Stop Encrypting Websites
In summer of 2014, Google called for “HTTPS Everywhere”. Since that time, they’ve been skewing search results in favor of HTTPS sites, and scaring you about sites which aren’t encrypted on Chrome’s URL bar. The best reason for going along with this is one I found on a website advocating for the change: “Everybody’s doing it”. Apparently, Google’s motto has changed from “Don’t Be Evil” to “Be a sheep”. When the web was started decades ago, it was all about open standards proposed by people who didn’t particularly have any ax to grind about what brand of soap you used or where you went on vacation.
Read moreFunctional programming
I don’t do “functional programming” for a living. I don’t know how to code in Haskell or OCaml. What I have to say here is based on doing some research on the topic. I could be wrong on some points. Fair warning. Functional programming is a programming paradigm. Certain languages implement this paradigm, but you can do functional programming in many languages not originally designed for it. There are some central ideas which characterize functional programming.
Read moreGrotblog updates
The principle thing driving my upgrade of the software to version 2.0 is handling the problem of someone taking down your blog. I happen to be politically incorrect, and in today’s toxic political environment, I can see someone taking down my blog for something they are offended by. I keep backups of all my articles offline. But that’s just the content. Outside the blog itself, I don’t keep track of the excerpts (now renamed “teasers”), the topics the posts fit into, the timestamp and the like.
Read moreInrupt and Solid
Vint Cerf (one of the prime movers in the creation of what became the Internet) is distressed by several aspects of the modern World Wide Web. For one thing, privacy is all but a disappeared concept. For another, your data is not your own; it’s controlled by someone else. Additionally, the huge gatekeepers of the Internet control the web in a way never intended when the web was first invented.
Read moreHistory of Medicine
Our story starts with one John D. Rockefeller. He was a monopolist and America’s first billionaire. By the turn of the 20th century, he controlled 90% of all oil refineries through his company, Standard Oil. By this time, chemists were discovering that an abundance of chemicals could be made from oil. The first plastic, Bakelite, was created in 1907. It was even possible to make make drugs and other products from oil.
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