Mastodon Swiss Army Knife.

Writing Hugo content with Nova.

Group actions to count colorings.

Compute necessary audience vote to survive a Reality TV show.

Given a set of marbles of different colors, find the majority color knowing it exists.

Given is a list of people at a party, find a celebrity.

Enigma Machines and their internal wiring.

Find a cycle in a sequence of values.

A Spy Among Friends I cannot really explain why I like the John Le Carre type of content so much. If I let myself indulge in armchair psychology, maybe what appeals to me is the heightened awareness of the facade of ourselves that spies must have. These fictional I have no idea how real spies function or if there is any resemblance between fictional and real. spies are forced to distrust every aspect of their interactions and relationships, have to build intricate webs of lies and dole out information and withhold information at crucial times. There’s always this cat and mouse game, who is hunting whom. Moles have to be discovered and turned. This all makes for great fiction. There’s also the witty dialog, the posh manners, the higher moral calling, the self doubt. John Le Carre was a master chef of all this spy brew, mixing it all together into an elegant story. I consumed all of it and haven’t found a worthy successor of him yet. Well, I’m here to say, if we’re allowed to change the medium from novel to TV series, “A spy among friends” comes really close. Combine the terrific writing with fantastic performances, a strong female lead, patience to let the story unfold in six one-hour episodes and trust in the viewer to follow along and you have a very satisfying spy show. I have only one, slight complaint: does everybody in the show really have to smoke so much ? ...

Today I’m making Apfelstrudel again. It is one of the few desserts I know how to make and my family likes it. I’m not making my own dough. That is way beyond my capabilities. For a sense of how skilled you have to be to pull off authentic strudel dough, watch this delightful documentary: I’m instead using puff pastry from Whole Foods: ...

Write a function that solves the board game Mastermind.

Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane From the renowned biochemist and author of The Vital Question, an illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. “Nick Lane’s exploration of the building blocks that underlie life’s big fundamental questions—the origin of life itself, aging, and disease—have shaped my thinking ... As Nick Lane tells it in his book “Transformer”, a biological cell is comparable to a big city: there are structures like buildings, there are pathways and flows, conveyer belts, machinery. One single cell undergoes one billion transformations a second. ...

Dough by Richard Bertinet Baking bread from dough involves the best kind of kitchen alchemy, for the possibilities to be conjured from the four ingredients of flour, water, yeast and salt are truly endless. Building on five easy recipes for basic doughs, Bertinet shows how even a beginner can achieve truly impressive ... Like many others I picked up bread making during the pandemic lockdown. It turned out to be a fun activity. I eventually landed on Richard Bertinet’s youtube video explaining dough handling. ...

Little puzzle.

Reasoning with numbers.

Down to Earth, Politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three ... I understand how we got here. It’s the universal desire to live in Cockaigne Cockaigne, the land of milk and honey. . Some of us live in Cockaigne. We’re busy protecting it, building walls and borders to keep the ones not in it out. We do that because we know Cockaigne as it stands doesn’t scale to everybody. The process of creating it has left a lot of people out, has created a lot of damage and destroyed the planet, forcing those not in the protective bubble of Cockaigne to deal with the consequences. We’re also in denial about our ability to keep this protective bubble up and how much suffering building Cockaigne has caused. In his book “Down to Earth” Bruno Latour French philosopher Bruno Latour died in October, 2022. strongly urges us to reconsider this fantasy, to step out of Cockaigne and come back down to Earth. In 140 pages and without using philosophical jargon Latour explains how we got into this mess and he tries to help us find a way out. ...

Program calculus problem.

Fibonacci with a twist.

Combinorics about permutations and inversions.

Combinatorics problem on multisets.