Personal blogs

Histoire naturelle des cétacées, 1804I find enterprise software fascinating because it operates the entire economy and yet it frequently neglects every single principle of quality that software people may espouse. Slack is/has been the anti-enterprise …

For the first part of 2021, my reading mainly consisted of Agatha Christie and John le Carré novels which I found were very easy to read with a tiny baby asleep on you. But as …

Bristol Cathedral.

In the introduction to Malcolm McCullough’s #breezepunk classic “Downtime on the Microgrid” he says… This past week we (Lunar Energy) sponsored a social event for an energy industry conference in Amsterdam. There were the usual …

American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art is an excellent, highly DIY doc. In it, Merle Becker (who has a YouTube channel devoted do DIY video production) follows her passion around the country, …

Continuing my interest in the bicycle rental scheme in Leicester, in December last year I began collecting the station usage data from the city council’s open data API.

I bought my Carradice Super C Handlebar Bag sometime in 2010 or 2011. I think I learned about it while reading one of the blogs of Emily Chappell as she was preparing to leave her …

Ingredients 1¼ c (112 g) rolled oats 1¼ c (250 g) unsweetened apple sauce ¼ c (50 g) sugar ½ c (118 mL) milk (oat milk works too) 4 T coconut oil (melted butter works …

Elon Musk’s Twitter in the name of ‘Free Speech’ has just banned anyone mentioning that they have accounts on other platforms – whether that be Truth Social, Facebook, Mastodon or anywhere. This is an unconscionable …

Cheers! Last night was the 59th Cinema Under The Stairs and the first of 2023. And what a film, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.Arnie! Guns'n'Roses! Liquid metal!And the awesome Becky Darke was visiting from London. It …

Just over a week ago, I got a call from a friend at DCMS asking for ideas on how they might help people to find the end of the queue for Her Majesty the Queen’s …

In August 2020, the New York Times asked me to write an op-ed for a special feature on authoritarianism and democracy. They declined to publish my submission, which I am sharing here instead. When the …

I have a new paper up on the arXiv today with TriThang Tran and Craig Westerland, “Fox-Neuwirth-Fuks cells, quantum shuffle algebras, and Malle’s conjecture for function fields.” There’s a bit of a story behind this, …

We live in a world where the superficial seems to have taken control. Sound bites, 280-character messages, short headlines, news briefs. We graze. We catch only a few drops out of the fire hose of …

Some good lists: Unsolicited Thoughts for the Young Men of New York, 1d50 Things I Learned in 2021, Better Living, Unsolicited Advice (2020, 2021, 2022) I like reading other peoples’ lists of advice or rules …

How it started: How it was going: How it ended: (Yes, I sliced my mozzarella instead of tearing it. I know it’s not traditional, but I like the more even covering.)

As a kid, through most of middle and high school, I got good grades. I stayed comfortably near the top of the class without working too hard, and more importantly, without explicitly aiming to be …

A good exhibition has an argument, and a great exhibition has an argument that convinces. By that standard the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of female abstract expressionist painters, Action, Gesture, Paint, is a great exhibition. The …

Broken Sleep Books, 2022. £8.99. A little like the compulsion to press a bruise, McPherson’s collection brings an irresistible tenderness together with pain. As the title suggests, beasts stalk the pages. These are not, though, …

3-2-23 🥳 If you're in a locale that celebrated palindrome day on February 3, I hope you had a good one! why americans write the date like that It's quite simple: because that's how we …