h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

The last four digits of 16¹⁶ https://aperiodical.com/2026/10/the-last-four-digits-of-16%c2%b9%e2%81%b6/

I made a thing: it's called the DNS Museum, and it's because I kept joking at the start of my talk, "Bizarre and Unusual Uses of DNS" that a lot of the things weren't alive anymore - so it was more like a museum of DNS and I was the curator. Anyway, I'm on holiday right now so I finally got around to doing something about that joke.

Consider this a first draft, I have way more notes about other things to add at some point. It's also a little bland, but one thing I'm not is a designer. Let me know about any issues - AI was used to help create the site, but of course I'm responsible for any mistakes. It's on GitHub too, so PRs are welcome.

https://dns.museum

For my birthday, my brother-in-law gave me a 4992-digit hex number that, when used as a seed for Python’s random number generator, makes it so that printing a sequence of “random” ASCII characters actually prints a birthday greeting.

I find it rather amazing that this is possible!

This is the program he sent with the seed:

with open("seed.txt", encoding="ascii") as handle:
seed = int(handle.read().strip(), 0)
r = random.Random(seed)
pending = ""
while True:
character = chr(r.randrange(128))
if pending + character == "\x1e\x1f":
break
print(pending, end="")
pending = character
print()

Huge updates to my transmission constraints dashboard!

✨ An entirely new layout
📊 Loads of new charts
⚖️ Comparison stats
📈 Cumulative data
🔥 Turn-up volume by fuel type

And much, much more…

https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/curtailment

🔥 Annual reminder for Northern Hemisphere inhabitants. Test your central heating before it gets really cold! 🔥
Bleed the radiators, top up the boiler and run a test for an hour.

The price of diesel is now effectively £2/litre so it costs about £140 to fill my tank which at 46mpg gives me a range of 700 miles: 20p/mile

Assuming an average electricity cost of 26p/kWh and a Polestar 2 with efficiency of 287 Wh/mi, that's about 7.5p/mile.

The cost of fuel and maintenance on the fully deprecated 'bangernomics' ICE car is now heavily outweighed by the EV savings, even with a higher purchase price.

Trump is doing a great job killing the oil industry long term 😀

World Standards Day and World Standards Day 2026 #Standards https://improbable.com/2026/09/26/world-standards-day-and-world-standards-day-2026/

Bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet? – visualised | Birds | The Guardian.

This is a really beautiful and fascinating article about bird migration, following several different species around the globe.

#birds #nature

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2025/oct/16/bird-migration-is-changing-what-does-this-reveal-about-our-planet-visualised-aoe

"If I'd had more time I'd have written less code"

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

This year's Geoguessr World Championship final is absolutely incredible

https://youtu.be/BU6rXYv726I?t=30917

Happy 50th Anniversary to The Muppet Show! Jim Henson's groundbreaking puppet variety show began airing on the United Kingdom's ATV Network on this date in 1976 ahead of its US debut later that month.

*** New blog post ***

The second post of my tour around Zeeland in the Spring of this year:

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2026/09/ive-seen-things-you-people-wouldnt.html

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners were introduced at the 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 3, 2026. Each winner has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. #IgNobel https://improbable.com/2026/09/03/the-2026-ig-nobel-prize-winners-are-announced/

Published today! Our article in Math Horizons about how Robert and I lied to players for three years in our game Digit Party, and how we used integer linear programming to stop.

This is, quite possibly, the most entertaining interview i have ever encountered. You simply *must * read it. It keeps getting better with every question.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/b-c-swimmer-crosses-strait-of-georgia-under-nine-hours-9.7316260

My blog has now had over 2 million hits, so let's celebrate with a Belgian burger.

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2026/08/build-belgian-burger-flemish-style.html

https://improbable.com/2026/08/25/fungi-fungi-fungi-at-this-years-ig-ig-ig/ https://improbable.com/2026/08/25/fungi-fungi-fungi-at-this-years-ig-ig-ig/

"611.9 MiB of database against 644.4 MiB of ELF files. The whole userland, as one queryable file, is _smaller_ than the files it came from. The b-tree cost that doubled a single `hello` amortises to nearly nothing across 1,123 objects and is roughly 6% over the actual program bytes."

From "Your executable is a SQLite database:" https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/23/your-executable-is-a-sqlite-database

A very few more tickets became available for the 26th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony (which will happen on Thursday, September 3, in #Zurich, Switzerland). Grab ‘em while you can. #IgNobel https://eventfrog.ch/de/p/wissenschaft-und-technik/the-36th-first-annual-ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-7446575553581194400.html