Once I was at Wendy’s with my friend when we saw a stray cat out prowling the perimeter of the parking lot at night. She lured it over, captured it, and we took it to a vet to check for a microchip. A week of “lost cat” posts on Facebook later, we discovered the location of its home: a place right next door to the Wendy’s, where its family and owner lived. “I wouldn’t have done this,” I told her that first night, as we anxiously drove a strange cat on the highway to the 24-hour vet in the dark, “but I love that you did.”

Something I enjoy is when your focus doesn’t have to jump around a whole bunch when using a computer program. One classic example of UI that manages the user’s focus is the humble float label:

Computers are bad at math. If you go into your friendly local Python terminal or JavaScript console, and type “0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1”, it will produce a number that is almost, but not quite 0.3. When you try to write programs that do math, things like this often happen. You may have heard that it’s because the number is “floating point.”

There’s a lot of superstition and folklore around floating-point numbers in computer science, plausibly due to occult-sounding terms like “mantissa” and “significand.” “Floating-point math is imprecise,” people will say. But the “floating-point” part gets way too much emphasis. “Math is too precise” is a better way to put it. The poor floating-point number is just chronically misunderstood.

It’s funny, or perhaps a shame, how humor, once you realize it’s a tool to communicate, slides headfirst into seriousness: I find myself constantly exaggerating, in the manner of a joke: “I haven’t had a vacation since the late 1800s;” “no one outside of this university has used this software in 79 years;” “time to go home for Christmas and hear about all the orphanages my family members have burned down lately.” All with the fear that if I said a simple truth, people would take it literally but not seriously, and so I have to say something that’s a little bit realer (but sounds more like a joke) than the actual truth

Author’s note: I originally wrote this on a different platform (as the date says, in 2019), and am transplanting it here. I dug up the originals of all of the photos and wrote alt text for them, but the text of the post remains completely unchanged. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even re-read it.

This is a story about farming. It is quite long. I think it may be worth reading anyway, but unfortunately I have no way to prove it. I’ve also tried my best but I still don’t know if it actually makes perfect sense in every way? But it did all actually happen; so it all kind of has to make at least a little bit of sense, even if doesn’t really seem like it.