eller

Because I've neglected the knife nerdery a bit lately... Here's an intruduction of the basic shapes the cross-section of a knife handle can take, their advantages and disadvantages as far as I'm concerned (I have, uh, strong opinions about knife handles), and what tasks they are suited for. (There is no "the best", just the right handle for the right person and/or task.) My list is far from comprehensive, and there are plenty of "intermediate" shapes as well as culture-specific ones, but for the start, I'll stick to the simple geometric shapes that are the most common ones world-wide.

( Opinions about handle geometry. )

...you can tell I'm a drop profile person, can't you? XD Anyway.

As always, if you don't know a technical term I'm using or you want to know more about a practical application, just ask!

For a really good joke, I have a strong reading recommendation for my fellow computing freaks as well as anyone even remotely into math. (Starting page 199, 'Quantum Disavantage') It's a lovely response to the guys at IBM (Kim et al., 2023) who did a quantum computing thingy that got quite a lot of media attention. They also claimed it was impossible to do this stuff on a 'regular' computer, which was refuted within days and caused a few shitstorms (not least because it's rude to publish this kind of claim in Nature without releasing a preprint on arXiv first... Manners, manners!) in the modeller scene. Now, someone... took this as an opportunity to bring out the good old Commodore 64 for entertainment. I love it. It's totally worth it for the photo of the 'experimental setup' alone, but really, the whole thing is quite funny. (Of course, anything published by The Association for Computational Heresy usually is.)  :D :D :D

Also found in the same volume (page 398 ff) is a really lovely Toki Pona paper ('Toki Pona and Orders of Semantic Completeness') - everybody's favorite language, right?!?

North Germany's weirdest invasive species. Bremen has the world's largest rhododendron collection, which is a quite fascinating scientific project (it's not just a very pretty garden - though it is - but also a gene bank and everything, so, the 3000 species of rhododendron are not purely there for decorative reasons) but does horrible things to the local ecosystem. When I was a kid, people were like, "oh, we'll plant rhododendron because the bugs won't eat it". This used to be correct, except these days, we don't just get all the invasive bugs that come with what's essentially a monoculture of invasive bushes, but also, some local bug species have evolved to eat rhododendron. I've seen a maybug eat a rhododendron leaf, and you have no idea how weird that is! (Evolution in progress, I suppose.) Anyway, whatever I may think about the ecological impact of this weird gardening project, the view in spring is spectacular. They also have other plants (including some really fascinating ones) and I enjoy going there with my sketchbook and colors! So, uh, have some rhododendron...



...I have to admit I have no idea which of the 3000 species it is. Theoretically, all their plants are properly labeled, so, the bush should have had a tag somewhere with its name, except of course it was not visible because all those leaves get in the way. Some Rhododendron it is. ;)

Materials I used:
Stillman&Birn Zeta Series sketchbook (270 g/m²)
Watercolors: Turner Permanent Lemon (PY109), ROSA Gallery Magenta Rose (PR122), Mijello Bamboo Green (PG36), Daniel Smith Jadeite Genuine, Holbein Shadow Green (PBk31)
White gel pen (Pentel)

So, this is basically... a math-y reading recommendation? Prompted by something mostly unrelated in a Discord chat that reminded me of all the ways divination and computer modelling can interconnect. (And not just in the way I use runes and tarot cards for math-y brainstorming; that's not divination at all.) Anyway. One of my favorite publications in recent years is this one:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7387702
It's called "I-Ching Divination Evolutionary Algorithm and its Convergence Analysis" and it's a perfectly serious paper, and one that I want to cite in my own work very badly; I just can't find a justification (yet) for doing so. (The topic is close enough to what I work on, just this type of algorithm I've never implemented, nor will I do so in the foreseeable future. Too bad.) The authors developed their lovely algorithm based on the traditional Chinese divination system of I-Ching which I unfortunately don't know enough about to make any intelligent comments... Just: this is not only creative and fun, but actually good (from the algorithmic side of things).

So a few weeks ago I was visiting that conference. (Okay, I visited three conferences during the last few weeks, and at least two of them were too many. And then some meetings. Anyway...) The funniest thing I found there was a card game - Authors - featuring ore minerals. Not just a crystal card game but only ore minerals, which was so weirdly specific I (of course) had to buy that thing. Still, I'd like to know, who came up with that particular idea? (And did it sell well?)

By the way, this painting shows Goethite, also an ore mineral. As a reference, I used a piece from my institute's collection. No, I don't work with ore minerals (I'm more the carbonate kind of person LOL), but isn't it nice to know our scientific resources are used so well?