Four Neat Things and a Break

A Friday Hodgepodge

I'll be taking a week off from blogging as we travel and host guests over Thanksgiving Week. Happy Holiday!

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1. An article at Atlas Obscura titled" Teach Yourself to Echolocate," draws from the expertise of an instructor to explain how to develop the skill.

Daniel Kish, for example, has this to say about the sound one uses to produce the required echoes:

Clicks are not created equal, and some of them will work against you. "The most commonly produced rubbish click is a 'cluck,'" Kish says. A cluck sounds something like two clicks on top of each other, which masks the returning sound. A good click can't be sloppy, and it must be possible to reliably reproduce.

For beginners, Kish says that a dental click fits the bill (this is a tsk-tsk sound, Kish says, "like you're disappointed"). Another contender is the sound you might use to prompt a horse to giddy-up; a "ch" sound, as in "check" or "church," is another option.

I knew that some blind people could echolocate, but I had no idea that it is as common as it is, or that it was being taught.

2. Older folk and retrocomputing enthusiasts alike will be intrigued by a question Raymond Chen recently took up: "Why does Windows 95 setup use 3 different UI's: DOS, Win3.x, and Win9x?"

With the aid of a flow chart to show how it worked, Chen shows this strange state of affairs to be a creative solution to a few problems, avoiding duplicated effort being the main one.

The Lord Howe Island stick insect, once thought to be extinct, is being brought back from the brink after a population was found on an uninhabited Island in 2001. (Image by Granitethighs, via Wikipedia, license.)

3. When the spoiler is the teaser, run with it anyway: Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone, according to Ulysse Carion's surprisingly absorbing explanation of how computers deal with time zones and Daylight Savings.

And yes, I fibbed a little by not saying why Lord_Howe is the weirdest. You'll have click through to find out.

4. This one is partly a reminder to myself to read the entire article, namely Gwern Branwen's "Why So Few Matt Levines," in which the author asks why there aren't more people like him, "who explain & popularize other major industries which are vital to modern life."

I learned of the piece through Hacker News and, as I normally do, looked at the comment thread a little first. Within that were several interesting candidates for "other" Matt Levines. That, too, merits a return visit.

-- CAV