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  1. Day 3 around : churches, horses, REINDEER, snow, mountains, caves, more snow, more snow, mountains, Akureyri.

    Started out in Egilsstaðir, were going to head straight up north but the roads were closed so took a detour around a river+up a valley. Some more nice waterfalls, nothing so large as the previous days but just as much character:

    First interesting animal sighting of the day: Reindeer from afar!

    upon a mountain slope, several small, lightly coloured quadrupeds are shown

    Followed quickly by a closer animal sighting, some beautiful Icelandic horses:

    several stout horses stand in a group before a mountainside

    er, halló hrós! Make that much closer:

    a horse gets a little bolder, approaching the car — then MUCH bolder, nuzzling against the window

    Then off to Mývatn and the Grjótagjá geothermal caves, with one of the most unstable looking entrances I’ve ever seen at a tourist destination:

    The caves are impressive from the inside but can only really be appreciated once viewed from above:

  2. Second day around not as good weather as the first but excellent nontheless — unlocked various achievements:

    • ran around on moss as far as the eye can see
    • picked up hitchhiker
    • learnt French word for “superstitious”
    • touched glacier
    • walked on iceberg which then cracked
    • saw seals frolicking amongst icebergs
    • saw hexagonal basalt columns

    The moss plains were unreal, hundreds of square kilometres of landscape straight out of Nausicäa of the Valley Of Wind — compare:

    Ice pool:

    Mini iceberg:

    No glacier-breaking sound recordings unfortunately as I didn’t get a chance to make a hydrophone — next time! Also, many panoramas to follow when I’m back home and in photo-stitching mode.

  3. In reply to a post on www.facebook.com

    @robinmujician Interesting — I’ve always considered a meme to be an idea transmitted between people, and memetics the study of how ideas travel between people. The argument being that uncommunicated thoughts aren’t very meaningful to anyone except the thinker, and the physical expressions of memes are creative works in their own right rather than memes — the meme being the idea that the creative work transmits.

    Never really considered it as applying to behaviours but it makes a lot of sense, and is in the official definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

  4. First day on trip round resounding success, many amazing things seen, photos taken, gravel walked in. Got back to Vík and all the food places were closed so ate a tortilla with peanut butter and crumbled choc chip cookie. Sufficient, minimum viable nourishment.

    Photos:

  5. Love this recognition+analysis of a pattern:

    Metavirus: […] a particularly infectious kind of meme that is a metameme that rewrites your notions of previous ideas (memes) in terms of itself.

    — Tantek on #indiewebcamp

  8. Unexplained Sounds — Whistle

    My first experiment with using sped-up oceanic hydrophone recordings as a musical element, contrasted against the Hurdy Gurdy.

    This one is a currently (2014-04) unidentified sound (probably an underwater volcano erupting) known as “whistle”.

  9. Underwater Sounds :

    Tangentially related:

  10. “Grass is greener on the other side” effect of wanting something you don’t have, mainly because you don’t have it, is exceedingly common. The solution seems to be to experience as many things as possible.

  12. Tried Kerbal Space Program — surprisingly difficult, though I attribute that partly to the unclear design and pedagogy. Great fun though, and an immediate emotional connection with the characters — esp. the way my kerbonaut gets all excited when rocket’s launching.

  17. Javascript has no real Set or Dictionary implementation, which for someone spoiled by python’s set and dicts is rather frustrating. However, in leiu of the poorly supported js Set type, plain old objects can be massaged into acting as both sets and dicts:

    
// Python: d = dict()
var d = {};

// d['key'] = 'value'
d['key'] = 'value';

// d.get('nonexistent', 'fallback')
d.hasOwnProperty('nonexistent') ? d['nonexistent'] : 'fallback';

// d.keys()
Object.keys(d);

// s = set()
var s = {};

// s.add(1)
s[1] = true;

// 1 in s
s.hasOwnProperty(1);

// Accessing all values in set:
Object.keys(s);

    Notes: the in operator can be used to test membership, but will incorrectly return true for __proto__, as well as all properties up the prototype chain, i.e. all properties and methods of Object. hasOwnProperty is much safer to use.

    Similarly, the use of the ternary operator for get-item-with-fallback could in theory be replaced with d['item'] || 'fallback', unless of course the value stored was falsey, in which case the or will incorrectly return a truthier fallback.