Clojurians Log v2

Good Morning!

Morning

Guten Morgen!

So what are folks doing to make it sanely through the pandemic winter?

Staying indoors and working…..

Besides that 🙂 I've taken to doing a long walk every day around noon, 1~2 hours, and I have to say I'm feeling better about things than I usually do this time of year. (I really can't stand winter)

High dosage vitamin D and a SAD lamp above my desk probably also help

I have a SAD light and a supply of Vitamin D too, it has helped. Working times as they are I’m just at that point where it’s dark when I get up and dark when I finish work. Good news is I seem to be handling it better this year.

I start pretty early, and sometimes won't finish particularly early, but spending that time out while it's light out makes it pretty ok. I remember in past years whenever it got dark I would feel like crap, like "yup another day is gone, and I hardly noticed, I've just been sitting at my desk all day". And now it's like "ok, I saw the sun come up, and now it's going down, another day well spent".

I found midday walks surprisingly ineffective for me. I've started a morning run, that's been helping clear my head.

good morning

@plexus I try to take a daily walk in the cemetery park located across the street, since I rarely take my bike anywhere these days.

I don’t think I’ve taken as many walks in the rest of my life as I have done in 2020.

Nice! I always walk to a small park on the edge of town. It has a couple ponds with ducks and swans, lots of trees. Having that bit of nature every day even if it's not much does help.

Yeah, I think light as a source of vitamin D is one thing, but nature itself is also especially important for mental wellbeing.

I read somewhere it has to do with the recursive nature (lol no pun intended) of it all and how we neurologically interpret sights like that, something a programmer might appreciate.

I’ve been a bit worried about this period ahead of us. Up here in Norway, it’s getting dark fast, and basically my daily routine is waking up in the dark, going down to my office in the basement in the dark, returning “home”, up in the appartement in the dark with no real reason to go outside during daytime. One great thing is that my boss (VP of Eng) now has actively gone out and encouraged us to do a switcheroo on our working days as far as possible in order to go out side for a couple of hours when the sun is out and rather work those hours when it’s dark, so basically partition the workday into two or even three. Personally, I have a hard time doing that, but I have begun starting my day with 30 minutes on my bike on the ballance-rollers down here in the basement. It doesn’t bring sunshine in the literal sense, but it does give me 30 mins of exercise which I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. My unsolicited advice: do as @plexus!

good morining!

@slipset If you want any sunlight in Copenhagen you have to seize it at the moment it’s available. So if I see the sun and I have no immediate obligations, I try to get out before it’s set or disappeared behind a cloud again. I can imagine it must be even more difficult in Norway in wintertime.

Now speaking of…

Everything is gray here. The big winter diffusor was installed. #livingnextotariver

@simongray It’s not much difference between Copenhagen and Oslo (where I live), but further north, deffo more difficult. I think that employers (and the callers of meetings) could do quite a bit to improve stuff to ensure that employees don’t have immediate obligations (or meetings as we like to call them) mid-day when the sun is out.

In these days of social-restraint, as it’s called in Norway, the hours from after dinner to bedtime are basically free for me to work.

morning!

morning

I should look into SAD lamps as well. I’m not made for Swedish winter.

@borkdude congrats on the babashka release. The nextjournal stuff sounds interesting

I couldn’t help myself and evaluate (range).

Man, nextjournal is looking pretty sweet these days.

😊

Can we have nice graphs with babashka and nextjournal

(I’m doing some covid-19 stats for tech.ml.dataset etc right now and I thought about using org-babel. Nextjournal looks nicer though

https://nextjournal.com/schmudde/vega-in-clojure

many ways to do this, especially now with the custom viewer, but vega support has been built in for quite some time

from a clojure runtime you just return data with the right metadata. This should work with the babashka prepl too (haven't tested, lmk if it doesn't). From other runtimes you simply spit out the necessary json https://nextjournal.com/blog/plotting-with-vega-lite-in-nextjournal

I think @mkvlr posted an example of this, maybe he could repeat it here

aaah, I’m using vega lite already. nice

Not babashka, but nevertheless https://nextjournal.com/a/NG9EF1kUEKG852roNKmVs

nice!

I don’t have a SAD lamp here in Copenhagen, but I’ve bought a bunch of IKEA Trådfri bulbs with variable white spectrum, and having 5 of those on cold white light in the morning helps a ton.

I do take my daughter back and forth to the nursery on the bike, so I combine getting some fresh air with exercise, which is surprisingly nice (I’m Greek and can’t stand the cold and wet)

https://nextjournal.com/a/NG9bUySQMeZyZniT1Kw1s/edit?token=NtiUS7QzKSvKweQP8EuCE8&cm6=1

no json version: https://nextjournal.com/a/NG9ZJj2E68E7Ho57qyS9v?token=FewTuGSXqMPEAV5adXewQc

#everythingisaremix

you can use the cm6=1 url param to opt into our soon to be released clojure editor with paredit support, see https://nextjournal.github.io/codemirror.next-clojure/ for the key bindings

morning

Is there a documentation about all the viewers?

I tried to get hiccup output running but I failed.

not yet and hiccup is currently broken 🙈

hope to fix this next week

and release the viewers as a open source library with docs soon

that would be nice. I’ll stay tuned

morning

@plexus having a dog has given me the motivation for daily walks and yes feels so much better to be out. Like @slipset mentioned, switching hours is good. I start at 1400 these days and spend the morning cooking or other activities with my wife. Don't think I'll change in the spring tbh.

I pass this tree every day. It's been able slow to shed its leaves and has beautiful fall colors. Anyone know what type of tree this is?

Looks like a maple tree

I know this is UK specific, but European trees can be found all over the place...perhaps this may help: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/british-tree-identification/id1112564089 there is also the equivalent for Android from the Woodland Trust.

https://www.treeguideuk.co.uk/maple-tree-identification/

@plexus I think this is a "plataan" (in Dutch): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus We have one next to our apartment building.

yeah, hard to identify completely. need more pictures, and possibly pictures of any "fruit" on the ground

I'm pretty sure about platanus though, it's a common tree here in Europe

And the leaves look familiar to me

You can also recognize it by these corona-like fruits

Corona 😱😉

I'll get better pictures tomorrow. Plataan has very recognizable bark, right?

yes

platane surely, maple has very different fruits

other one that has these kind of fruits is "marronnier" but the leaves look very different (more rounded)

Plane/plataan trees are the devil tho. They really mess up my sinuses when the fruit start to break up

I hate maple, super dense pack of leaves that require picking them up in fall, quite ugly tree too imho. But! Cool for woodworking. In short I like maple dead

I like maple syrup though

and maple leaves are soo soooooo pretty when they go red and gold

That does look a lot like it, and the fruit seems to match too. I never noticed the bark being like a platane bark but I'm going to have a better look next time.

if the bark looks a bit like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Plane_Tree_bark_at_Tayac%2C_Dordogne.jpg/170px-Plane_Tree_bark_at_Tayac%2C_Dordogne.jpg

then it is a plane tree

That does depend on the time or the weather of year though. Ours has a pretty regular bark right now, maybe because it just rained and it's wet.

I've never seen the plane trees in London go red. They always go a dull gold/brown

our maples are not so nice

it gets orange then brown

or but you wrote platanes, nevermind

I have fond memories of Japanese maple trees in October. Very beautiful.

Our garden is full of those. Acer this, Acer that. I don't seem to be able to let a year paas without planting a new one. 😀

My neighbor has a japanese maple tree, it’s been an awesome view over the last weeks.