This update contains carefully selected thought bubbles from the time span between Earth date Wednesday July 20 and Sunday July 24, 2016.

Actually, the majority of this post is taken up by my Poor Man’s Bitcoin Explanation. If you’re not a nerd and/or you don’t have any interest in fabulous new virtual currencies that manage to work around a whole constellation of systems and rules put in place by governments the world over (STICK IT TO THE MAN BY THE POWER OF MATH!!), just skip over the next section.

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• From now on, I would like to limit WHVs to bullets (really) or to named sections, to ease reading. DOWN WITH WALLS OF TEXT!
• After a multi-year, completely coincidental, break from medical imaging, I am back to The Real Business since the start of July. I am super excited about the plans we’re cooking up and executing. I can obviously not say too much, unless beer is involved, or you hang around here for muuuuuch longer. I think I am allowed to mention digital pathology and machine learning and beer.
• Last week we road-tripped up the East Coast to St Francis Bay, via Oudtshoorn and the Cango Caves.
  • Pro tip: When road tripping with more than 0 (zero) children (babies count double; sick babies +5 hit points), and you have to stay overnight somewhere, invest extra in the biggest suite you (or your children’s college fund) can afford.
  • On the beach in St Francis Bay (right in the middle of winter, you still seem to get these lovely balmy beach days), it seemed that everybody was surfing. Whole families, with the mom, the dad, all the kids, and grandma and grandpa, were all on various sizes of surfboards in the sea catching some waves.
  • Here’s a photo from the furthest point on what I call “Not The Ugliest Jogging Route in The World” (in St Francis Bay):

• Last night I accidentally discovered that I can pinpoint the exact weekend and location when and where I first tasted my favourite trappist beer (EVER), namely Rochefort #8. It’s all written up in this 2003 post.
• When Google send me an email this weekend asking me exactly how I would like them to use my email (yes, a few months ago I migrated my mail empire back to Google because my self-hosting experiment had started to cost me time and money) to show me custom advertisements, I was reminded that I do actually find the machine learning models they’re building about me quite creepy, and that perhaps I would prefer not also handing them 12 years of emails to make their models more accurate. There and then I migrated said 12 years of emails from GMail to FastMail. So far I’m really impressed by the product, mostly due to the speed and the user experience of the web-app. There might be a more detailed post in the near future, let me know if you’re interested.
• Most surprising and interesting (to me) new scientific discovery of the week: A team of scientists at Northeastern University in Boston have shown that one of the many kinds of bacteria living in your stomach eats exclusively GABA, a really important brain chemical (neurotransmitter) that plays a role in keeping you calm. Based on this and other work, it looks like the bacteria in your tummy, also known as your gastrointestinal microbiota, besides being crucially important to your digestive system and your general survival, probably also play quite an important role in your psyche. I find this slightly mind-blowing.

Have a great week kids, I hope to see you on the other side.

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WARNING on 2020-02-24: webfaction has been bought by godaddy and will soon close down. I have recently moved out and am now keeping all of my Let’s Encrypt certificates up to date with the official certbot tool.

WARNING: High levels of NERD ahead.

I started using CloudFlare’s free tier on this blog, before Let’s Encrypt burst onto the scene, mostly for their universal SSL. However, as joepie91 recently pointed out, this means that by design, CloudFlare has to decrypt all SSL traffic, and then re-encrypt it to send it to your original site with its self-signed or generic certificate (in my case). Apart from this, CloudFlare is a bit of overkill for this low-traffic site.

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I was reminded that future me really enjoys having written these things. (Present me knows about extrapolation.)

Actually present me also enjoys this, but creating sufficient amounts of time to do so is often challenging. I have most recently convinced myself that I should see this as practice so that I will later be able to write really entertaining posts in minimal time. Until then my two readers, I hope to compensate with edification.

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That’s how the African sun sets in Mpumalanga.

… and this is more or less what it looks like when a cheetah decides to grace you with its presence. We had it all to ourselves (this is quite unusual in the Kruger National Park with an animal of this level of celebrity) and were able to follow it until it wandered further away from the road, probably on the lookout for some dinner.

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Well hello everyone! I missed you, but due to reasons (read on…), this is the first time I’ve been able to get around to a weekly head voices.

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On Sunday, April 10, 2016, as if the day was not already perfect enough, we were super fortunate to see a pod of dolphins speeding along in the sea right next to the R44 coastal road.

The sight was so spectacular, that we could not spare a second to get our cameras out, so you’re going to have to be satisfied with this photo of me and GOU #1 admiring the pod as they swam out of sight.

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Congratulations, you have successfully completed the week of Monday February 8 to Sunday February 14, 2016!

About 4 seconds after posting previous edition WHV #104 to Facebook with the “When you’re a vegan and haven’t told anyone in 10 minutes” meme image included, friend Ivo T. zinged me with this reply:

So much truth. I have been put back in my place. Sorry vegans. Sorry MBA students. Not sorry Ayn Randers.

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This post is about things that I noticed in the week of Monday February 1 to Sunday February 7, 2016.

I dug up an email I wrote to Alex Stepanov and Meng Lee, authors of the C++ Standard Template Library on Monday August 3, 1998, to ask them if they would have written a matrix template, if they would have derived it from the vector template. Stepanov answered, the next day (!), that he had never found much use for inheritance. In those days, nerd celebrities mailed you back. Also, poor old C++ inheritance…

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I thought that I had nothing for the two weeks from Monday January 18 to Sunday January 31, 2016, but my notes begged to differ. They suggested the following items for your reading, listening and viewing pleasure:

Party trick

If you’re like me, you stop two to three chips short of finishing the packet so that you can explain to your conscience that you didn’t finish the whole thing. However, once or twice in my life, I’ve been faced with the terrifying conundrum of a partially finished packet of chips, but no way to seal the packet for later utilisation. Readers, agonise no more! Learn from this animated demonstration:

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