Every month I share the things I leraned and remembered to write down somewhere. Here are the June notes.
Berlin is serious about bats
I discovered a naturbelassener Park around Tempelhof nearby my apartment. Berlin quietly protects a lot of semi-wild spaces like bats.
NABU Berlin says that Berlin is the “capital of bats”: 18 bat species have been recorded in the city, and up to 11,000 bats overwinter in the Spandau Citadel alone. (NABU - Naturschutzbund Deutschland e.V.)
Nazi drug experiments
While I show a Nazi era concentration camp to my family during their visit to Berlin, I learned lots about the drug experiments in these camps.
Nazi doctors conducted radical medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners without consent. I knew it already but I didn't know there were inhumane cocaine experiments and some psychedelics as well. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum groups these experiments into survival, drug-treatment, and ideological/racial categories. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
More specifically, SS doctor Kurt Plötner is associated with mescaline experiments at Dachau, apparently connected to interrogation and “truth serum” research. These expreiments later mentioned on LSD researches. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
Eichenprozessionsspinner
I learned the story behind the German word that looks like a keyboard accident: Eichenprozessionsspinner, the oak processionary moth. the city was invaded, probabyl still is. Especially in the outer parts.
The adult moth is not the main issue. The caterpillars are. Their tiny hairs contain an irritating toxin and can cause skin, eye, throat, and allergic reactions.
Berlin is a good habitat for them because the city has many oaks in parks and along streets. (Berlin.de)
Plants that keep appearing
My father once pointed out a wild herb named (in Turkish) sinir otu to me on a Berlin sidewalk. He mentioned that it's a medically important herb. I did not care much at the time. Now I keep seeing it everywhere.
The German name is Spitzwegerich, in English ribwort plantain, and its Latin name is Plantago lanceolata. The European Medicines Agency lists it as a traditional herbal medicine used for throat irritation, dry cough, cough with cold, and minor skin inflammation. (European Medicines Agency (EMA))
Also learned that blackberry tea is great for eye pressure apperently. I am not turning this into medical advice. It is just good tea actually.
Barry’s Berlin
Barry’s gymb Berlin gave me a small anthropology moment :/
Luxury gym, waiting list, strange people waiting outside, weird Google Maps energy, and a visible upper class snob culture fitness.
NUMA finally clicked
I learned more about NUMA, short for Non-Uniform Memory Access.
Small server:
CPU <-> RAM
Large multi-socket server:
CPU0 <-> RAM0
CPU1 <-> RAM1
CPU2 <-> RAM2
CPU3 <-> RAM3
Each CPU socket has memory that is physically closer to it. Local memory access is faster. Remote memory access still works, but it crosses the interconnect and costs more latency. Red Hat describes NUMA as a design where memory resources are allocated close to a CPU to improve access time. (Red Hat Documentation)
Linux exposes this topology nicely:
numactl --hardware
lscpu | grep NUMA
numastat
numactl --show
The practical lesson: big servers are not just “more CPU and more RAM”. Placement matters. Threads and memory should ideally live close to each other. Otherwise, a powerful machine can quietly waste performance by moving data across sockets.
Linux also has NUMA memory policy support, which controls from which NUMA node memory gets allocated. (Kernel Documentation)
Strudel and TidalCycles
I tried to configure Strudel and TidalCycles locally, then discovered that Strudel already works in the browser.
Strudel is basically a browser-based live coding environment that ports the TidalCycles pattern language to JavaScript. (Strudel)
Music rabbit holes
A great house track from Saudi Arabia:
Shoft Alhala, Radio Edit, by Vinyl Mode and Moayad
I also learned about Assa’d Khoury’s Electronic Touches Belly Dance, a 1978 Lebanese instrumental album built around funky electronic keyboards and Arabic melodies. It was reissued in 2026 after nearly 50 years. (WEWANTSOUNDS)
The most interesting part for me was the modified Farfisa-style keyboard world: electronic organs adapted for Oriental scales and quarter-tones. Arabic music needs pitches that standard Western keyboards do not naturally provide. This similar trend of tuning off the keyboards can also be observed other sub-cultures in North and central Africa.
AWS “What is” pages
I appreciated AWS’s “What is” pages.
The computer chip explanation is simple, direct, and mostly free of forced metaphors. It explains chips, silicon, etching, analog circuits, digital circuits, ASICs, SoCs, and AWS custom chips like Graviton, Inferentia, and Trainium in a clean way. (Amazon Web Services, Inc.)
Good technical writing does not always need storytelling.