Sitting at an airport, awaiting a flight, is a fundamentally unenjoyable experience. You know that you still have to sit through the boredom of the flight in an uncomfortable seat, in full knowledge that they’d make you stand if only they could do so while maintaining mirage of safety. You know the face mask you’re wearing will hug your face for way more hours than it is designed to be effective, and that this does not matter anyway, since it’s largely a performative gesture.

It is really alarming to see the nonsense on the front pages of the Serbian media today, with claims that Ukraine has attacked Russia. Come the fuck on, really. As much as I like a lot of people in Serbia, I cannot for the life of me understand the profound aversion to truth that appears so commonplace here. Thankfully, there are some excellent people trying to promote truth. I shall visit with some of them later.

Working on the road is always a bit of a double edged sword. Today I’m in Kragujevac, Serbia, where I’ve just emerged from an 8:30 hour marathon meeting, conducted in three languages, discussing complex topics relating to physics, chemistry and engineering. My brain is melty. Despite this, I’m feeling a strong urge to get some more work done tonight. Perhaps some code later. Perhaps. Tomorrow to Belgrade, and then back home on Wednesday.

Some weeks ago I gave a talk at The Goa Project. I ran into my notes from the event and although I don’t have much time to process them into something coherent at this point in time, I figure it doesn’t hurt to put these somewhere more useful than oblivion. The warning implicit in such notes is of course that they were written out hastily and are lacking in context; the real context exists only in the recordings of the event where these notes were used.

At 17:40:07 UTC today, a Cygnus spacecraft desginated NG-17 was launched from Wallops island atop an Antares 230+ rocket, destined to rendezvous with the International Space Station. This was by most metrics a typical resupply mission, but one of the items in one of the payload bags is an artwork produced by the Moon Gallery, which itself contains 64 artworks, each 1cm³ in size. The ultimate goal of the Moon Gallery is to establish the first permanent art gallery on Luna.

Yesterday, a conversation with a friend veered into the convoluted history of post-WWII scientific and technological development, and the various characters that drove it. During the conversation, we unavoidably veered into cybernetics, that long forgotten systematization of theories around feedback and control systems, which at the time appeared so promising, but are now at best ignored, and at worst reviled. When reading the history of cybernetics, it is hard to not get swept up by the eager and earnest romanticism of it, and the tenderness with which the various characters discuss the ideas.

The other day, I went on an Icelandic language podcast called “Bitcoin byltingin”, or “the Bitcoin revolution,” in which I tried to explain that 13 years after its conception, blockchain technology has proven revolutionary only insofar as it has revolutionized the efficiency of scams, facilitated ridiculous volumes of societal harm, and accelerated the rate at which we burn our planet. Of course, I largely failed. Not so much at explaining these things, but rather at doing so in a way that anybody would actually care about.

So yeah, my work managed to get in the way of my documentation efforts, and I’ve been running like mad for the last month. As of today, I have committed code for 30 days in a row. In addition, I have sent out four grant applications, and set up a number of other business related things. I think I might take a rest sometime soon. Compressing floats As a test, I implemented TSXor for floating point number compression, because I need to shunt large amounts of time series and geospatial data around and it’s nice if that doesn’t eat up all the bandwidth and storage space.

It’s the last day of January! Y’all know what that means! Good, because I don’t. Today is snowy and cold in Reykjavík, but the coffee is warm, the lunch-pizza is baked and eaten, and a ton of code has been made. I struggled with focus in the early morning, but still got an acceptable amount done today. Tapered off towards the end though… but all in all, pretty good. MCH2022! I submitted a talk to MCH2022 today.

Two weeks ago I set myself an artificial deadline for today for a bunch of things to be done. Those things at the beginning of Wednesday included a number of things that are done, and several which were not. The progress this week has been solid. A lot of the work that I’ve been doing in the last several weeks has started to fall into place. Unfortunately, by doing so it has exposed a few annoying data errors already, which I’ll have to deal with, but that’s all in the game…