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Despite growing up as a third culture kid used to travel, and having spent almost 20 years visiting various places around Japan, this spring brought a new experience: taking my kid on their first international …

Redditor tomsek68 is working on a project that would breathe new life into an old handheld computer by replacing a broken motherboard with an old, sluggish processor with a newer board sporting a modern processor …

We're finally getting a way to fully style & customise <select> elements! But there's a detail I'd like everyone's opinion on. A brief intro to customisable <select> If you want to hear about it in …

Years ago, during the 2016 Fort McMurry wildfire, I read an article that I should have bookmarked that discussed wildfire in physics terms – watts per square meter. Above some threshold, you literally and actually …

So the big news this week is that o3, OpenAI’s new language model, got 25% on FrontierMath. Let’s start by explaining what this means. What is o3? What is FrontierMath? A language model, as probably …

We recently got back from a family trip to Mexico, a country I’d almost never been to (a couple of childhood day trips to Nogales, a walk across the border into Juárez in 1999, a …

This illusion (from the Chicago museum of illusions, and duplicated, I believe, in other similar museums in other cities) “almost” appears to give a tiling of \(\mathbf{R}^3\) by regular dodecahedra, which for a number of …

Thank goodness this book exists. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been attacked at a suburban backyard barbecue by some crazed IT guy with a wrench and thought, “Damn, if only I had …

In the second volume of his Johnsonian Miscellanies (Clarendon Press, 1897), George Birkbeck Hill collects anecdotes from the writer and clergyman Thomas Campbell, including this: “Talking of suicide, Boswell took up the defence for argument’s …

In the Andes Mountains today, water managers are using both ancient and modern approaches to improve supplies of this vital resource. Novel methods, including those based on Indigenous knowledge, are needed to help meet the …

Last July, my history professor husband and I took a trip to Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia to visit a selection of Civil War battlefields that comprise the "western theater" of that great war. From our …

Photographer: Greg ParkerSummary Author: Greg Parker In early October of 2024, two consecutive clear, moonless nights allowed me to capture the image at top, the entire constellation of Sagitta. The grouping of four arrow-shaped stars …

In my last post, I debunked the myth of the "reserve pool" of British workers. In this post, I discuss three more labour force myths that refuse to die: the myth of the "tide of …

The US Trade Representative has filed a “Report on China’s Targeting of the Maritime, Logistics and Shipbuilding Sectors for Dominance” (January 16, 2025). In the lingo of US trade law, this is a “Section 301” …

How in the absolute fuck can this be the tenth installment of the annual Tucker Awards recognizing excellence in swearing? Somehow, it’s true: feast your eyes on the nine previous installments from ’15, ’16, ’17, …