The Outsider web is alive and well.

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The web designer and developer Jim Nielsen commented on a quote from the Security/Devops engineer Mat Duggan about the Fediverse… apparently a “social network that half the internet has never heard of”.

No source for this claim is cited so allow me make up my own statistic in response: Half the Internet has heard of the Fediverse but decided it is not for them as they are not techy people and do not wish to join one of the gated communities they are building for themselves so they can keep reassuring each other what a great job they are doing… even if some of them struggle to resize a window.

To quote from an earlier piece by Mat Duggan regarding a browser extension he had created:

“Interestingly one of my most common requests is “I would like less technical content” which as it turns out is tricky to provide because it’s pretty hard to find.”

The clues are all there. Let’s see if they can figure it out.

Éliane Radigue at the Co-op.

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It was just a few days after the Guardian had an article about the delightful drone of the refrigeration cabinets at a Sheffield Co-op store:

…that we learned of the death of Éliane Radigue at the age of 94. Some of the comments to the article describe the musical sounds of some European trains which loops nicely back to Radigue’s apprenticeship with Pierre Schaeffer in the 1950s as he used recordings of trains in his own works.

But this is Éliane Radigue’s Islas resonantes created on her ARP 2500.

At least Apple’s Music app has figured out how to spell her name with the erroneous Radique variant now redirecting to the correct form.

The Myth of the Moth

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On Richard Osman’s House of Games this evening we were informed of the interesting fact that a moth once found inside a computer is why computer bugs are so called.

It is a good story but it is not a fact.

The word bug had long been used to denote some form of malfunction – as in a film from several years before the moth was found:


The Oxford English Dictionary has earlier yet examples:

1875
The biggest ‘bug’ yet has been discovered in the U.S. Hotel Electric Annunciator.
Operator 15 August 5/1Citation details for Operator

1889
Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.
Pall Mall Gazette 11 March 1/1

If we are feeling fanciful we might find ourselves in the land of the Fairies where we might encounter a mischievous Welsh Bwgan up to no good.

So when the moth was discovered it was duly noted that an actual bug had been found rather than the mythical one that had long been blamed for such malfunctions.

It is a good story so it is a shame to waste it.