Mary Holstege

@mathling
727 Followers
818 Following
3.2K Posts

Retired software engineer. Now I write programs to make art and, lately, make art with words.

Will natter on about tech in general with forays into linguistics, football, cooking, politics, climate, and random stuff.

Maker of jam. Petter of cats. Viewer of stars.

she/her or they/them

RSS feed: https://mathling.com/art-rss.xml

Personalhttps://www.mathling.com/
RedBubble (Merch! Prints!)https://www.redbubble.com/people/holstege
Books2Read author pagehttps://books2read.com/ap/xqYAAW/Mary-Holstege
DeviantArt (Bit out of date)https://www.deviantart.com/lingmath/gallery
A sunset tree

#GenerativeArt interlude

A rather attractive parametric l-system tree

#XQuery #SVG #CreativeCoding

And while I'm in a cranky mood: the guys our neighbour got to fix the fence just hacked out a piece of our irrigation system in the process. Didn't ask, didn't tell, just left me to discover it these several months later.

Vexing.

Well, I don't know if Intuit has shifted to using LLMs to make its software, or they fired their QA staff, or they just aren't spending the effort on their desktop software so as to push everyone towards the web crap, BUT

TurboTax is noticably worse, with several obvious bugs and deficiencies compared to previous years. Just glaring.

Chapter 41 of Atraxian Blue (https://
books2read.com/u/b6ElAx) is up at
http://mathling.com/books/index.html

Belle Epoch: Mirabelle

In which Tass, come of age, is called to his father's office, and learns a great many secrets

#scifi
#writing
#AtraxianBlue

Book previews

Ready for a horror show that is different than the current news cycle?

This is code that @hannorein, Aaron Boley, and I put together for modelling Starlinks. We scaled up the brightness based on what we think could be the size of these stupid new "AI datacenters" that SpaceX says they will launch a million of, and used the orbits posted on @planet4589.bsky.social's website

I'll walk you through this plot in the following posts.

It's almost as if we have learned precisely nothing from the decades of literature and research on specification languages.

Nah, I kid. It is that exactly.

Modern, scientific man has written women out of history

Half of Japan’s samurai were women, groundbreaking new exhibition at British Museum says
https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/japan/british-museum-samurai-women-warrior-myth-b2913476.html

The Viking Woman Warrior of Birka, Sweden
https://www.history-channel.org/a-viking-mystery-the-woman-warrior-of-birka/

Early Women Were Hunters, Not Just Gatherers
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/

‘Woman the hunter’: Studies aim to correct history
https://news.nd.edu/news/woman-the-hunter-studies-aim-to-correct-history/

The sports where women outperform men
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240731-the-sports-where-women-outperform-men

Half of Japan’s samurais were women reveals groundbreaking new exhibition at British Museum

‘Samurai’ explores over a thousand years of Japanese history related to the elite warrior class

The Independent