One of the biggest challenges to Hotaka, at 3190m Japan’s third tallest mountain, is that the standard route (which is the only one really while there is snow) features a very long, almost 15km approach walk from Kamikochi along the Azusa river.
Aizu-koma
I went to climb Mt Aizu-koma, one of the 100 famous mountains of Japan, and one of the few that are relatively easily accessible from Tokyo but still have snow in June. And snow it had. The goal of the climb was to break in the double boots I got for Elbrus. I also added my training 10kg weight to my backpack, making it total near 20kg (a bit too much).
Toronto!
You know how surprised I was when I got the email from the Clojure/north organizers telling me that our talk proposal was accepted? (Hint: a lot.) Turns out they’d been looking for talks that aren’t so much experimentation and theory, but more working through the mud of reality. We’ve got that.
Filament
It’s hard to start new habits. I almost forgot to do this today.
Juntocracy
A few days ago I came up with an idea. I’ve been making worlds in my head for as long as I can remember, but coming up with stories in those worlds was a whole different deal. So I figured I’d just practice writing by picking a random word every day I go to the gym (which is most weekdays) and write 200 words (at least) around that.
Today’s word was “juntocracy.” (Somewhat amusing that my spellchecker doesn’t know it.)
Arcarum
Today the Arcarum summons got their fifth release and the associated characters (sages?) have been unlocked as well. They’ve finally raised the weekly/total point limits too, so now I’m less likely to bump into that wall when running the rounds.
Akadake loser
Akadake (often romanized as Mt Aka) is part of Yatsugatake, it’s highest peak actually. The range is known for being “active” all year round. Other mountains get inaccessible and deserted as winter starts: buses stop running, mountain huts close until spring and so on.
The Yatsugatake range has lots of ski resorts and it’s a friendly place for people like me who want to try climbing in snow. I’ve had a weekend’s fun in Tateshina already (which is the northern neighbor of Yatsugatake actually), so now I decided to jump into the deep water (snow) and go for Mt Aka. I didn’t expect the difficulty I faced.
Mapping
The other day I was thinking about Rich Hickey’s keynote at last year’s Conj. He goes into how the literal maps (or hashes or hashmaps or however a language prefers to call them) are really functions too. A function in maths is a mapping between sets and that’s what maps are.
Then that makes functions we normally write are just like that too, except the mappings are more abstract and defined through code. Because the mappings are so complex and indirect, we write tests to check (automated) that the mapping we defined through code is correct.
Obviously defining the exact mappings for every possible combination of the input set(s) is not feasible (that’d be a map, the end). But if “all” is not possible then how much is? What exactly is the absolute minimum amount of test( case)s that’s useful?
