetic Adsorption Smart Digital Timer-Focus is the highest value skill in a world that profits from your attention. The secret trick that productivity hackers use for getting the most out of a day is to use a physical timer. A small device that has been proven to significantly improve your performance. 

$20

A majority of voters suspect recent elections have been affected by cheating, and believe officials are ignoring the problem.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 60% of Likely U.S. voters think it is likely that cheating affected the outcomes of some races in last year’s midterm elections, including 37% who say it’s Very Likely. Thirty-five percent (35%) don’t believe it’s likely the 2022 midterms were affected by cheating, including 20% who think it’s Not At All Likely. 

It's no crime in open source to do initial idea development in small groups out of the public gaze. Nor to ask for others to join in a design discussion as you see fit. That should be true for all aspects of any organisation that supplies and depends on open source communities. This is a very different culture to commercial entities, and it's very dangerous to think like one when you're the other.

In the words of Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is to open source's great advantage that it can align its organizational cultures to those of its communities far more easily than can shareholder-bidden corporations. When strategies and cultures are in tune, then real magic can happen – and when they don't, things get seriously Rusty. ®

This is a simple script that converts copied data from xls to DokuWiki's Table format.

I have lectured state legislators and many others, and argued here, how the goal of the current ‘progressive’ movement, particularly the CRT and related racialized movements, is to deconstruct the country. To tear it apart.

It’s why I’ve argued “The fight over Critical Race Theory in education is a fight in many ways for our national survival”.

It’s not about a particular policy, it’s about tearing down:

“There is a thin line in society, between food and anarchy, freedom and repression, liberty and tyranny, safety and street violence. It’s thinner than we want to admit, and it’s being pushed to its limits on purpose by ideologies that want to deconstruct our society. Tearing down society is a dangerous game.”

The topic came up in my hour-long Tucker Carlson Today interview:

Tucker: Chaos is an opportunity.

WAJ: Chaos is an opportunity. And also I think it’s a societal dead end. It is teaching people to hate their country because their loyalty is not to their country. It’s to their group identity. It’s to their tribe. It’s turning us back into a tribal society where your group identity is your allegiance….

Pitting races against each other, pitting ethnic groups against each other, is a way to tear down the structures of society. And that’s really the end goal. What happens after that? I don’t think they’ve thought through. Because if they were to succeed in their goal of tearing down the police, tearing down the court system, tearing down all these systems that keep us a relatively civil society, it could be very ugly. It’s Yugoslavia. //

Sean Davis @seanmdav
·
Tucker’s entire speech was spectacular and very emotionally moving. The battle we are fighting now is not left vs. right or Democrat vs. Republican. The battle is evil vs. good, darkness vs. light.
Heritage Foundation @Heritage
“When people, [including] the federal government, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, what you’re watching is not a political movement, it’s evil.” - @TuckerCarlson #Heritage50

According to data published by the United Nations Statistics Division, China accounted for 28 percent of global manufacturing output in 2018. That puts the country more than 10 percentage points ahead of the United States, which used to have the world’s largest manufacturing sector until China overtook it in 2010.

With total value added by the Chinese manufacturing sector amounting to almost $4 trillion in 2018, manufacturing accounted for nearly 30 percent of the country’s total economic output. The U.S. economy is much less reliant on manufacturing these days: in 2018, the manufacturing sector accounted for just 11 percent of GDP in the world’s largest economy.

In his continuing war on fossil fuels, President Biden and the Environmental Protection Agency are planning to announce a severe new proposal forcing the nation’s power plants to dramatically cut their emissions by 2040. Similar efforts by Biden and President Obama before him were struck down by the Supreme Court.

If the liberal Washington Post is calling the proposal “drastic,” you know it’s going to be contentious. Their headline? “EPA plan would impose drastic cuts on power plant emissions by 2040.” //

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 that an Obama-era regulation curbing power plant emissions was unconstitutional since the EPA did not have explicit power to make such rules. Unfortunately, Biden’s behemoth, inflation-causing “Inflation Reduction Act” passed in August 2022, and it has a provision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

While Thursday’s inaugural flight of Starship brought excitement, incredible images, and a roar to South Texas, it also tossed concrete miles away (and at vans). Numerous leaked images, aerial photos, and ocean-based photos have revealed the extensive damage to Stage 0. Everything you need to see has been compiled into one article.

For all leftists, climate alarmists, and other dwellers in fantasy land, happy Earth Day! Unfortunately for “climate change” true believers, not only have climate predictions been consistently and wildly wrong for 50 years now, but “clean” or “green” energy is toxic for the environment, inefficient, and unprofitable. //

First, it’s literally impossible to produce the amount of energy and electricity society currently uses with “green” energy. That’s why climate propagandists like World Economic Forum tell people to get used to being poorer. But also, much of that “green” energy is actually terrible for the environment. Solar panels and wind turbines have killed billions of birds, and offshore wind turbines can be deadly for whales. //

EV batteries, which have to be replaced every few years, are very toxic to dispose of. The “mining, manufacturing, and disposal of [EV] batteries threatens to be a major environmental concern in the coming years.” Solar panels and wind turbines also generate lots of toxic waste. //

Any reasonable person who has seen wind or solar farms has to notice they take up massive amounts of land. In other words, to put up wind turbines or solar panels, huge swathes of natural scenery and farmland must be ruined. This includes killing literally millions of trees.

Back in 2016, a planned solar panel farm in New Jersey required cutting down 15,000 trees. 200-year-old rainforest trees were axed in Tasmania in 2019 to clear land for a wind farm. In Scotland, as of 2020, almost 14 million trees had been cut down to make way for wind turbines. By 2021, Scotland was reportedly still cutting down an estimated 1,600 trees a day to make way for wind turbines. In 2022, Germany was planning to clear a large swathe of the thousand-year-old forest known as the “treasure house of European forests” to make way for a wind power plant.

RFK Jr., in his recent announcement of his candidacy for president, declared that he was going to do something truly radical if elected president: tell the truth, no matter how uncomfortable or unpopular //

The idea of a politician being held to such a standard shouldn’t be radical, but it absolutely is. At this point, we simply take it for granted that if a government actor’s lips are moving, he’s probably lying. The only questions are how much of what he’s saying is exaggerated, distorted, or outright fabricated, and for what purpose?

And because the corporate media that is supposed to expose and chronicle politicans’ lies is almost always in on the deception itself, the onus falls on the individual or a trusted independent media source to sort fact from fiction. What this leads to is a devastating decay in trust in government and an erosion of civic engagement of the sort seen in Eastern Europe in the heyday of Soviet communism.

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

Yesterday I wrote about the first launch of Space X’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built. There was one particular clip which seemed to show a bunch of debris flying at the camera as the rocket was lifting off. Here’s the clip.

VSI releases OpenVMS 9.2-1 and x86 hobby licenses //

VMS Software Inc (VSI) has opened its hobbyist licensing scheme for the x86-64 version of one of the most reliable OSes in the business.

The slow-but-steady migration of OpenVMS onto commodity x86 kit has passed a couple of significant milestones. A year ago, we covered the release of OpenVMS 9.2, the first production-ready version of the OS for x86-64 kit. In that story we mentioned that the VMS equivalent of a point release was coming, probably at the end of 2022. Well, it's here, and there is also a way to get hold of the new OS and try it for yourself.

Progress is slow, but that is a good thing: this is one of the most reliable and stable OSes in the IT industry. A measured, thoroughly tested release cycle is what you want when some clusters have uptimes measured in decades.

Last month, HP spin-off VMS Software Inc. started the field test of OpenVMS E9.2-1. This version means two significant new milestones for this 46-year-old enterprise OS. It's the first update for the new x86-64 edition: if you were running 9.2 on Intel-powered tin, you can get the 9.2-1 update and do an in-place upgrade.

Thought Icelandic glacier water was rare? How about chugging down some Moon water. //

Scientists in China have found glass beads contained in lunar soil might hold enough water to provide a resource for future lunar missions.

The results, published in Nature Geoscience this week, stem from data collected by China's Chang'e-5 mission, and suggest the Moon's surface holds much more trapped water than previously thought and the liquid compound vital to continuing life could be relatively easy to extract.

Small glass beads created when meteorites smash into the lunar surface have long been considered a candidate for water storage. Using samples from the Apollo 11 mission, a US study published in 2012 found between 200 and 300 parts per million of water and hydroxyl (OH) in the glass beads they contained. //

Water made it into the beads via the solar winds, the reasoning goes. Solar winds are a plasma emitted from the sun containing hydrogen ions. On earth, they cause the aurora borealis and aurora australis, owing to an interaction with the Earth's magnetic field in the upper atmosphere. As the Moon has no magnetic field, the solar winds can reach its surface and interact with minerals in the soils containing oxygen. Because the solar wind is always, erm, blowing, the water in the beads is replenished.

Letting the calendar cycle for 45 years gives each planet a chance to complete a synodic cycle. //

"By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar," the researchers wrote.

The math appears to bear that out. NASA reckons Mercury's synodic period is 115.88 days, but if we allow the ancient Mayans some leniency due to their lack of advanced scientific instruments and say it's 117 days, you can get exactly seven periods on the calendar.

The other planets visible from Earth and known to the Mayans – Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all have similar mathematical matches when the calendar is allowed to make multiple cycles. Mars, which has the longest synodic period at 780 days, takes 21 periods to fit exactly into 20 cycles, both of which have 16,380 days, just shy of 45 years.

firmware is weirder than we give it credit for. It's even hard to say exactly what it is.

That used to be easy – firmware was software built into hardware (don't mention microcode.) In the days when that meant small expensive ROM chips, only a tiny part of a device's working software could be stored that way, in general just the low-level routines that directly operated the hardware and presented APIs to software that would be loaded in later. Now many devices have enough system flash on board to hold the complete stack, firmware now includes complete operating systems and has come to mean that software at the heart of your technology that controls its behavior and which you can't just load in as an app.

This somewhat shadowy status has consequences. For a start, it has virtually no consumer market. Nobody goes out and buys new firmware; //

No illicit market exists to cream off revenues.

While companies can buy in firmware from other companies, more often, as with MSI, you're a hardware company writing your own firmware. //

So there's no market in stolen firmware, and not much to be gained by keeping it secret anyway. So why lock it down? //

So unlocking firmware makes it more secure, not less. It makes devices more useful, not less. It creates more innovation, not less. And open source firmware is theft-proof; nobody can steal what you're giving away. //

In fact, it's probably time to ditch the idea of firmware as a magical chimaera too dangerous to be freed. The idea only made sense when hardware imposed far more limits on computer architecture. Its continued existence doesn't benefit anyone – manufacturers, users, innovators or the environment. As one of the last ways left to lock people out from their own devices, it's a barrier, not a shield. Publish the code. Open the specs. There's no firm foundation for firmware any more.

Salat did not immediately realize that he was witnessing a “SpaceX Spiral.” As noted by SpaceWeather, three hours earlier SpaceX launched 51 small satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base some 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away. //

An all-sky camera at the University of Alaska’s Poker Flat Research Range also captured the strange whirlpool on Saturday evening. //

SpaceX rockets are designed to land back on Earth but the second stage of the Falcon 9 does not parachute down to the ground. Instead, it burns up in the atmosphere but before doing so it vents its unused fuel which will often take the form of a stunning spiral. //

“I will say I loved the wonderment of not knowing what it was. The auroras kept on dancing so it was hours before I had time to research and try figuring out this unique phenomenon I had witnessed.

“Those were the best hours of blissful bewilderment.”