By and large, it’s one of those teapot squabbles that the intersection of Twitter and Open Source can easily make more heated than enlightening. My interest here isn’t to pick a side and point fingers thither and there, if only because it’s pretty hard to point fingers and type at the same time. Rather, I wonder if the heat could not be harnessed to cook up something useful.

Un jour à peine est passé depuis les nouvelles attaques sur Paris, et certains ont déjà cédé aux clairons de la rhétorique martiale. L’émotion est vive pour nous tous; il est pardonnable d’avoir trébuché un instant, d’avoir parlé dans la peur, d’avoir paniqué. Mais il est indispensable de se ressaisir.

There will be those to tell you that the “kindergartener” is an appropriate noise level metric. Nothing could be further from the truth. Direct experience demonstrates beyond doubt that, in terms of sheer volume, there is in effect only marginal difference between “3 kindergarteners” and “21 kindergarteners.”

Manuel Valls est inspiré aujourd’hui. Très inspiré. Et comme toute bonne politique est fille de démagogiepédagogie, il a travaillé dur à nous expliquer le profond de sa pensée par le biais d’une petite infographie, aussi efficace et lourde de conséquences qu’elle est simple et féconde de sens.

Quite a long while back I had found Eric Weeks’ quasi.c, a small and fast quasicrystalline pattern generator. I recall having quite some fun throwing random options at it and looking at the pretty patterns it made. But C and PostScript are only so much fun for so long, and so I thought of it no more.