TrickJarrett.com

Has.Quest

I couldn't help myself. No idea what I'll do with it, but it was too fun of a domain to pass up.

Texas Board of Education got proposal to call slavery 'involuntary relocation'

A group of educators in Texas proposed referring to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second-grade classes — before being rebuffed by the State Board of Education.

Dinosaur Diets May Help Explain Dramatic Diversity

If you traveled across what is now North America around 75 million years ago, you would see vastly different dinosaur species everywhere you went. The dramatic variation in this period's fossils, found throughout the western half of the continent, has long puzzled paleontologists. Some have proposed that mountains or rivers might have isolated evolving dinosaur populations, leading to greater diversity. But a new study suggests a different possibility. Part of the answer, researchers report in the journal Palaeontology, rests in what herbivorous dinosaurs were munching on.

The Christian Right is winning at the Supreme Court, but not in public opinion

How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?

For JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let's look at this a little more closely to understand why we don't use more decimal places.

Up to now, I have only ever memorized 3.14159 as that is plenty accurate for any calculation I might need to do. But knowing that NASA uses just ten more digits is a good motivation that I should memorize that far in case I ever need to calculate space travel.

Give the article a read as it goes into great depth as to why fifteen digits is more than enough for NASA.

The Greatest Holiday of the Year

No More Google Analytics And Upcoming Coding Plans

Google Analytics is mainly for my own validation at seeing the handful of people who come by. But I removed it, and am instead testing a more privacy friendly alternative called Clicky.

I am taking the next week off of work. I am not yet sure my coding plans for that week. For Glowbug this blog's backend system), I have three things that are sort of sitting front-of-mind. Automated email newsletter generation, archive pages for tags (if you wanted to see all the entries I have about NASA, for example, you can't currently), and making the publish functionality smarter (currently when I make a post, the site rebuilds everything. I think I can do better than that.)

I also have a few other coding projects in mind, one new one which I've codenamed 'BEHEMOTH' - But, it's definitely named that because I think it will turn into a big project and I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle it yet.

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Edit:

A few more ideas / thoughts while I was making quiche this morning. I wonder if I should add the ability to thread posts? For example, I could do a post about the Supreme Court in the morning, and then later the day thread a link to another post under it. Or for example, this edit would be its own post and would instead thread under the above post. Not sure it's actually better, and I would need to figure out how it is handled for things like the RSS feed, etc. But an interesting thought.

It would also be interesting to thread under a post from a previous day, etc. But again, how is that represented / displayed?

Also, while I like the backend's Markdown text editor I use to compose entries, it does not work well for me on mobile. I need to decide what I'm going to do. I am toying with the idea of making a simple mobile app that lets me post to the blog, primarily as a coding exercise, but also it would allow me to more easily share links to the blog from other apps. Where now the workflow is rather convoluted.

Simone Biles and Megan Rapinoe to get Presidential Medal of Freedom

A Free Online Lecture Course on Photography and Anthropology