Notice the text on the bus to Marsaxlokk

1. Trump admin working to temporarily ban work-based visas: Report  Top Live News
2. US lawmakers want H-1B visas and foreign students internship suspended to protect American jobs  Times of India
3. US likely to temporarily ban work-based visas like H-1B due to rise in unemployment  Zee News
4. US Mulls Temporary Ban on Work Visas Amid Unemployment: Reports  The Quint
5. 5 US lawmakers ask Trump to suspend new H-1B visas  The Tribune India
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Histogram: You have to know the past to understand the present by Tomas Petricek, University of Kent

Programs are created through a variety of interactions. A programmer might write some code, run it interactively to check whether it works, use copy and paste, apply a refactoring or choose an item from an auto-complete list. Programming research often forgets about these and represents programs as the resulting text. Consequently, thinking about such interactions is often out of scope. This essay shifts focus from programs to a more interesting question of programming.

We represent programs as lists of interactions such as triggering an auto-complete and choosing an option, declaring a value, introducing a variable or evaluating a piece of code. We explore a number of consequences of this way of thinking about programs. First, if we create functions by writing concrete code using a sample input and applying a refactoring, we do not lose the sample input and can use it later for debugging. Second, if we treat executing code interactively as an interaction and store the results, we can later use this information to give more precise suggestions in auto-complete. Third, by moving away from a textual representation, we can display the same program as text, but also in a view inspired by spreadsheets. Fourth, we can let programmers create programs by directly interacting with live previews as those interactions can be recorded and as a part of program history.

We discuss the key ideas through examples in a simple programming environment for data exploration. Our focus in this essay is more on principles than on providing fine tuned user experience. We keep our environment more explicit, especially when this reveals what is happening behind the scenes. We aim to show that seeing programs as lists of interactions is a powerful change of perspective that can help us build better programming systems with novel features that make programming easier and more accessible. The data exploration environment in this interactive essay may not yet be that, but it gives a glimpse of the future.

Hollywood and Brine

One thing is getting to Hollywood; the other is staying here. You can’t just stay here in the hopes of becoming a celebrity and take a job at a bank or some other menial office job in the Valley. Heaven forbid.

I Mean…What?!?

1. Viroloog Marion Koopmans: 'Als het misgaat, hebben we echt een megaprobleem'  AD.nl
2. Ook Nederlandse viroloog verwacht tweede coronagolf | Buitenland | Nieuws  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Viroloog: “Nieuwe coronagolf verwacht, alles staat of valt met hoe we ons gedragen”  Oog TV
4. BLIJF BANG! Viroloog Marion Koopmans waarschuwt: 'Die tweede coronavirus-golf komt er'  De Dagelijkse Standaard
5. Viroloog: 'Er komt een tweede coronagolf die mogelijk nog krachtiger is dan de eerste'  ThePostOnline
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. Kans op 2e golf, maar contactopsporing moet 2e lockdown vermijden: bekijk de beste fragmenten uit "Het coronadebat"  VRT NWS
2. Het Corona Debat met Marc Van Ranst, Erika Vlieghe, Maggie De Block (Open Vld), Bart De Wever (N-VA) en anderen  De Morgen
3. 'We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is'  De Standaard
4. Het grote coronadebat: “We moeten tijd winnen tot vaccin er is”  Het Belang van Limburg
5. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. Remco Evenepoel: "Vandaag had een heel belangrijke dag moeten zijn"  sporza.be
2. Remco Evenepoel verkiest Giro boven Luik-Bastenaken-Luik | Wielrennen | Sport  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Contador over 20 minuten-test Evenepoel: “Als die klopt, kan hij nu al de Giro winnen”  WielerFlits.be
4. Patrick Lefevere bevestigt dat Remco Evenepoel de Giro gaat rijden  Wielerkrant.be
5. Remco Evenepoel rijdt Giro in het najaar: "Intriest dat hij Luik niet kan rijden"  sporza.be
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. 'Temptation'-verleidster Eline verrast: “Vriendinnen met Elke, géén contact meer met Arda”  Het Laatste Nieuws
2. 'Kk hadt naaien', een slappe worst en een ongeziene belediging: dit viel onze 'Temptation'-watcher op  Het Nieuwsblad
3. Eline uit Temptation Island doet pikante uitspraken: 'Elke moet mij dankbaar zijn'  Nieuws365
4. Een erg straffe Elke, harde levenslessen en vreemde kronkels: dit was aflevering 12 van 'Temptation Island'  Het Laatste Nieuws
5. Zach over zijn gedrag in 'Temptation Island': “Ik wou een psychologisch spelletje spelen met Romee”  Het Nieuwsblad
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Valerie De Booser deelt uitdagende foto op Instagram vanuit haar kot  Het NieuwsbladHele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. Pionier van de rockmuziek Little Richard (87) overleden  De Morgen
2. Rock-n'-rollpionier Little 'Tutti Frutti' Richard (87) overleden  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Rock 'n' roll-pionier Little Richard is overleden, herontdek zijn grootste hits  VRT NWS
4. Grondlegger rock-'n-roll Little Richard (87) overleden | Show  AD.nl
5. Muzieklegendes over Little Richard: “Als ik zijn muziek beluisterde, kon ik God horen”  Het Laatste Nieuws
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. Smartphones aan spotprijzen, ze bestaan nog: onze gadget inspector test er twee  Het Belang van Limburg
2. GETEST. Spotgoedkope smartphones van minder dan 100 euro  Het Nieuwsblad
3. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. 173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering liet ons aan ons lot over. We hebben twee maanden op ons terras moeten doorbrengen”  Het Laatste Nieuws
2. 173 gestrande Belgen eindelijk thuis na quarantaine in Tenerife: “Regering heeft te weinig gedaan!”  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Na quarantaine in Tenerife: 173 Belgen eindelijk weer thuis  De Morgen
4. Belgen die vastzaten op Tenerife charterden zelf vliegtuig naar huis  De Standaard
5. West-Vlaming regelt repatriëring gestrande Belgen  Focus en WTV
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Turkse recepten tegen virus laten meer vrijheid toe  De Standaard

Motorrijder uit Zottegem overleden na zwaar ongeval in Zwalm, bestuurster auto zwaargewond  Het NieuwsbladHele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. Minister van Toerisme Demir wil toeristen in Vlaanderen spreiden  De Standaard
2. Minister van Toerisme Demir wil met druktebarometer toeristen in Vlaanderen spreiden  Het Laatste Nieuws
3. Minister Zuhal Demir licht toerismeplan voor de zomer toe: “Ik wil dat de mensen Vlaanderen herontdekken”  Het Nieuwsblad
4. Ziekenhuizen kust ongerust over komst toeristen  Focus en WTV
5. Minister van Toerisme Demir werkt aan plan om toeristen in Vlaanderen te spreiden  De Morgen
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

1. Uitvoerders van roofmoord op Leopoldine De Decker krijgen 28 jaar, opdrachtgevers hoeven niet terug naar de cel  Gazet van Antwerpen
2. Na negen uur in beraad: vier veroordelingen en één vrijspraak in roofmoord Leopoldine (76)  Het Nieuwsblad
3. Straffen tussen 3 en 29 jaar cel geëist in zaak roofmoord op Leopoldine De Decker  Gazet van Antwerpen
4. ASSISEN. Tot 28 jaar cel voor roofmoord op Leopoldine De Decker, familie opgelucht: “Nu kunnen we eindelijk verder met ons leven”  Het Laatste Nieuws
5. ASSISEN. Roofmoord op Leopoldine De Decker: 28 jaar cel voor uitvoerders, (deels) voorwaardelijke straffen voor opdrachtgevers  Het Laatste Nieuws
6. Hele verhaal bekijken via Google Nieuws

Man die fietspad bezaait met prikkeldraad, spijkers en glas praat zichzelf aan de galg tegen visser die stiekem filmt  Het Laatste Nieuws

Cherry Esplanade Walk (Video)

Coming soon from PS Publishing is The Mysteries of the Faceless King, the first of two volumes collecting the best of Darrell Schweitzer's short fiction. Beautifully made, with a cover by the estimable Jason Van Hollander.

Also, an introduction by (cough) me. Here's how that begins:

Once upon a time . . .None of the stories collected herein begin with those words, though some come close. But they might as well. For Darrell Schweitzer writes a very traditional sort of story. His fiction is almost always fantasy, which is a mode nested deep in the roots of Story; usually horror, a mode as old as nightmares; and very often weird fantasy, a much more recent mode but one that is dear to his heart. Most could have been written a hundred years ago—or, with equal ease, a hundred years in the future. This is not a criticism. Timelessness is precisely what he is after.

PS Publishing has posted the entirety of the introduction online, preparatory to publication of the book sometime this month. So if you're curious as to what I said, you have only two options. You can buy the book. Or you can read the intro online for free.

But if you don't buy the book, you won't get the stories. You're in a quandary.

You can find the entire introductory essay here. Or you can just go to the PS Publishing website and wander about, marveling at how many of their books you want by clicking here.


And I should remind you . . .

The ebook of The Iron Dragon's Daughter, the first of three stand-alone fantasies in the Iron Dragons Trilogy, goes on sale tomorrow (Wednesday, April 1, 2020) for the one day only for only $1.99. That's a good deal. But only tomorrow and only in Canada and the US.

The Iron Dragon's Mother received a long, thoughtful, and positive review from Matt Hilliard in the March 30 issue of Strange Horizons. Rather than give you the usual pull-quote carefully excised from the corpus of the text, I thought I'd share with you one of Hilliard's observations:

That raises the question: what is Swanwick up to with this setting? If he wants to write fun faerie stories, why not just write about faeries the normal way? Or, since a valid way to describe this book is to say it’s “about a faerie fighter pilot, but it’s reallyabout living in a corrupt world and dealing with death,” why not just write about corruption and death in the real world where both can be found in abundance? To answer the second question, a common defense of genre fiction is that both fantasy and science fiction give us a different perspective on things that don’t change. They defamiliarize the world around us by situating us in the future or a past that never existed, and in doing so they can teach us things about humanity that we wouldn’t otherwise have known.

It’s been sixty-five years since J. R. R. Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring and spawned a host of imitators, and for most of Swanwick’s readers, fantasy has become deeply familiar. If it’s too familiar, it no longer defamiliarizes. What to do? Some authors, such as those of the New Weird, responded by moving away from Tolkien’s folklore influences, pushing into stranger territory. Swanwick has done the opposite, hewing closely to the peoples and monsters of folklore traditions from around the world (albeit with the occasional references to Tolkien himself, as with Caitlin’s brother, named Fingolfinrhod). But by mixing together elves and Gucci handbags, dwarves and cigarettes, or dragons and jet fighters, Swanwick continually shifts the context his reader must use. Whenever you find yourself getting comfortable, the novel suddenly sounds like this: “With the easy, racist phrasing of his class, her brother said, ‘Well, the kobold is in the henhouse now, to be sure’” (p. 289).

Overall, the review is positive, the sort of thing that warms a writer's heart. Hilliard has some negative things to say along the way, but since they're based on a careful reading of the book I actually wrote, I don't see that I have any right to complain.

You can read the whole review here.  Or go to Strange Horizons here and wander around, maybe read a story or two while you're there.

Above: Cleaning office, I came across the above photo of myself at age 23, when I was new to Philadelphia and determined to be a science fiction writer. It captures my mood then pretty well.

Over on Facebook, Samuel R. Delany, answering a question in a post, offered the best and most succinct writing advice anyone has ever codified. Here, in its entirety, it is:

Writing advice: Read and reread. Think of a story you have never read but wish you had; then write it as carefully as you can. Finish it, and send it around till it's published.

The third sentence, as Chip noted at the time, was a condensation of advice that Robert A. Heinlein offered. So what you have above is the combined wisdom of two of the greatest careers science fiction has ever seen.

I could unpack that brief paragraph at enormous length. But, honestly, there's no need. You read it and you understood it. Now you only have to live it.


Above: The photo by James Hamilton was lifted from The Nation, where it illustrated a typically thoughtful and enlightened interview with Chip. You can find it here.

My Subterranean Press collection, The Postmodern Adventuers of Darger and Surplus,  has received quite a splendid review for Locus by Gary K. Wolfe, which has now been posted on Locus Online. Darger and Surplus are, as you probably know, gentlemen grifters in the future civilization that rises from the ashes of our own, after a failed revolution by the Artificial Intelligences we are currently hard at work creating. Humanity mostly won that war and the demons and mad gods were banished to a subterranean infrastructure too widespread and well-defended to be rooted out. But, as a result, the mechanical sciences have languished while the biological ones thrive.

All this is spelled out in the review more entertainingly than I have put it here. I encourage you to read it.

Meanwhile, here's the pull-quote I'd grab from the review if I were the sort of person who did that sort of thing:

As those Hugo voters apparently recognized nearly 20 years ago, Darger and Surplus not only join the small company of SF’s classic rogues, but the world they occupy is as complex, detailed, and morally chaotic as we’ve come to expect from the best of Swanwick’s fiction.

You can find the review in its glorious entirety here. Or you can just go to locusmag.com and poke around. Bot Locus and Locus Online make for informative, enjoyable reading


And as long as you're there . . .

Like everything else, Locus is feeling the financial stress of the lockdown. If you can afford it, and if you, like me, value the publication, consider contributing a little toward its survival.

Another character that didn't make it into The Iron Dragon's Mother. Industrialized Faerie is a rich world. The three novels I've set in it can only only hint at how rich and strange it is.

This image, for a rarity, was hardly altered at all.


And where, you ask, did I find this. . . ?

The image came from the Body Works show that toured the world some years ago. A large number of corpses were flayed and then carefully preserved, in order to display the wonders of anatomy. The show was controversial at the time because the corpses came from China and there were those who claimed the bodies hadn't been voluntarily donated but those of criminals who had died in prison. The truth of the matter was impossible to ascertain.

The show, however, was extremely popular. My son, Sean Swanwick, worked for a summer as a guide when it was displayed at the Franklin Institute and he told me that they had to watch the people touring it like hawks... Every now and then, someone would try to snap off a finger or other appendage to take home as a souvenir.


Above: Image five. Five more to go.

Yet again, something astonishing has arrived in my mailbox. This time, it's a chapbook titled Paris ett poem, containing a Swedish translation (surely the first) of Hoope Mirrlees' modernist masterpiece, Paris, a Poem. Mirrlees, you'll recall, is best known in genre circles for her fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist, in academic circles for being on the fringes of Bloomsbury, and in poetic circles for this poem.

Ylva Gislén translated the poem, wrote an introduction, provided explanatory notes, and created two collages for inclusion in the chapbook. All of it, clearly, a labor of love.

Quite a lovely  book. Published by Ellerströms.


And Speaking of Good Things . . .

The Temporary Culture chapbook assembled by Henry Wessells, "She Saved Us from World War Three," was reviewed by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. Here's what he said:

Besides being one of the stars of “The Booksellers,” Henry Wessells is also the proprietor of the micro-publisher, Temporary Culture. His latest booklet, “She Saved Us From World War Three,” brings together an interview, essay and two letters highlighting the friendship between Gardner Dozois, the longtime editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Alice Sheldon, the former Washington intelligence agent whose intense, sometimes feminist sci-fi — no one ever forgets “The Women Men Don’t See” — was written using the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. In one letter Sheldon explains that she has pretty much stopped writing because “the stories were getting to hurt too much.”

Which is pretty good coverage for a micro-press.

The solution is not to scold drivers but to make structural solutions.

  I must confess: I was tempted to write a column along the lines of “Yes, it’s a war on the car, and it’s a just war!” But we don’t need a war on the car. What we need is an intervention. We need a serious conversation about our collective, structural addiction to this substance, […]

The post Our addiction to driving is costing lives, and more appeared first on Torontoist.

Why all the secrecy?

If you follow the news in Toronto or if you’re interested in technology, you’ve probably heard of Sidewalk Toronto by now. It’s a joint project of Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, and Waterfront Toronto. This is the tech giant’s first foray into urban development and infrastructure, with Toronto hosting the pilot project. In […]

The post Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement appeared first on Torontoist.

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020

 It’s time to go back and give the Elves some love.

Harrisburg University proudly announces, in a press release: HU facial recognition software predicts criminality A group of Harrisburg University professors and a Ph.D. student have developed automated computer facial recognition software capable of predicting whether someone is likely going to be a criminal. With 80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias, the software can […]

A new comic strip—in Russian and in English—about some of the curious characters who have won Ig Nobel Prizes. The series appears on Instagram.

life’s stats and photo journal pages have been updated. Not too much interesting this time around… life has been crazy, but not due to trips, at least. It was a really weird Christmas, weather-wise. Mostly because it was super warm … Continue reading →

[h/t Stephan Hurtubise]  

Readers of Language Log will certainly be aware of Tocharian, but when I began my international research project on the Tarim Basin mummies in 1991, very few people — only a tiny handful of esoteric researchers — had ever heard of the Tocharians and their language since they went extinct more than a millennium ago, […]

Today's xkcd illustrates why topic modeling can be tricky, for people as well as for machines: The mouseover title: "As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat." […]

Something extraordinary happened on May 4, 2020.  Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger delivered an extremely impressive speech in virtually flawless Mandarin.  Here it is: Here's the transcript of Pottinger's speech (pdf), the formal English title of which is "Reflections on China's May Fourth Movement: an American Perspective — Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger to […]

Hi all.  Check out some of the really great party ideas some of you have added to my last post.  Watch the What’s New on the homepage.  Soon we’ll be doing some of them.  Continue to send me your party ideas – you guys rock. I have a challenge for you – how many NEW friends can […]

Dear Idea Seeker or Ally of the Idea Seekers, I have great news!  Greedy Cloud has been chased away and Spec and Tra discovered some new spring time house and garden items that he was hiding from everyone. Check them out in my house and garden, or go see Spec, Tra and Skeeter’s houses. Here […]

Introducing the world's least versatile camera. The slogan says it all: "we can't all be heroes."

Power outage? Grab a length of steel automotive brakeline tubing, the straw from a box of Yoo-Hoo, D-cell batteries to make a 6V. Also may require generous amounts of duct tape, electrical tape, bell wire, and boredom.

I think they spent all their money on the fancy toilet paper. ~NSHA

Zombie Strippers has got to be hands down one of the cheesiet, oddest, zombie movies movies I have ever seen

About a week ago I rented this movie, now if you’ve been watching any new movies over the last couple of months you’ve probably seen the trailer for this movie. If your like me you probably thought to yourself “Hey this looks pretty sweet, it looks like there’s going to be lots of hacking and slashing and all that fun stuff”