Trump’s invincible ignorance

Last Week Was a Degrading Embarrassment. And a Microcosm of Trump. – Foreign Policy: Does Donald Trump engage in some secret ritual involving the mass ingestion of bullshit? How else does he manage to spew out so much?

Almost everything else about that tweet is also false: The decision to sell the old U.S. Embassy was made by former President George W. Bush, not former President Barack Obama, and it was done for security reasons. The new embassy, built at a cost of $1 billion, not $1.2 billion, has been described by Trump’s own ambassador to the Court of St. James’s as a “bargain” that was paid for by the sale of other U.S. properties in London.

...in fact there is a big price to be paid for having a president whom no one can trust. It makes it almost impossible, for example, to convince other countries to go along with the United States in any international crisis where the facts are in dispute.

“See, that’s treason right there,” he said. No it’s not — unless treason is redefined to mean, as it does in places like Turkey and Russia, any criticism of the supreme leader.

What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult? | Quanta Magazine

What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult? | Quanta Magazine:

When you start modeling a flow using Navier-Stokes, your fluid will have some initial amount of energy. But in a turbulent flow, that energy can get concentrated. Instead of being distributed evenly across the river, kinetic energy may gather in arbitrarily small eddies, and particles in those eddies could (theoretically) be accelerated to infinite velocity.

... turbulence is meant to describe exactly this — the transfer of kinetic energy from large to smaller and smaller scales...

Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown - Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton provides a wonderfully clear explanation of recently-disclosed CPU vulnerabilities: Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown - Raspberry Pi. I think this is the clearest writing on CPU architecture details that I've seen, aside from articles in BYTE magazine in the early 1980s. The comment thread is also a fun read, not least for its mention of the Motorola 68000.

Ptolemy, Kepler and Fourier walk into a used bookstore...

In which I learn a little modern JavaScript and bemoan my lousy memory: Epicycles Ever After