Antonio claims that blog readers don’t care about archives: the last 10 posts are where all of the interest is. Generally, this is true, but when I find a new blog, and those latest posts seem really interesting, I’ll take a quick scan through the archives to get an idea of what else I can expect. Every once in a while, that scan through the archives turns into an hour-long exploration, similar to what happens to me in book stores when time permits: browsing turns to reading turns to learning.

Connelly Barnes has one of those blogs. He posts sporadically, but each post is a meaty nugget of Python in academia. For example, I wish I could understand the code behind the real-time hair animation, and I’d never heard of the Burrows-Wheeler transform before (it’s a miraculously reversible transform that rearranges data to move repeated bytes closer together to get better compressibility).