Bitch is a book from zoologist Lucy Cooke on correcting misunderstandings and cultural biases in our biological science. She explains, via animal studies, how existing notions of sex, male/female roles, and “what is natural” have been incomplete, if not incorrect.

In Bitch, Lucy goes through the behaviors of lemurs, meerkats, hyenas, moles, orcas, elephants, bonobos, termites, birds and fish to challenge conventional wisdom on nature and the roles of male and females. This alone makes for an engrossing read. I cannot help but to be delighted by learning brand new things about nature and animals. It brings me back to being a child again. What makes things better is her amusing way with words. (I am jealous.) Some choice phrases from the book:

This is a story from Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast. He talked about being on Brian Cox’s show and discussing the futures of space travel. Neil was saying that chemical rocket engines are not going to cut it and we need to look into things like wormholes and warp drives. Then Brian cuts in and explains that wormholes are fundamentally unstable and they won’t work.

Brian was absolutely correct, but that was not the point. The point was about what the audience said. Cox’s audience said to them, “That’s why the Americans discover everything! They are always so optimistic!” (Cox is a British phycisit and Neil is an American physicist).

Staff Plus Live 2021 was a virtual conference held by LeadDev.com on Sept 14, 2021. I believe this is their first conference aimed at Staff+ Engineers. Loosely defined, Staff+ are high-impacting engineers whose success is felt across the company. In other words, these are engineers who creates high leverage. I was able to attend this year’s conference and learned a lot from it. I started this post to write down what resonated with me before I forget about them.

Just the act of measuring something can change outcomes. I love the reference to Jespen.

https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/

Back from a long vacation. This week, we have folk wisdom on visual programming

https://drossbucket.com/2021/06/30/hacker-news-folk-wisdom-on-visual-programming/

Humans and incentives, and why some metrics (or objectives and key results) should not be public.

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/06/01/count/

Systemd, the good parts

https://lobste.rs/s/po98o2/systemd_good_parts

My thoughts today led me to reading about nuclear wastes. It turns out that what we call “nuclear waste” is a pretty vague term.

A light-water reactor generates different kind of “waste” from a molten salt reactor. A traditional light-water reactor doesn’t consume fuel efficiently. It leaves behing partially consumed fuel that is not economically attractive to refine for further use. These partially spent rods continue to generate heat and are sometimes stored in cooling pools. Wastes from light-water reactors contain plutonium, which can be used to create atomic weapons.

Grammar visualizer

https://dundalek.com/grammkit/

1. Which leads to a JS parser generator

https://pegjs.org/online

2. And also leads to a JS parser generator with a visual debugger

https://ohmlang.github.io/editor/

This also prompts my interest into a graphviz/dot parser

https://github.com/awalterschulze/gographviz

Which uses this Go parser generator

https://github.com/goccmack/gocc

This exploration also led me to this Go parser generator

https://github.com/alecthomas/participle