John Jacobsen

Sites of Arrival A group show of (mostly) figurative art at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts: Matthew Braun John Jacobsen Veronica Severini Donald Colley Muriel Christensen Location and Hours Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts August 8-17,…

I've been making some progress with steelcut, my Common Lisp template generator (does every Lisper write one of these as a rite of passage?)

Like many programmers, I have programming hobbies.

On Monday, February 4th, 1985, at the tender age of eighteen, I wrote down in the back of my journal two meagre fragments of the previous night's dreams: I’m at Fred’s and the cab is 45 minutes late.

What computer programming languages "go with" (feel like) what art mediums?

Since at least the 1980s I've kept a (very intermittent) dream journal in various forms, including dedicated paper notebooks notes or drawings in sketchbooks fragments of entries in daily Org Mode diary pages individual iCloud Notes, one per dream a singl…

I've gotten interested in Raspberry Pis again, having recently picked up a Pi Zero 2 W.

Over the decades I've relied heavily on bash aliases and functions to automate common tasks, resulting in a .bash_profile that's over a thousand lines long.

I can't believe I haven't written anything here in over a year.

What follows is a selection of practices which I find helpful when working with software projects, whether in public or in private, in solo or in collaborative work.

The last few days have been devoted to improving l1, the homegrown lisp I wrote about earlier this year.

Histogram made by a 1980's version of the author.

For the past month I've been spending some free time writing another Lisp implementation, this time in Go.

For the fifth or sixth time I am performing a major migration of this site from one implementation to another.

See my Now Page for what I'm up to these days.

Making Things Fast A while back, we used a toy particle physics trigger to explore concepts in lazy evaluation and functional programming in Clojure.

Intro I've been writing this post as I go, and you may still see changes if you check back from time to time.

In a comment on yesterday's Hacker News thread about journaling, I sketched out my daily journaling practice of late.

Background Lately I've been a bit of a Lisp kick again, reading On Lisp and Practical Common Lisp, working problems and re-casting my Clojure-based blog software into Common Lisp to see how that goes.

I am pleased to announce: Of the Flesh but not the World...

I have been experimenting with notations for color mixtures, so I can make notes about colors on the go without actually carrying a whole set of oil paints everywhere.

Introduction This article was adapted from discussions we had at the weekly Clojure study group at OpinionLab, in June, 2018.

A Recursive Feast In 1983, Douglas R.

Painting is quite old and hard to fool.

Physical John Jacobsen NPX Designs, LLC. 5341 S.

Skeleton and muscle overlay study (underlying photo by Pixiduc) A knowledge of the human form is vital for figurative artists.

I grew up1[some old pictures of me]]] in Madison, Wisconsin and studied art and physics at the University of Wisconsin — Madison, receiving my doctorate in physics there in 1996 under Prof.

365 Drawings The sketchbooks shown below are the result of doing one drawing from memory every day for a year, a project I finished this month.

Painting in Progress - from imagination As I return to the painting on my easel, reworking both the major figures and probably everything else as well, I am put to mind of a lesson by a former teacher, Carol Pylant.

Riverside Plaza Memory Sketch Every day for the past three months I have drawn some scene or event that I saw that day, purely from memory.

Questions to Ask … of a painting in progress, with strategies for recovery.

… in which we explore the power of macros, and macro-writing macros, to DRY out repetitive code.

Picking up the art blogging again after a long hiatus.

… in which we explore lazy sequences and common functional idioms in Clojure via the example of looking for (nearly) coincident clusters of times in a series.

One of my favorite talks from this month’s excellent Clojure/conj was Carin Meier's presentation, which combined storytelling, live coding, philosophy, the history of computing, and flying robotic drones.

After a long hiatus, let’s continue our foray into amateur genomics with Clojure, in which we continue to encounter elegant expressions of Clojure’s power as well as a few additional wrinkles in the Clojure ecosystem (in this case, Incanter).

In our last post we saw that so-called “N-blocks” (regions of the genome for which sequences are not available) were not getting decoded correctly by our decoder.

In the past two posts, we created and validated a decoder for genome data in 2bit format.

Today we’ll validate the genome decoder we described yesterday, once again with our friend the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae (you may want to enjoy a slice of freshly-baked bread and a stein of Pilsner with this post).

The entire human genome is available as a single .2bit file here (click on “Full Data Set”, then download hg19.2bit).

In Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice, humanity receives a “letter from the stars,” in the form of regularly repeating binary data encoded in a beam of extraterrestrial neutrinos.

This weekend I’ve been having a lot of fun working the Bioinformatics problems from Rosalind.

Context managers are a way of allocating and releasing some sort of resource exactly where you need it.

Python has become notorious for being somewhat problematic when it comes to concurrency.

I thought I’d take a moment to present one possible path, or set of alternate paths, for learning Clojure, a modern Lisp implemented on top of the Java Virtual Machine.

A separate monitor is handy for showing tests results continuously while working.

Working on Clojure Koans while riding on a C-17, bound for Antarctica Today I am inspired to ponder many languages at once and review which ones I use regularly, which ones I’m curious about, which ones I avoid, and what I’d like to use, if it were to exi…

Dec. 2, 2011, 08:10 NZDT Tranz Coastal train from Christchurch to Picton Observatory Hill in McMurdo The new Cashel Mall in Christchurch Another gorgeous summer day here as the countryside rolls by: grassy, green hills punctuated by trees passing singly a…

Nov. 29, 2011 17:30 NZDT Crary Lab, McMurdo Station Made it back to McMurdo where liquid water runs in the streets, mountains can be seen in all directions, helicopters take off and land every twenty minutes or so, and the oxygen flows thick and warm into…

Nov. 28, 2011 15:51 NZDT B2 Science, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station Walking home Last full day here, insh’Allah.