Talking to the Average Joe: What COVID-19 Has In Common With Young Sheldon

2023-12-05 10 min read Writing Marco

Maybe we should have learned from the show, Young Sheldon, before it was too late. The struggle of a hyperbrilliant child savant having to deal with a world of average people should have given pause to scientists and government officials trying to talk down to a bunch of humans that didn’t want to follow order. But there is far more at stake than even the public’s reaction to the novel coronavirus, as the future of the planet is at stake. Continue reading

Introducing the Dayada Encoding

2023-12-01 5 min read Programming Marco

Imagine you need to transfer small chunks of binary data over a channel that doesn’t like binary of any kind. You want to disguise it as regular text, maybe in a language the text processor/forwarder cannot analyze. That’s exactly what the Dayada encoding does. Continue reading

The Two Very Different Men At the Heart of Christianity

2023-11-25 12 min read Writing Marco

The most important question a modern Christian needs to ask themselves is whether the goal of Christian life is to live without sin. This article looks at the two different answers that are backed by Scripture and how they belong to the two very different men that together created Christianity as we know it. Continue reading

Your First Day of Snowboarding

2023-11-24 15 min read Snow Marco

Who convinced you to go snowboarding? Tell them off and go back home! No, really, try it out and follow useful guides like this one… Snowboarding is popular, snowboarding is fun, snowboarding is painful. Who’s right? All of the above! Here is a short guide to your first day on the mountain. Continue reading

How Good Is Duolingo At Teaching Languages?

2023-11-18 13 min read Apps Marco

I have been long fond of Duolingo, an app that teaches languages for free. You can use it on the phone, you can use it on a web site, it teaches language in a playful way that people call gamified. You get points, you compete with others, and you get constant positive feedback.

More than just that, Duolingo has a series of courses for less common languages. I am particularly fond of the Esperanto and Hawaiian courses, as I love both languages and because there really wasn’t a good alternative for Duolingo before. Hawaiian, in particular, was taught by the University of Hawaii and the course was a for pay program.

Gender Treatment in Nova vs. Esperanto

2023-11-15 11 min read Language Marco

One of the more political attacks against Esperanto in current times comes from the idea that Esperanto is inherently sexist. Nova is different, although the difference is less political and more due to language simplicity and consistency reasons. The end result is anyway that Nova, unlike Esperanto, is entirely sex-neutral in a way that is easier to learn and comprehend. Continue reading

Adding Search to a HUGO Site

2023-11-11 10 min read Site Programming Marco

One function that is harder to do without a database backend, as static sites don’t, is search. With WordPress, search is baked into the core and all templates have to do is not get in the way. But on a static site, there is no backend to call, no infrastructure to invoke, and no user interface to show.

Static sites have gotten around this by using third party search providers. Basically, you add some third party code to your site and then magic happens. There are two options on how to do it:

Good Bye, Shasta

2023-11-11 8 min read People Marco

I was perusing the articles on here and found the one I wrote when my older cat, Mondo died. When the younger one, Shasta died, I wrote a private one but nothing to commemorate her publicly, so here goes.

Cats are weird animals, but they are weird in a way very similar to how humans are. Both of us are social, but not too much. We like interacting with other members of our species, but we also know we are competing with them. We are smart, but not too smart. We are playful, at times too much. We can be hyper, and we can be sleepy.

Moving on again: Joomla to WordPress to Hugo

2023-11-09 6 min read Site Marco

It’s that time of the century again: I need to move on from one platform to another and carry (almost) all the content with me. This time, the move was not necessary and I could have continued working with WordPress. But updating the software every few days added up in time, the concern that eventually I’d be caught by a WordPress flaw that allowed remote execution, and ultimate takeover of the server, and the resources required to run PHP and MySQL were all too much.

The Great Annular Eclipse of 2023

2023-11-09 7 min read Travel Marco

I am still remembering the Great American Eclipse of 2017 with fondness and surprise. Even to a trained physicist like me, the sudden disappearance of the sun for a few minutes in the middle of the day was surprising, even startling. It’s probably my fondest memory of a natural event, together with the sight of lava falls on Hawai’i, the Big Island of the state.

But there was a much more convenient eclipse happening in 2023. It happened in October, in the middle of Colorado’s Mud Season, and on a Saturday. The weather was forecast to be absolutely perfect, warmish and sunny and with no clouds in sight. Still, was it not going to be a letdown after the Great Total Eclipse? I mean, we all had heard the song, Total Eclipse of My Heart. Had anyone written anything about the Annular Eclipse of the Heart?

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