nikhil.io

The Cosmic Mother is very strong here. AMMORU 🙏🌸♥️👹 The first was this excellent one for a steel company:…

Was looking for an alternative to my trusty “10 Hours of IceBreaker Idling in the Arctic” and found this. over the last couple of years i’ve been making really really really quiet music to listen to when i do yoga or sleep or meditate or panic. i ended up with 4 hours of music and have decided to…

I did like the mood (and soft-spoken narration) of the introduction but I absolutely loved that background music. It’s called Lambent Rag by Clark and is worth a listen and a watch. The Air looks nice but I’ll baby my iPhone 13 Mini, perfection as far a…

A short meditation my friend Greg Bal. The very first one is of the Pedestrian Mall in Iowa City and I absolutely love it.…

Featuring several seasoned negotiators listening in on the master class. (Cached)…

So you might think, why bother solving this problem? Why not work on some big problem that we know is important? But I think that misses the point. What if the Goldbach Conjecture, turns out it is opening up a whole new part of the multiverse of mathematical ideas. We don’t really know 'cause we…

No math/equations. Just clear and concise overviews of topics. Made as a video to fall asleep to!…

A three-hour rundown of the game’s mythology from the 1992 Mortal Kombat to 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1 by ClementJ64. For a more extensive historical overview that doesn’t get into the mythology, there’s Ian Scherer’s excellent “The History of Mortal Kombat”. Lots of dedicated research in both videos f…

This is super-cool. They place a piece of Uranium Oxide in a cloud chamber and you can actually see two kinds of radioactive ‘bullets’ just flying out of the sample: Alpha particles, which make shorter and chonkier streaks because they’re Helium nucleii which are much heavier than: Beta particle…

A crowdsourced list of the best trip-hop songs with each letter of the alphabet. Most popular are Massive Attack and Portishead (no surprises here). Here’s a YouTube playlist. Track Artist Angel Massive Attack link Building Steam With A Grain of Salt DJ Shadow link Cowboys Po…

I say ‘little’ relative to all else it finds itself in. Read some place that if the Milky Way were the size of the United States, our ‘little’ Sun would be the size of… drumroll… a grain of sand someplace in the Midwest 🫠🌽…

The cringe I get from the explanation from someone who truly knows the game is akin to the one I get from “hacking the mainframe” or “tracking the killer’s IP address” or the casual “bypassing the firewall”. All hat, no cattle indeed. I can venture a guess at the answer but: Why, why is any of thi…

Not completely unsurprising, but yeah: I was struck by how it’s essentially a continuous tone after about 2,000 BPM. Makes one wonder if anything in the Universe is really continuous or if all of it is fundamentally discrete. Also makes you wonder how animals like bees perceive the world.…

Caption by CO 🤣…

If you liked that, you might like this longer documentary called “Being Poirot” by Suchet himself.…

Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.…

Spent a decent portion of my professional life with init.d. Had to deploy a set of Ubuntu servers last week (use FreeBSD at home), which marked my first actual brush with systemd after a long while of sysadmin-ing Linux systems. It’s weird, takes some getting used to, and has a lovely Enterprise™ s…

I know nothing of D&D, wanted to find out more after watching the latest season of Stranger Things, and came by this video. I still don’t understand how the figurines contribute to the gameplay but was amazed by his vast collection of them. Lots of lovely passion and camaraderie here ♥️ Here’s…

My dudes. Cached here via YouTube because it is too precious to be yanked off the internet. Via Rob G. It also occurred to me that the OS in the video would be more usable, more respectful, and less full of spyware than the giant crock of shit that is Windows 11.…

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This really got me: My job is to keep our code running while other packagers are changing theirs. Lord have mercy. NPM continued use and existence is proof that (Almost) Every Day is a Miracle ✨…

In 1967, the Films Division of India asked all kinds of 20-year olds about their dreams and how they felt about the future of a nation that was, itself, 20 years old. Here’s the original video. A lot of the kids who speak English in the video (starting at 5:00) attend the august Indian Institute of…

This (beautifully formatted and well-paced-and-delivered and surprisingly sparsely attended) talk by Gabriel Lebec on the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus is one of my favorite talks ever. As Lebec explains, the lovely bird names come from this book call…

Excellent stuff, particularly the mechanical keyboard envy. There’s a Nikhil in it too! 💁‍♂️ I don’t think I’ll get into them. Got myself one of these (brown switches) about three years ago after outsourcing the research to a highly enthusiastic and helpful co-worker. The “L” key sticks sometimes…

Because we don’t simply write non-annoying and non-creepy software that respects you and does the thing you want it to do anymore. Gotta deliver Value™ to all key stakeholders. By which we mean ourselves and the Market. Not you. You are nothing more than Data that taps “Purchase” to us.…

If you took “Buttons” by The Pussycat Dolls and deep-fried it in stale peanut oil, you would get the result below. It’s by Youtuber Dii and it’s all I’ve been humming for the past 48 hours.…

There isn’t much variety in the music I listen to. I stick to soundtracks, minimalist composers, some weird surprises, and mostly to what my good friend calls “electronic windchime shit” (by which he means “ambient music.”) This means I’ve heard fewer than, say, twenty country songs in my life so…

She addresses graduate/PhD students struggling to complete their theses but there’s quite a bit to learn here. She considers procrastination as a perfectly logical response: why wouldn’t one seek pleasure? It’s something that (a) reveals a lot about what you’re afraid of and (b) is hence a protecti…

See also: “Where profits come from”…

Koji Kondo is a “sound designer” who composed music for Super Mario Bros. He was inspired by these songs. Music Artist Song The Main “Overworld” Theme T-Square Sister Marian (3:08) When you go down the Warp Pipes Friendship Let’s not talk about it When you get a Star…

Two absolutely mesmerizing videos by Universal Everything. I could watch them for hours and might just loop them on the old iPad. This one’s called “Walking City” Here’s another called “Transfiguration” 🙌 Here’s a third video (not by Unive…

Vox on something I’ve always wondered: Why tennis pros reject balls before a serve (and what happens to the ones they do.) More fluff ⇒ more drag ⇒ more time for your opponent to react. So they’re looking for a ball with less fluff for their first serve…

I was rather dismayed to find out that there were no more episodes of “Grill Talk” with the leader of one of the worst companies on the planet. I wonder if the PR team that thought it was a good idea to show the ‘casual and human’ side of their ethically bankrupt CEO are still with the company. He…

Hikaru Dorodango means “Shining Mudcake”. Start with a lump of mud and end with a highly polished sphere. Absolutely amazing. Here’s a short NatGeo video about Bruce Gardner, an artist who makes a lot of these. He says it took him 30 tries to make his first perfect one.…

“Happiness” “MAN”…

A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen. The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day…

Dylan Beattie is my new favorite nerd on YouTube.…

Well… not really. Maybe. Brian Will examines the history of the OOP way of thinking and it’s over-application as a panacea to every problem domain, particularly in The Enterprise™…

A fascinating peek into the (big, lucrative) world of competitive gaming and how an humble champion’s unorthodox, world-class skills developed in a vacuum in a country not known for its gaming scene.…

They use a pantograph to etch things out, after which they ‘tampograph’ the logo (at 1:45.)…

I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity.…

I must have watched this 14,221 times. A parody of this (real) miniseries. There’s a Part III too.…

Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020. He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine): Q: How has the re…

If impatient, skip to the last minute.…

Mentioned this to NB. Saving here for later. On this event: Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gent…

“Nidhi: In thirty-five years of being in this industry, I’ve never seen a dish look like that… taste so good. It’s delicious.”…

See also: “Creating a QR Code step by step”…

Took me two tries to get through this. I felt bad for Rep. Clawson but he was well-intentioned and, to CM’s point, this is the kind of “honest mistake” that can happen only in a few countries 🇺🇸…

He played Hans Gruber’s “right-hand man” Karl Vreski. Here’s more on his roller-coaster of a life.…

I have found a new thing I’m going to turn into scrambled eggs repeatedly until I get it right. See also: more omelettes.…

Bryan Ropar is a plastic chair connoisseur and expert. Here’s his ranking of the Top 100 Plastic Chairs (couldn’t find the ranking criteria.)…

This is the "the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world" and dates from “either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD.” It was found engraved on a tombstone and was “dedicated by Seikilos to Euterpe, who was possibly his wife.” (…

Kashyap on his journey to become one of India’s most important filmmakers. The cover picture is clickbait. No “shocking” revelations. Just a good story about pursuing one’s chosen vocation with grit and perseverance (with a bit of luck along the way.)…

Was watching an episode or two of Joy of Painting with my sister when we wondered what happened to all the finished paintings on his show. Now we know.…

TL;DW: This is “anti-fouling” that repels barnacles, algae, and mollusks by emitting “biocides”. This is desirable because they cause drag (think fuel) and structural damage. Red because traditionally some oxide of Copper. Also this: In nature bright…

I cannot get over how maddeningly cute this is. Reddit user pendragwen’s comment makes it even better: Awww! But look at how they test out their chromatophores first thing after hatching! It’s speculated that color-changing is how they communicate and show emotion. Almost like a little joyful str…

Excellent talk by Chris Toomey on Mastering the Vim Language. Features a lot of must-read Vim resources and nice-to-have plugins. Key takeaway for me: Prefer text objects to motions when possible (corollary: “Is this repeatable?”)…

Developed in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, minute repeaters sound the time in hours, quarters and minutes—hence their name. Repeaters served a practical purpose: telling time in the dark. When streetlights were rare and matches and candles precious, chiming watches were a logical sol…

Stumbled upon this nearly three-hour, real-time, annotated simulation of the Titanic sinking. Late night. Which led me to James Cameron’s 2012 documentary Titanic: The Final Word, in which he assembles a group of engineers and historians to fix the simulation in the 1997 movie, which leads to this…

Bill Hader is made to faceshift when doing his impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s weird and brilliant and I love it. Here’s another where he does Al Pacino. TIL about the term “deepfakes”.…

Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video. The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one: Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine f…

Absolutely amazing stop motion by Daniel Cloud Campos & Co. Here’s the making of. They did it over 17 days. I wonder when they got any sleep. At one point he says “we got 2 seconds after 4 hours.” ~3 minutes of video = 360 hours, or 15 days 😬 And…

This video of a ball swinging in front of concave mirror (starts at 2:00, cannot embed for some reason) reminded me of simulations of what it would be like if one fell into a Black Hole. Here’s a Schwarzschild Black Hole, one “with mass, but with no electric charge, and no spin.” (Source) https:/…

Amar Bose on education, teaching, purpose, creativity, not whinging, Norbert Weiner (under whom he was a grad student), and working with the right (and ethical) people. Starts around 24:00.…

As the final season of HBO’s blockbuster television series Game of Thrones hits screens around the world today, audiences in China are begging for the explicit scenes of sex and violence not to be censored. [. . .] Disgruntled viewers in China have previously compared the significantly edited vers…

Best thing I’ve seen this year. About as spiritual as it gets. After an unimaginable length of time, even the black holes will have evaporated and the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons, gradually tending towards the same temperature, as the…

A delightful, 20-minute video from the Hamilton Watch Company and a tl;dw version of the above Bought one after looking to get the “Murph Watch” in Interstellar. That article notes that they only made 10 for the movie (and gave one away.) Well, they’re…

I think my job doesn’t have an end goal. Words like “finished” or “complete” don’t exist. We do our best with today’s menu and entertain our guests. That’s all for today, it’s repetition. – Chef Nozumu Abe, Sushi Noz…

Set to “Destino” 💗💗💗…

Oh how I love a good David Mitchell rant. This one’s on avoiding taxation via pension contributions: [. . . ] what we’re essentially saying is that people get to choose, if they’re rich, how much they reckon they out to pay. Where on this moral scale do they place themselves, what can they square…

NPR on why many of us can identify with little Agnes: The study found that for the entire group of participants, cuter creatures were associated with greater activity in brain areas involved in emotion. But the more cute aggression a person felt, the m…

This is absolutely beautiful. I’m happy there’s a way to generate music that sounds like one of my favorite tracks.…

Heard this and was made aware of this timeless album for the first time at a very strange party at Iowa State. RIP Sam Zaman.…

Via co-worker DH. Dara Ó Briain on how Racism is better than Astrology: Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these thi…

Minute Physics on how Muons reaching terrestrial detectors from the upper atmosphere are direct proof of time dilation/length contraction in Special Relativity. What a Boss 🙏 💯…

Wahyu Ichwandardi used MacPaint and Macromind VideoWorks/Director on an old Mac SE to create this wonderful frame-by-frame animation of “This is America”.…

Nick Murray Willis does brilliant “animated treatments” of commentary.…

Al Jazeera on godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh: This is insane: Chauhan: One day the Guru summoned a meeting of his closest male devotees. There were about 400 to 500 people. He said “We are going to remove your virility. After that, your mind isn’t goi…

Astounding. No glue, 1 million Technic elements Total weight: 1,500 kg 5.3HP Engine 2,304 Power Functions motors 4,032 Technic gear wheels 2,016 Technic cross axles Est torque 92 Nm Functional rear spoiler and speedometer 13,438 man hours How they made it…

Kei Nomiyama and Radim Schreiber take otherworldly photos of fireflies. The latter will be at the Des Moines Botanical Center exhibiting his “Firefly Experience”…

She… made me feel like years of practicing this… were in vain. This guy attempts the ‘Pepin Omelette’ with fantastic results and this chef is from another dimens…

“ 05/08/18 lol…

Enough said. (via Chad)…

The calmest 9 minutes I spent today.…