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Beetles may be the most profligate insect in terms of diversity of species; but it is ants (the Formicidae family) that are the most successful in numbers alone. The combined weight of every living ant has been estimated at half the mass of all insects; by another estimate, if the 7 billion+ humans weigh a combined 332 billion kg; the 10,000 trillion ants in the world come in at 40 …

Game of Thrones star Jacob Anderson is set to make his debut on Doctor Who later this year, playing Vinder. As a recurring character throughout the series, Jacob’s new role will see him join forces with the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker), Yaz (Mandip Gill) and Dan Lewis (John Bishop) as the Doctor faces her biggest ever adventure battling evil across time and space. Known to millions as Grey Worm in Game …

went for a beer with Alice and suggested I might write a weeknote when I got home we each had two pints of Neck Oil. it was £6.30 for one pint. I’m glad I don’t go to the pub three or four nights a week any more last night our next door neighbour said to me, “there’s a house round the corner, they’ve taken the whole roof off. shall we …

cincylibrary:Blue Yellow-backed Warbler – From John James Audubon’s Birds of America, circa 1827-1830.

Over the past couple of years I’ve slowly stopped using twitter. Initially I was just tweeting less, while still reading lots of it. Then as they slowly broke Tweetbot by removing APIs I slowly just stopped using the service. I tried to start using it a bit more when the global pandemic kicked off to try and recreate the old water cooler usage that made it big years ago. But …

Ongoing injuries have forced me to really cut down on my running but on a recent trip to Cork city for a family wedding I could not resist checking out a local parkrun. Cork has a very well established running scene with lots of clubs as evidenced at the 'Running in Cork' blog. It is the home of many great athletes, perhaps most notably Sonia O'Sullivan who in the 1990s …

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 enterprise tool — a real product, using web technologies, with emojis. So it’s fun to think through this acquisition. I have absolutely no inside knowledge. Press release via Business Wire.Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire …

A woman leans on the entrance to one of Bordighera’s gardens in Italy, 1928.Photograph by Hans Hildenbrand, National Geographic Creative

Wilco has a new record coming, Cruel Country. Jeff Tweedy, in his newsletter, shares some of the background promo material, which includes this gem of a graf.The whole record is comprised, almost entirely, of live takes, with just a handful of overdubs. Everyone in the room together with a leaky drum booth and no baffles. It’s a really great way to make a record. But due to artistic curiosity and …

We’ve recently launched a new degree program in Urban Technology at University of Michigan that combines urbanism, technology, and design. But what does design mean in this context? Like many aspects of creating a new transdisciplinary degree program from scratch, a simple question has been somewhat less simple to answer. This post is a report-to-date of our thinking on the nature of design in urban technology. TLDR? We’re combining service, …

May 2021’s Gwern.net newsletter is now out; previous, April 2021 (archives). This is a collation of links and summary of major changes, overlapping with my Changelog; brought to you by my donors on Patreon.Note: I will be in Denver 12–13 June 2021 for a conference.1 WritingsProposal: “Choose Your Own Adventure AI Dungeon”; “Decision Transformers: Preference Learning As Simple As Possible”2 Links2.1 AIMatters Of Scale:Hardware:“Podracer architectures for scalable Reinforcement Learning”, Hessel …

Coming back from the dead to let you all know that this book is being reprinted in the spring from NYR Children's Collection. Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse! by George Mendoza, illustrated by Doris Susan Smith, was originally published in 1981 by Penguin and is one I have periodically looked out for, ever since reading about it in ye olden blog times here and a few years later it …