We don’t have much trouble yet with relativistic temporal distortions, but Earth’s motion causes us to lose about 0.152 seconds per year relative to the Solar system. Likewise we lose about 8.5 seconds per year relative to the Milky Way. I wonder when we’re going to start to care. Presumably there would be consideration of such issues while dealing with interplanetary spacecraft, timing burns and such.
GPS satellite clocks have to run fast to account for the combined relatavistic effects of moving fast and being significantly farther away from earth's gravity. Without this, they would accumulate around 11km of error per day from losing around 7microseconds per day compared to earthbound clocks.
It is why we are introducing LTC, Coordinated Lunar Time. Apparently the relativistic effects on the Moon are already big enough to make using UTC problematic.
Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest project was a system which was part Python for the management, but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system for different kinds of commercial and residential property and all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?
My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.
As a language it is lovely, if you're a fan of minimalism -- being stack-happy, like FORTH. It is well worth learning even just to flex the mind, but especially if you need to make complex diagrams and value stable APIs.
METAPOST seems to be similarly stable, and has an interesting programming/math model (DEK keeps it open in window and uses it (or METAFONT which it is based on?) for interactive math).
Yes, it's spelled 'tism not 'tsim. And dyslexia not dyxlesia. But explaining the word play kinda ruins the joke, heh. Just having fun here, no worries.
Check out Kroki for a multi-syntax wrapper around a bunch of text driven diagram generators —- including Mermaid, PlantUML, Ditaa, GraphViz, SVGBob, etc, etc
Back in 1992 or so the NeXT could distinguish (was it 16 or) 64 fixed, trained, phrases. Point being, it doesn’t take too much compute with a finite vocabulary.
I've gravitated to the use of a 43" 4K TV as my main monitor (and have a few others scattered about for auxiliary purposes) and when hacking hard have a full screen emacs window split into lots of panes, vertically and horizontally a la Mondrian. I am confused about how others get anything done without a similar configuration! This new feature seems like it will be great fun.
I came to the chat before reading the piece only to find myself confronted with my assumption that it was about going deeper into flow while coding — and this is how some innovations happen!
I lived in Inuvik, NWT (Canada) for a decade in my youth. It's above the Arctic Circle and has 30 days without sunlight, bracketed by months of near darkness. Each year a new crop of noobs would move in and there would be a little exodus when the folks who just couldn't hack the dark would finally realize what they had signed up for. Summer was grand compensation though, three or four months of the sun being up whenever you might be tempted to be. An odd thing was, in the summer, being up at 3 am and seeing things uncannily lit from an unfamiliar side! Quite a fascinating place to experience, all in all, and well worth the couple thousands of kilometers of driving to get there too.
