Hi I'm Ed.

Always up to something. Sometimes nothing.


Is Human progress an illusion?

The idea of progress rests on the belief that the growth of knowledge and the advance of the species go together—if not now, then in the long run. The biblical myth of the Fall of Man contains the forbidden truth. Knowledge does not make us free. It leaves us as we have always been, prey to every kind of folly. The same truth is found in Greek myth. The punishment of Prometheus, chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods, was not unjust.

Egg Pan

Once upon a time, in the kingdom of my kitchen, there lived a loyal servant named Egg Pan. For years, Egg Pan has been my faithful companion in the art of egg cooking. Its superpower? A magical non-stick surface. When this magic fades, I simply summon a new Egg Pan to take its place. But here's the twist: despite its non-stick charm, I've always cooked my eggs in a pool of fat. Less fat than in a "stick" pan, but fat nonetheless.

Then, one day, a question popped into my head, as if laid by a hen of curiosity: "Can I cook eggs in a non-stick pan without any fat?" It's funny how I've never asked myself this before, despite seeing countless commercials of eggs gliding effortlessly out of non-stick pans, no fat in sight.

Another revelation hit me: I've never tasted eggs without fat, except for those sneaky hard-boiled ones. So, I decided to embark on a culinary adventure. I cooked scrambled eggs without fat for the first time in my life. And guess what? They were egg-cellent! Plus, I had one less ingredient to fetch from the fridge (bye-bye, fat) and one less utensil to wash (so long, knife or spoon).

And that, my friends, is the tale of my egg pan and the fat-free egg revelation!

facil.io, Web application framework written in C

This is dope. I have a small hobby project I was going to do in Go, htmx, and hyperscript, but now I might do it in C.

Vely

Vely is a general-purpose framework for rapid development of high-performance software. It is especially well suited for web applications. It's Free Open Source (under the business-friendly Eclipse Public License 2 (EPL-2)).

Vely is declarative and functional, with single-line statements performing entire tasks. It's simple to design, write and maintain applications.

Decades of adding energy-intensive abstractions on top of programming languages led to increase in complexity and decrease in performance. Vely applications are 100% native, high-performance and low-footprint without interpreters, virtual machines, or byte-code schemes.

Lagrange Gemini Client

If you want to surf Gemini you'll need a client that understands the Gemini protocol, there are a lot of clients out there and I believe there are plugins to enable the protocol in popular browsers. But I use Lagrange, it's written in C and looks great.

It also has light themes.

Kagi search engine

I come from the old Internet. My dad was on BBS before the WWW and as a kid I got to share that experience with him. I also remember when the WWW formed and searching the web using Netscape and having a website up and running with some HTML back before CSS. Even though the web was a lot smaller it was a lot bigger and growing up I was exposed to so many ideas. There is no need to go down the rabbit hole shit show that is Google Search. At the same time, I get it - bills to pay - or something like that.

Kagi is pretty dope. There is a free tier and you can pay for some other nifty features. But their lens feature and search experience so far is pretty nostalgic and I can find things without post fixing my search queries with "reddit" lol

Twitter was valuable because people would share links. You could find interesting stuff once you sifted through the BS. It was sort of a hack for lack of a good search engine. But I shouldn't have to sift though bullshit and ads to find stuff - that would be like going to the library and all the books were wrapped in duck tape and you had to remove the duck tape before you could read it. Slight exaggeration but sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

Legibility

Legibility is a constraint that obfuscates our senses.

  • Mirage
  • Phantoms

It creates an interface (involuntary filter) between ourselves and ecology.

Unlike a prism that reveals the complexity of light shining through it - legibility is like tinted glass; only silhouettes and shadows.

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A Focus on Fixation, Van der Loos

Fixatives can be crosslinking like formalin or coagulating like acetone. Crosslinkers conceal antigens, requiring epitope retrieval. Coagulants preserve antigens. Longer fixation reduces staining but signal amplification can help. Cryostat sections are not a "gold standard" since proteins are lost during post-fixation. Formalin-fixed paraffin sections retain proteins better. Terminology should distinguish staining sections vs intact cells. Test antibodies on intact cells and cell blocks before staining tissues. Fixation impacts epitope availability so optimal protocols must be determined empirically. Cell blocks can provide controls when differential staining is not possible.

Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics

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