BLDGBLOG

This is really inspiring. Made me think of a couple things. Not really sure if this is the right spot, but just in case...

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident."

The universe makes room for you when you're born, long before your self-awareness and ego develops. Society makes room for you once you can be boxed, filed and categorized, once your "truth" can be domesticated and a watered-down caricaturization of it accepted as self-evident.

How to stay focused when "success" is authoritatively measured by a yardstick of abject stupidity, then?

If you can find your own unique way to disappear into the Nakatomi space (https://bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1265944) of how society internalizes a given subject (which is not necessarily the same thing as the Nakatomi space of the subject itself), you can gain awareness of the intrinsics connecting personal experience with social representation, and learn to project "truth" that is perspective-corrected for however you want society to react to it ("enlightenment").

IMHO, winning is using this trick to make yourself appear utterly forgettable/boring while you carve out all the room you'll ever want to play in, find yourself and fulfillment, and do amazing things. As the penultimate fitness-function competition, I think the level of focus required to achieve this is categorically not…

Just realized that the "blogs" category in my Feedly has 347 entries in it, and about half of them haven't published in more than 3 months.

Here are some that are prolific and good:

https://marginalrevolution.com/

Marginal Revolution: wide-ranging and prolific blog about economics and culture.

https://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com

Anecdotal Evidence: well-written personal blog, mostly observations on books.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/

Krebs on Security: about information security. It's written for a popular audience, which is about the level at which I understand the subject.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/

Michael Tsai: collects quotes from other people about ongoing software-related news.

https://acquisitiontalk.com

Acquisition Talk: about weapons system acquisition, government procurement, etc. Something I wanted to follow because it's a huge sector that doesn't get a lot of attention.

https://www.futilitycloset.com/

Futility Closet: wunderkammer-style blog with historical miscellany, quotes, puzzles, etc. Also a great podcast.

https://www.tor.com/tag/jo-walton-reads/

Jo Walton's Reading List: Not strictly a blog, but it's in my RSS feeds. I like to see what she's reading lately, and sometimes I get good recommendations from her (e.g. KJ Parker).

https://www.bldgblog.com/

BLDGBLOG: about design, architecture, etc.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/

Colossal: about art and design.

https://www.subtraction.com/

Subtraction: about design

There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking:

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

Source: https://bldgblog.com/2013/05/sim-city-an-interview-with-stone-librande/

Also interesting are the resolution targets, using sets of black and white bars at varying widths in both X any X orientation, to determine the spatial resolution i.e. how high frequency a component could still be imaged separately as lines, similar to TV test cards. These are discussed in various blogs [1][2] with some amazing picures. I think these were for both satellite imaging and spy-plane (U2 and SR-71 plus less exotic surveillance systems) and not just the USA. This article [3] shows some satellite test targets in the Gobi desert, presumable for Chinese (PRC) spy satellites, and also has a cool picture of the world's largest compass rose, at Edwards dry lake bed, as well as explaining the crosses from the original article, and talking about radar altimeter targets (another dry-lake bed) that are mapped to centimetre accuracy in altitude for calibrating GPS and other systems.

I find it a really interesting area of industrial/scientific archaeology, with some fascinating stories.

[1] http://www.clui.org/newsletter/winter-2013/photo-calibration-targets
[2] http://www.bldgblog.com/2013/02/optical-calibration-targets/
[3] http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/landscapes-made-for-satellite-eyes-calibration-targets-resolution-tests-and-giant-desert-compasses

Following up on this... The blog post Islands at the Speed of Light ( http://www.bldgblog.com/2011/03/islands-at-the-speed-of-light/ ) with a "global map of 'optimal intermediate locations between trading centers,' based on the earth’s geometry and the speed of light"

There's a similar article at When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/when-the-speed-of-light-is-too-slow )

The paper that both of these articles are based on: Relativistic statistical arbitrage https://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf which opens with:

> Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have brought typical trading latencies below 500 􏰒µs􏰃, at which point light propagation delays due to geographically separated information sources become relevant for trading strategies and coordination 􏰀e.g., it takes 67 ms, over 100 times longer, for light to travel between antipodal points along the Earth’s surface􏰁. Moreover, as trading times continue to decrease in coming years 􏰀e.g., latencies in the microseconds are already being targeted by traders, this feature will become even more pronounced.

BLDG BLOG riffs on the Roomba idea:

the idea of faking your own location through attaching your GPS anklet to a Roomba, for
example, and letting it wander around the house all day is perversely brilliant, like
something from a 21st-century Alfred Hitchcock film. Of course, it wouldn't take very
long to deduce from the algorithmically perfect straight lines and zig-zag edge
geometry of your Roomba's movements that it is not, in fact, a real person walking
around in there—or perhaps it would just look like you've taken up some bizarre new
form of home exercise.

But a much more believable algorithm for faking the movements of a real, living
resident could be part of some dark-market firmware update—new algorithms for the
becoming-criminal of everyday machines.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/ghosts-of-home-geography.html