• This WHV deals with the weeks from Monday June 29 to Sunday July 19. I skipped an edition or two whilst away on vacation, as I was quite busy with, you know, being on vacation. So, about that vacation:
• Last year I explained about the Kruger National Park, or KNP. Well, we went again this year, and again it was lovely. It helps that in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, “winter” at this time of year seems to mean “lovely balmy days with temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius”. What completely and utterly seals the deal, is being surrounded by this particular permutation of natural vastness. You should go there to see for yourself, but here’s a taste:

• EXTREME-NERDERY BULLET: If you’re a Dvorak typist using Java-based tools on the Mac (e.g. Eclipse, IntelliJ, AppCode, and everything by JetBrains) you might have noticed that keyboard shortcuts fall on the spectrum somewhere between extremely wonky and plain infuriating. Besides that you now know that this subset of persons is not limited to just you, here’s an SO answer that I wrote up based on information in the JetBrains bug threads. In short, a long-standing (as in years) bug in Java on Mac means you have to use an open-source tool called Karabiner instead of Mac’s built-in Dvorak support.
• Here, have a photo of a stealthy leopard to recover:

• A Sunday lunch at the Thirsty Scarecrow led to at least two new discoveries. Citizen Beer, a craft beer brewery I have not ran into yet (it’s not for lack of trying, really) makes a pretty delicious amber ale called Alliance (their wonderfully-named Saboteur IPA is not too shabby either):

The week of Monday June 21 to Sunday June 28 as seen through bullets:

• On Monday I received a super sweet email from an ex-student of one of my DataVis courses at the TU Delft. My course got a “one of the best” rating, but more importantly, the gentleman in question explained that it had inspired him to make a career in DataVis (and judging by his work record up to now, he’s doing a really good job of it!). It’s hard to explain how much good such a thank you mail does to my heart.
• This reminded me accutely of the concluding life advice the American author David Sedaris gave to the guests attending his edition of the Dutch College Tour. The advice was:

Write thank you notes.

Read More

The week of Monday June 15 to Sunday June 21 in bullets:

• Ran around organizing all kinds of things for the new house. The various institutions have been cooperating very nicely.
• Spent days trying first to fix an implementation of a GPU algorithm to simulate car paint, and then to implement an alternative algorithm by the clever boys and girls at NVIDIA. A team-mate finally got everything working by realising that the float16 texture coordinates (long story) we were using to sample a noise texture needed to be float32. Lesson learnt: If you’re seeing splotches when you’re supposed to be seeing snow, check your float precision!
• Spent the rest of the week fighting with wkhtmltopdf, a tool that converts HTML into PDF. Unfortunately the tool is 50% webkit, and 50% black magic. Lesson learnt: wkhtmltopdf 0.12.2.1 renders internally at 74.8dpi. Accept it, calculate with it, and move on. The upshot of this is that the IP Dashboard is now 37% better at exporting charts.
• For some time now, when I have to make decisions, I actively optimise for experiences and not for possessions. At some point in the past I read in the blogosphere that experiences make people happier than possessions, and since then I’ve been paying more attention to this. IT REALLY WORKS!(tm) Tonight I wanted to look up the sources of this idea for you (and for me). Here are the two academic papers causing most of that online discussion, and a summarising blog post::
  • The Relative Relativity of Material and Experiential Purchases (2010), Travis J. Carter and Thomas Gilovich.
  • I Am What I Do, Not What I Have: The Differential Centrality of Experiential and Material Purchases to the Self (2012), Travis J. Carter and Thomas Gilovich.
  • Study shows experiences are better than possessions -- summarising post on phys.org. Carter and Gilovich’s research (based on on a number of tests and questionnaires they did with a sample of Cornell students) demonstrated that experiences were more satisfying than possessions. Their results also support at least one explanatory mechanism: Experiences are more closely connected to the self. This makes sense: Anybody else can buy the same thing you bought, but, by definition, your experience of some event or adventure is quite unique to you. To my mind, the idea of focusing on the experience rather than the cake at the end is pleasingly complementary to the adage that Life is a journey, not a destination, which I have just learned is due to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• I’m still terrible at bullets, I know.

Dear reader(s), have a beautiful and experience-filled week!

Read More

So after exactly no-one asked me when the Weekly Head Voices would be back, or why they stopped, I decided to reverse my almost-decision of quitting. This hiatus made me realise that the WHV are one of the few tenuous connecting lines between me and a tiny group of readers, people I am quite fond of, dotted around the world.

Again inspired by the information-and-entertainment-dense way that Swimgeek manages to do it, I’m going to try this in bullet form.

Read More

The public’s unwillingness to learn basic scientific concepts and scientists’ inability to communicate those concepts lead the public to reject promising research (such as genetic modification), ignore serious problems (such as global warming) and embrace dangerous nonsense (such as anti-vaccination rhetoric).

— Proposition from the Ph.D. thesis of Dr Wynand Winterbach, via Francois Malan on Facebook.

(This important message was brought to you by cpbotha.net, trawling facebook for interesting tidbits so you don’t have to!)

Read More

Exactly ten minutes after having made a single discreet phone call, a truck arrives at one’s house with thousands of pieces of lovingly chopped braai wood. The amount of one’s choosing is then lovingly yet efficiently stacked right by the holy altar of meat scorching, after which the truck leaves on its next mission.

(P.S. The wood is rooikrans.)

Read More

Currently listening to Chris Sneddon’s mix on musicForProgramming();

For this last hour it has been exactly the right levels of everything to drown out distractions from my surroundings whilst not acting as a distraction in itself.

(Yes, I’m doing small status updates here now. It’s an experiment.)

Read More

Jack Black brewery’s Lumberjack is an amber ale craft brewed in Cape Town. As bottle designs go, this one is pretty metal:

Amongst a number of impressive-sounding statements, the back of  the bottle concludes with:

Lumberjack has a sturdy malt driven backbone packed with loads of roasted malt. Huge hop additions intensify the piney-citrus aromas of this full flavoured ale. A beer for the brave.

After reading that, who does not want to drink this beer for the brave?! Based on extensive testing, I can report that this is indeed a full-bodied beer that deserves and rewards your full attention.

Read More

Six jumping castles for the little ones, beautiful food and Lourensford wine for the adults. Lourensford Harvest Market is on every Sunday at Lourensford Wine Estate.

We might just make it through this autumn in one piece!

Read More

This is the 90th edition of the weekly head voices. I just looked up the very first edition – it was way back in August of 2009! (That was apparently about 285 weeks ago, meaning I’ve averaged about one post every 3.17 weeks.)

To celebrate, have some bullets:

• Behind me are two weeks of extreme focus chasing various deadlines. I can feel my brain taking some strain switching between C++ and GPU shaders on the one side and Python and D3 on the other. I’m hoping it’s the good kind of strain.
• Had to get the latest NVIDIA 346 drivers going on an Ubuntu 14.04 Optimus laptop (dynamic switching between Intel and NVIDIA graphics) due to very specific features required for a work project. This first led to this post fixing Ubuntu black screen on the bleeding edge and then acted as the straw that broke the camel’s back…
• … where with “straw” I actually mean a very good excuse to buy a new PC, an event which I found so exciting that I surgically removed it from this post and inserted into a completely separate post which you can read by clicking here.
• Here, have a summary of a really interesting article in the nytimes from which I learned at least two interesting new things:
  • Von Economo neurons, or spindle neurons, are neurons that can be four times as large as other neurons, are long and thin, and have branches that extend far across the brain. Researchers think that these neurons act as fast relays between different remote regions of the brain, which could for example help humans “manage impulses and stay focused on long term goals”.
  • In a post-mortem study on so-called SuperAgers, people who at past 80 were still as cognitively strong as healthy 50 year olds, it was found that these geriatric geniuses had five times more Von Economo neurons than normal. The burning question now is: Did they start out with more than normal, or did they just retain them better?

Just in case you sometimes doubt that the internet is, in spite of everything, an awesome force for good in the world today, I present the following evidence (via @alper):

Read More