Barnaby Walters

Arranging atoms and pressurising air in a variety of manners, such as:

Pronouns: they/he

  1. Doing some highly scientific experiments:

    four spoons are laid out, each with a different proportion of granola to skyr.

    Initial observations: for one mouthful, skyr:granola ratios by weight varying between 6:1 and 6:7 have little noticeable effect on taste or feel of granola in your mouth, time taken to eat or number of annoying little granola-particles stuck in your teeth. At the lowest granola proportion the granola taste and smell was noticeably lessened.

    More to follow.

  2. Fellow publishers: how actively do you chase up unattributed use of your work you find? Do you actively look for unattributed copies?

    Context: recently I’ve stumbled semi-coincidentally across several (casual, non-commercial) uses of my work, in one case attributed it myself, in the other sent a friendly message asking about it w/ no response. Wondering if this is a common experience?

  3. That Steve Tyler is some sort of compositional genius:

    Really pleased to see him publishing more of his music online. If you get a chance to go see him play (with Katy or Andy or whoever else really), don’t pass it up!

  4. Ben Werdmüller: At this point in my career I'm prepared to recommend that we all standardize on ASCII art and forget about "videos" and "multimedia".

    @benwerd videos are such noisy things, whilst ASCII art has a certain serenity about it. But lack of video does mean no more Clangers :'(

    …unless…

    VCR TIME!

  5. Identified next personal block after some false starts: toolkit which makes not only subscribing to content but maintaining subscriptions+crawling historical content extremely easy.

    Basic requirement for compelling services:

    • feed reader
    • spam prevention
    • search engine

    all of which I’ve started building separately before realising that it makes much more sense for them to all be the same thing.

    Made a lot of progress on foundations this afternoon, code still in domain-specific anti-spam tool repo github.com/barnabywalters/shrewdness but nearly ready to be packaged up and put to use!

  6. Thoughts about whilst reading Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things — mf vocabularies e.g. h-card, h-entry, h-event are basic-level categories, the level at which:

    • it is easiest for humans to learn and reason about,
    • we have the shortest, most common names for them,
    • defined by how we interact with them

    E.g. h-entry ≈ “post”

    • short name
    • extremely common on the web
    • well-defined interaction patterns e.g. writing, posting, replying, reading, browsing through a feed, searching for/within, liking, reposting, quoting etc.

    Rather than RDF or schema.org which seek to create pure, objectivist, hierarchies of categories — our brains simply don’t work like that.