September 06, 2017 at 10:07PM

Today I learned: 1) On macs, there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you add umlauts to vowels. Today I learned that it can also be used to make a naked umlaut: ¨. The same thing works for some other accents, like ´ and ˆ (not ^). 2) ...how hurricanes work! At least, a little bit. A hurricane is basically a giant, roughly-donut-shaped cell of moving air. It gets started when there's a lot of hot water. Like, a LOT of hot water. Heat from the water heats the air above it, and moistens it by evaporation. That air rises and cools, eventually forcing out the water vapor as clouds. That part above describes quite a few types of cloud formation. What makes hurricanes happen is that oceans are HUGE and contain a LOT of heat, so it takes a LOT of air to carry away all the excess. So much air get heated and forced upwards, in fact, that the air pressure lowers, which draws in air from the surrounding ocean. Then *that* air gets heated and rises, etc. If this happens forcefully enough, for long enough, it forms a cell, where air circulates up, out from the center, down, and back in toward the center. All the while, it's sucking water up into the accumulating cloud layer, which eventually gets dumped out when the whole thing hits something that isn't warm water (usually land). Why do hurricanes spin? Uh, something about coriolis forces, I'm sure. 3) There's a really cool unit-testing package for Python called Hypothesis that lets you test functions by defining guarantees of those functions, like "this function doesn't throw an error" or "this function *does* throw an error" or "if you serialize and read back a value using these functions, you get the same value back". Hypothesis automatically generates test cases from your specifications, paying particular attention to edge cases of various kinds. When you run your unit test, it runs all of the Hypothesis-generated test cases. If there's an error, Hypothesis will try to find the simplest possible example that breaks your specs and tells you what that example was. Honestly, this package sounds a little too good to be true to me -- anybody out there have experience with it? Lady Jade?