> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Readit Newszeckalpha commented on PYX: The next step in Python packaging astral.sh/blog/introducin... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko
zeckalpha commented on New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes dynomight.net/colors/... · Posted by u/zdw
This is only tangentially related, but I have always wondered why chlorophyll absorbs blue and red, but reflects green--green being sunlight's brightest component.
It's almost as if there was some evolutionary pressure towards being very visible in sunlight which is more important than evolving ways to collect as much sun energy as possible. When I guess at this I end up with something along the lines of reflected green being used as a signal to a neighboring plant: "I'm already here, grow in some other direction instead." There is some evidence that plants do this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-3040.ep1160...) but it's not clear that the need to do so is so strong that it would overshadow the drive to collect as much energy as possible.
Or perhaps there's something to do with the physics of absorbing light to drive a chemical reaction that makes it better to absorb at red and blue while passing on green (450nm and 680nm are not harmonics--so if this is the case it's more complex than which sorts of standing waves would fit in some chemical gap or other).
I didn't see any mention of this so thought I would add:
This sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Earth_hypothesis. Going through history, there have been times where the Earth has had oxygen spikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen (Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoproterozoic_oxygenation_eve...) Cool image showing how this process is unstable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event#/media/F...
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You might be interested in the different photosynthesis cycles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crassulacean_acid_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_photosynthesis - this one was only discovered in 2016!
Research into these may have profound impact on climate change.
No mention of the Taj Mahal, which famously is not square so it appears square.
zeckalpha commented on Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface patternproject.substack.c... · Posted by u/cainxinth
zeckalpha commented on Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025 catstret.ch/202506/sun-ra... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
someone should reboot the Sun brand as a super high end laptop and workstation company. ~$10k price point. GPU or future tech, native virtualization to run simultaneous OS images, modular and upgradable like framework's products, droppable ruggedization, sim card and isolated secure element as a crypto module, same day replacement delivery worldwide.
could do the same with Atari, Cray, even a rebrand of SGI to Silicon General Intelligence. I miss muscular tech like that.
Oracle wouldn't let you do that with Sun.
Atari has been brought back! https://atari.com
HPE is using the Cray brand: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/supercomputing/cray-ex...
Coincidentally, https://www.sgi.com/ redirects to the HPE Cray link above.
zeckalpha commented on Public Signal Backups Testing community.signalusers.org... · Posted by u/blendergeek
zeckalpha commented on Public Signal Backups Testing community.signalusers.org... · Posted by u/blendergeek
Back it up now so when the encryption is broken, it can be read!
Instead, I would point to the physical trauma of a concussion as the differentiating factor.