Scratch Pad: Payne, Duolingo, Conway

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon) and disquiet.bsky.social (if you’re on Bluesky, which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment).

▰ RIP to a great one, Dr. Roger Payne, who helped discover singing as a form of communication among whales. I had the opportunity to interview him at length early on in the pandemic for a long-form writing project I’m still in the midst of. He was sharp, funny, and generous. He leaves behind an incredible legacy of acoustic ecology. We have a richer sense of life on our planet because of his life’s work. (Read his New York Times obituary.)

▰ One thing I’ve learned from Duolingo is that a particular alert sound I’d previously heard for some time is, in fact, not people’s text messages but people doing Duolingo

▰ I really like comics. I really love pencilled roughs for comics. Check out this multi-page planning document from the fourth issue of Declan Shalvey’s ongoing series Old Dog, which he writes and (with support from Clayton Cowles) draws.

▰ How was this not an option in The New York Times Spelling Bee?

▰ Judged a book by its cover (OK, and also its author’s reputation) and bought it:

▰ I really wanna try out this new synthesizer module based on Conway’s Game of Life. It’s from the developer Nervous Squirrel.