Weekly Head Voices #147: The yearly post-Mpumalanga post.

The Lilac-Breasted Roller. I met this enchanting and almost surrealistically pretty creature for the first time two weeks ago. Time period covered by this post: Monday June 18 to Sunday July 8. Reason for extended absence: Holiday-based recharge. Holiday rating: 13/10. Math is irrelevant. It’s relatively quiet from the European side of my family. I trust (partly confirmed by the grapevine) that my peeps over there are having themselves a wonderful rest.

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Weekly Head Voices #146: You too can learn Kung Fu.

This post covers the period Monday June 11 to Sunday June 17. Read it to become rich, yawn at Lisp and Emacs, yearn to run free on the wide open plains and to learn Kung Fu. Not ambitious at all. Front door nearby De Waal Park, in Cape Town. Photo taken on Sunday by GOU#1, age 12. Social Democracy FTW It turns out that your chances of becoming rich are the greatest if you had the good fortune to have been born in one of the Nordic social democracies, such as Norway, Sweden or Denmark.

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Weekly Head Voices #145: The Narrating Self.

View of the False Bay from the Helderberg Nature Reserve. The work part of the week flew by. (I think this is the reason for the shortness of this post. As is often the case, we start with journal stuff, then nerd stuff and, hidden at the end, some backyard philosophy stuff.) Dear diary The weekend part on the other hand started with a welcome-back-braai (HI MOM!) on Friday, followed by a sublime oxtail potjie on Saturday and concluded today with a sublime long(ish, by my standards as always) run in the morning (showing a little solidarity with the Comrades participants whilst not completely busting my barefoot-style-acclimatising feet and ankles) plus Helderberg stroll and lunch, and is now ending with a WHV writing session.

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Weekly Head Voices #144: Eternal learner.

Welcome back friends! (Right after the nerd news, there’s running and backyard philosophy. You can start wherever you like.) Nerd News The Weekly Nerd News Network (WNNN) wanted to bring the following points under your attention: Emacs 26.1, the first major release since September 2016, when 25.1 came out, happened on May 28. Although Emacs reached perfection (and sentience, some say) a few decades ago, this new version does include improvements such as native line numbering for the VIM refugees and buttery smooth scrolling on X11 (read the very entertaining story behind this).

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Weekly Head Voices #143: The rider and the elephant.

Pretty autumn sunset. A few metres below, the ritual weekend-starting braai was picking up speed. Welcome back kids! Besides this post, which somehow turned out to be longer than I expected, my more nerdy alter ego also wrote a post titled Interactive programming with Fennel Lua Lisp, Emacs and Lisp Game Jam winner EXO_encounter 667. #DeleteFacebook, part deux In an unsurprising (to me) turn of events, the Cambridge Analytica scandal has not even caused a dent in Facebook usage.

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Weekly Head Voices #142: Theory of mind.

Autumn is really pretty down here. We’re getting back on track with the WHVs friends! In the hardly started tradition of writing blog posts in music-backed focus blocks, I have my “upbeat thinking” playlist teed up and ready to go. The outline of this post formed itself as a Real Bullet List(tm) in my Emacs about an hour ago. Let’s go. They grow up so fast Theory of Mind, or ToM, is an important mental capability that we use to model and predict the thoughts and desires of fellow humans.

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Weekly Head Voices #141: Albert was Burning really hard.

Impression of AfrikaBurn 2018 by the Tall Philosophical Neighbour, aka DJ Fiasco, aka Super Hanz. As we were walking back from the ice truck to the BURNIVERSITY, our home away from home, one of our newly-made Canadian friends said: Albert is burning really hard. Albert (name subtly changed to protect the innocent), who by that time had presented his first improv theater workshop at our camp, had struck me as a brilliant and already open-minded human being.

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Weekly Head Voices #140: Koperkapel.

Hello there friends, welcome back! Matters have started heating up around here with the final preparations for a pretty intense project that is expected to launch in about a week’s time. I would prefer saying more about it after the launch, because reasons. I’m mentioning it here as explanation for the paucity of this post, and just in case a near-future post manages to be slightly late or even absent.

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Weekly Head Voices #139: Luna.

Well hello there friends! We have just returned from a ridiculously enjoyable holiday in The Drakensberg, or uKhahlamba in isiZulu. More specifically, we started in Giant’s Castle, the place of no internet mentioned in the previous edition of the WHV, and also the subject of that post’s main image, but we spent the largest part of the week at Cathedral Peak. Due to it having been holiday and all, the rest of this post will follow the trusty old bullet list form.

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Weekly Head Voices #138: Born to run.

I am currently in a place with no to extremely little internet. Just getting the photo above uploaded was an adventure. I briefly debated breaking my current WHV posting streak due to exceptional circumstances, but decided against it, at least for now. Anyways, I might have no internet, but the scenery here is phenomenal. (It later turned out that just getting this blog post uploaded on Sunday evening was not going to happen.

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