The Independent providing helpful background context for this quote from Lena Dunham's risqué speech at Taylor Swift's wedding.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/lena-dunham-taylor-swift-wedding-speech-full-b3009125.html
Happy Father's Day to all the dads and everyone who has Dad Energy
(you don't need to be a man to have Dad Energy, you don't even need to have a kid to have Dad Energy, all it takes is an outward expression of confidence and a small selection of dowels)
"I stopped my horse occasionally, and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true."
u/Zuwxiv describes the epiphany that led Thomas Clarkson to spend his whole life working to abolish the slave trade.
Good Law Project update on their fight for Trans Rights
https://goodlawproject.org/piecing-together-our-fight-for-trans-rights/
#TransRightsAreHumanRights #UKpol #UKPolitics #UKLaw #GoodLawProject #TerfIsland
@futurebird meanwhile, a shallow pool in the center of Milano (Italy), two weeks ago.
Somehow I don't think they put hydrogen peroxide in it...
Cinnabar moth just hanging out on our kitchen window. Cambridge, UK.
Of course programming is art, ask any programmer the range of emotions they felt looking at someone else’s code that one time.
https://youtube.com/shorts/tGx-A4qGMtA?feature=share
Here is my one-minute take of a lovely new paper by Sébastien Labbé & Peter Selinger, "A construction of the hat tilings by a Markov partition" (arXiv:2604.20964).
An ordinary fractal background secretly stores all twelve orientations of the hat — and sliding an irrational grid across it produces the aperiodic monotile, fitting together perfectly no matter the offset. 🎩
> LLM-assisted coding is fine.
Depends on what you mean by fine. If you mean in an ethical sense, then no. If you mean in a practical sense, then also no.
Had an idea for a fun game mechanic in my sleep. Woke up and carefully wrote it down on a piece of paper I had by my bed.
As I was writing I realised with growing horror that I never have any such paper there, and that I must still be dreaming. Panicked and woke up for real and wrote the idea on my phone. Was so relieved to have realised!
No one had to force-feed the web to workers.
The AI bubble isn't like the internet bubble @pluralistic
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/
Never forget that YOU are a data center. Drink some water please :ms_potable_water:
Good article about the UK's shameful trans-exclusionary slide. https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-end-of-trans-rights-in-the-uk-is-the-start-of-democratic-collapse/
Hmph. It's been nearly two years since a burglar was caught because he got engrossed in Giovanni Nucci's book The Gods at Six O'Clock, and with all that social media publicity, *still* no one has translated it?
The channel vocoder was designed to compress and encrypt military speech during World War II, not make music.
https://tonalux.org/blog/channel-vocoder-architecture-explained
#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #ElectronicMusic #Synthesizer #DSP
Here's a 600-cell inversive limit set.
This is a set that is invariant to inversions around spheres centred at the 600-cell's vertices, and stereographically projected into 3D.
The spheres must meet at a dihedral angle of π/𝑛 for some integer 𝑛. So there are a countably infinite number of such shapes, however there are three that are the key ones:
𝑛=3: the set complement of a ball packing.
𝑛=4: the set shown here. It is the densest that is still a void-sponge.
𝑛=∞: the thinnest that is a void-sponge.
You can also use disconnected spheres and they form a fractal dust.
(1/3)
In 1983, Kevin Karplus and Alex Strong published a plucked-string synthesis algorithm that fits in fifteen lines of C. The reason it sounds like a guitar took four more years to fully explain.
https://tonalux.org/blog/karplus-strong-string-synthesis
#MusicProduction #SoundDesign #AudioEngineering #ElectronicMusic #Synthesizer #DSP
Fun with saddles
@timhutton Hi Tim!
Cells reproduce normally, albeit a bit slower than in your original Squirm3 because I made the arena 125 times bigger by area (5000x3000 vs your 400x300), so they encounter soup less often. To counter, I added a water droplet feature that acts as a "soft jar." These circular droplets trap cells inside as well as soup atoms. The water also allows for more Brownian motion than in dry zones.
As for randomness, it's on. Your cases’ stochasticity is intact. In the save files that capture the run, the atom histogram is a/b/c/d/e/f only.
As for the bounding membrane, I observed that it has a single-cell origin.
One cell's membrane breaks open because of a failed division. The membrane opens, leaving the rest of the bonded atoms exposed but still intact. The membrane then closes again, but not around its "organelles," but rather around an empty space. Topologically, the cell turned itself inside out, like an inverted sock.
The gene strand is still alive, still bonded to its anchor atoms, except now those anchor atoms are on the outer surface of the new big ring. The strand divides normally. The pulling sequence has nowhere to go but the only empty space around, which happens to be the interior of the new ring. Daughters land inside, divide again, and populate the shell (the outer organelles of the bounding membrane can still produce more cells of their own, pumping into the space enclosed by the bounding membrane).
I've attached a video illustrating this process, you can observe it around the 0:15 mark.
@timhutton Hey Tim! I built a 2026 fork of your Squirm3 that keeps the chemistry rules unchanged but modernizes the substrate: WebGPU rendering, 5000×3000 arena, water as continuum heterogeneous-Brownian regions, seedable RNG, save/load.
In a single seeded run I observed a closed a-a-a membrane loop spontaneously form around a cluster of intact protocells, then accumulate more cells over time:
1. iter 117,632 - outer loop, 1 inner protocell
2. iter 140,920 - 69-atom outer loop, 2 inner protocells
3. iter 157,068 - 78-atom outer loop, 4 inner protocells
Verified from the bond graph, not just visually, I also made an analysis script in the repo that walks the graph and runs point-in-polygon containment. The outer ring is ~3x the size of a typical single-cell membrane in the same run.
Your polymerization rule is scale-agnostic, so this is consistent with your chemistry, but I don't think meta-membrane formation appears in your 2002 or 2007 papers. Did you ever observe it in your own runs?
Three save files + the script are in the repo so it's reproducible. Load any save in the demo and you boot directly into that state.
Demo: https://davidortsac.github.io/primordium/
Saves + script: https://github.com/DavidOrtsac/primordium/tree/main/samples
Repo: https://github.com/DavidOrtsac/primordium
Big fan of your work!
#CellularAutomata #ArtificialLife #ALife #ReactionDiffusion #ArtificialChemistry