There's another Veritasium video that has a neat experiment ostensibly showing light (both lamp and laser sources) "taking all paths" (or words to that effect--I don't really know what I'm seeing or what I'm talking about!) It starts around 25 minutes in.
EDIT: Whoops. The YouTube video linked by naasking in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44771713 touches on the Veritasum video I linked to and goes to some length to explain that it is NOT proving the light is taking "all possible paths." He also brings up and links to a video on the "Looking Glass Universe" channel in which the hostess recreates the Vertiasium experiment and gives a differing interpretation. (Some commenters there have objections to the experimental setup. Oh boy, I may be down a rabbit hole here.)
(The download link is easily found there, as well as git repository and forum links.)
It's based on UXP (the Unified XUL Platform) and is thus related to the Pale Moon browser (which doesn't bother me). I've been using it on Linux as a way to have an "older Thunderbird" look and feel, e.g., I have real scrollbars, and the "Send" button didn't mysteriously vanish from the Compose window with no way to get it back upon some "from the ground up redesign" upgrade.
On the booting Windows front, this thread has a few people describing how they successfully used BootManager to dual and triple boot Haiku, Windows 7, and/or Linux:
I have a laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T410s) with Haiku, Linux Mint, and Devuan GNU/Linux. I use BootManager in the MBR, and it gives me a menu of all three to choose from. For the two Linux options, I have GRUB installed on each of their own partitions, so BootManager just sends me to the GRUB installed on whichever Linux partition. (Of course, this isn't exactly "replacing" GRUB altogether.)
I do it this way because I find dealing with BootManager to send me to individual GRUBs to boot a particular Linux partition much, much easier than fiddling with GRUB to boot Haiku.
(One last thought, parenthetical as I'm not sure it can even work from a USB drive: Worst case, you might make a USB "boot stick" that uses BootManager to choose between Haiku and Linux and let Windows do its jolly thing on the MBR?)
I tried to install the BootManager, but the limitations mentioned in the docs blocked the install. I think this part:
> BootManager isn't yet tested very well and still has a few restrictions that it will complain about if they aren't met: the menu can only be installed on your first harddisk and there has to be a 2KiB space after the Master Boot Record (MBR).
No idea how to create those conditions, the 2KiB space, and since I would have to do it with gparted in Linux anyway this made me install Linux instead first (with grub).
BootManager actually sounded nice - like you describe, I expected it to simply offer me the other OS(s) option(s), and I wasn't even set on installing Linux in the first place on that machine.
To your parenthesis: Yeah, I even had a boot manager on USB once for my PC, so it crossed my mind here, but for a travel laptop this would be a bit uncomfortable.
I don't know if this will be helpful or inspirational or depressing, but your comment made me think of Paul Lutus, who pulled off at least some parts of the dream of living in a cabin and writing software. Here's an interview he did with Adam Gordon Bell on Bell's CoRecursive podcast (transcript and audio):
I want to add that Sufjan Stevens has a song, "Exploding Whale", which is not really about the event per se, but uses it as a metaphor: "....Embrace the epic fail/Of my exploding whale...."
The forum seems a little disorganized to me, but I lurk a few times a year and get the pulse of how the development is going by reading the recent-ish posts.
From the first link:
"What is OpenXTalk?
OpenXTal k [sic] is the working name of a fork of the now unsupported Legacy LiveCode Community Edition project, with the goal of keeping a FREE OPEN SOURCE xTalk language publicly available...."
"....
Play softball with the guys, wife made curly fries
Drink about four O'Doul's, grounded out, two pop flies
...."