This Neil deGrasse Tyson segment on the evolution of the eye helped me understand something important about evolution. "We like to think of our eyes as state of the art, but 375 million years later, we still can't see things right in front of our noses, or discern fine details in near-darkness the way fish can. When we left the water why didn't nature just start over again and evolve us a new set of eyes that were optimal for seeing in the air? Nature doesn't work that way. Evolution reshapes existing structures over generations, adapting them with small changes. It can't just go back to the drawing board and start from scratch." #

It's been a week since we started a thread about discovery in blogs. We haven't discussed much, as far as I can see, that hasn't already been tried. One idea, one-click to subscribe to a blog's feed was something we did at UserLand in 2002. The problem wasn't technology, it wasn't hard, rather it was how to get enough of the blogging tools to support the same calls to form critical mass. It didn't happen. Here's my conclusion on the discussion so far. Two things are needed to upgrade the blogosphere. 1. A growing excited user base. 2. A (somewhat) dominant vendor who is committed to user choice, and therefore uses open clonable formats and protocols. #1 is a prerequisite for anything to happen imho. #2 is a lesson I learned when the clonability of UserLand's products was not reciprocated by our competitors. That's an important lesson and I don't think many others are aware of it. As with our tech, it's available to anyone who wants it. #

A reminder. This is what Trump did to our judicial system. This schmuck is on the Supreme Court. It wasn't just a bad dream.#

I just ordered an iMac Pro. The only upgrade I got was doubling the memory to 64GB. I usually buy as little Apple memory as possible, but I was warned that installing memory on this machine is not so easy. So I paid the luxury tax. The whole thing is a luxury, my current iMac performs pretty well. I use it as a writing machine, blogging and software, and I guess it's mostly doing I/O, it's not compute-bound. But this is the last moment for me to buy a new Mac, this is the last O/S release that runs Frontier. There's no direct port planned as far as I know. And hopefully before this machine dies, there will be a Linux port, which is where I'd rather be spending my time. Or possibly my JavaScript codebase will be rich enough so I can port my dev tools to be independent of Frontier. Not my preferred path forward. I've been using a Mac since 1984, with a brief hiatus at the end of the 90s. The total with tax and AppleCare came to $6,497.66. It will be delivered between November 6 and 8. Just in time to either celebrate victory in the election or drown my sorrows in defeat. #