Barry Rountree

@rhizomic.bsky.social

465 Followers 1735 Following

Computer scientist at LLNL. He/him. Banner: A messy desk with a computers and a cat tree. Overstuffed bookshelves made of reclaimed wood. Sunny patio and exuberant foliage. Photo: Detail of rockface from Mt. Tamalpais State Park.

A "meader map" of a section of the Mississippi River by Harold Fisk (1944). As rivers move sediment about, their courses can change dramatically over time. The map shows what appear to be dozens of river courses laid over each other, each with a unique color, with only the most recent course completely unobscured. The effect is quite striking: the course of the river has revisited the same point of land multiple times, but from slightly (or not so slightly) different directions and angles. A series of these maps is made available by "The Public Domain Review." The one presented here is from their introductory article "Ancient Courses: Harold Fisk's Meander Maps of the Mississippi River" available here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/maps-of-the-lower-mississippi-harold-fisk/
A chart showing the increase of command line options for common *nix commands over time. The greatest increase is from 1979 (v7 Unix) to 1996 (Slackware v3.1) with slower to no growth in 2015 (Ubuntu 12) and Ubuntu 17 (2015). Notably, the tar command went from 12 options to 139, the ps command went from 4 options to 85, and ls went from 11 options to 58. Credit: https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ Each of those additional options was deemed important enough by enough people that it became part of the de facto standard implementation. This doesn't happen with all options (e.g., tar on OSX and Linux diverge annoyingly), and over time, inertial does make it more difficult to add new functionality. This illustrates two countervailing forces as work: the need (perceived or real) for additional flexibility versus the costs of incorporating that flexibility into standards (de facto or otherwise). If the number of options to tar had been capped, we would probably see a proliferation of incompatible tar replacements that did very nearly what tar did with a bit of extra functionality. Open source software has thrived in areas where there is large demand for additional flexibility and large inertia in existing solutions preventing new flexibility from being incorporated.
The blog post "A Bestiary of the Digital WIlds: The Score" in its current form is rendering neither the links nor two images correctly, instead showing the code that ought to have been converted.
Second draft of the musical score A Bestiary of the Digital Wilds by Astral, page 1 of 2.
First draft of the score "A Bestiary of the Digital Wilds" by Astral. A couple of small lilypond coding errors to be cleaned up, but otherwise looking good. Compiler note: % lilypond astral2.ly GNU LilyPond 2.24.4 (running Guile 3.0) Processing `astral2.ly' Parsing... Interpreting music...[8][16] astral2.ly:112:50: warning: barcheck failed at: 13/16 \grace { cis16 d } c4 e g \grace { ais16 b } c | Preprocessing graphical objects... Interpreting music... astral2.ly:112:50: warning: barcheck failed at: 13/16 \grace { cis16 d } c4 e g \grace { ais16 b } c |
An image of the pdf generated by compiling music notation in the parent post with lilypond.
The cover of Joy Division's 1979 "Unknown Pleasures" album, designed by Peter Saville. The image shows a stacked line graph with no axes or other text or labels. The lines are white on a solid black background. The image is inspired by a stacked plot of pulsar radio signals that had been republished in the 1977 Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. Much ink has been spilled describing its origins and iconicity.
Title page of Lieber's Standard Telegraphic Code, by B. Franklin Lieber, New York, 1896.
A screen shot of purchasing a bus ticket online via VGN (German) using their provided English translation. The "Salutation" field provides three options: "Mister", "Woman", and "Miscellaneous." No worries.
The cover of David Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress." The style is very much aligned to other books in the Dalkey Archive Essentials series: red and black text, a red border, and three black-and-white photographs cropped to geometric figures: an old-style typewriter keyboard in a half- circle, driftwood on a beach, and the silhouette a woman walking along the beach cropped to a triangle. Red lines and a red dot complete the image.
Milton Mayer's "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45." The cover is a black grid on a white background, with a red swastika overlaid on the middle of the grid. First published in 1955. Picked it up, started reading somewhere in the middle, and five pages later decided I should probably finish it at home.
Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany (eds.), "Glossary of Undisciplined Design." A pink cover with bright yellow highlighting and the words of the title splayed in disarray. From the text: "From `U for Unstable Signs' to `F for Failing Queerly,' `M for Monster's Tools' to `D of Dysfunctional Workspaces,' this collection of 52 glossary entries ... attaches to many situations and contexts within/around the sphere of graphic design...". There's an entire genre of annoyed-graphic-designers-commenting-on-their-profession. Looks like a worthy entry.
The cover of Anne Serre's "A Leopard-Skin Hat." Several tan-and-black blobs, two of which suggest women's faces. From the blurb: "[It] may be the French writer Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a "masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance," it is the story of an intense friendship between "the Narrator" and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders."
Front cover of Anne Serre's "The Fool and Other Moral Tales": A cartoonish illustration of a young person in Medieval-ish costume with a bag on the end of a stick slung over one shoulder (I'm told this is a "bindle") and a flower in the other hand. The sky is vivid red, the mountains in the background are blue capped with white, and a small, excited white dog joins the journey. The person has their nose in the air, their eyes appear closed, and they are about to step off the edge of a cliff. The cover image is framed by a realistic, inexpensive, stained wooden frame. From the blurb on the back: "Anne Serre offers here three delicious and radically heterodox novellas."
A diagram of a 64-bit register with 29 single-bit fields called out individually underneath. The diagram is color-coded, the lines connecting the bitfields to their labels form a pleasing, exact pattern, and the font looks suspiciously like a LaTeX default.
From the UATX "Selected Core Texts," Euripides is represented... by an empty box.
The UATX "Selected Core Texts" lists several works of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, Politics) as having been written by Aeschylus (the playwright).
A gcc "conversion from unsigned _BitInt(456) to unsigned _BitInt(448)" error, showing 456 (or 448) bits worth of 0xffff snaking across the screen.
Header from Intel's website describing documentation for "13th Generation Intel (R) Core (TM) Processor Family and Intel (R) Core (TM) Processor (14th Gen).
The Merlin handheld electronic game from 1978. Very red, very plastic, somewhat in the form of a phone handset: the top third being a grilled speaker, the bottom third four buttons, and the middle third being 11 clear circular buttons with backlit LEDs. It played a mean game of tic-tac-toe, as well as five other games that did not make nearly as much of an impression.