The main concept discussed in A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram is the complexity that results from very simple Cellular Automata. I looked at that in an earlier post Cellular Automata with F# . Chapter four of A New Kind of Science looks at systems based on numbers:

The underlying rules for systems like cellular automata are however usually different from those for systems based on numbers. The main point is that the rules for cellular automata are always local: the new color of any …

Accelerate: The Science of DevOps - Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations (2018) had a huge impact in the technology industry. The book describes models of DevOps capabilities and culture, and how organisations can drive improvement in software delivery and reliability. What most people remember from the book, and the largest impact it’s had on the industry, are what are colloquially referred to as the DORA metrics. Four key indicators which strongly correlate with …

Buried Alive, from the book Livia (1978) in The Avignon Quintet .

A poem filling with water,
A woman swimming across it
Believing it a lake,
The words avail so little,
The water has carried them away
Frail as a drypoint the one kiss,
Renovation of a swimmer’s loving.

Attach a penny calendar to the moon
And cycle down the highways of the need,
The doll will have nothing under her dress;
With an indolence close to godhead
You remain watching, he remains watching.

When she smiles the …

Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has crept into a couple of my go-to podcasts; folks I respect are talking about it so I wanted to learn it for myself. In this post I describe the approach I took to learning the Terra Blockchain. We set aside GUIs and Web Applications and instead interact with it programatically through the Python API.

What is DeFi? I’m not an expert and I’m not a Twitter shill so I can’t …