Recently updated blogs

The effect varies for different people. Take a moment and look at this. Some people don’t see anything special: just a blue iris in a red eye. Image: CC-BY Tom Stafford 2022 For me though, there is an incredibly strong depth illusion – the blue and the red appear as if they are at different distances. I can enhance the effect by blinking rapidly, turning the brightness up on my …

Over in Every, I wrote about how writing is more than a method for capturing ideas, it’s a way of exploring them: By externalizing your thoughts, writing puts you into conversation with yourself. It’s always easier to diagnose other people’s problems, and to identify opportunities they might be missing. Just so, writing from the heart gives you a new vantage on you. This is certainly useful if you’re writing for …

durf: Boston Dynamics steals Japanese kawaii tech for its latest robot:

Written by Cathy Robinson, nature and travel writer, for Naturehood at Earthwatch Europe Have you been lucky enough to spot a pair of copper-coloured eyes peeping out from a hidey hole this spring? If you have toads on your patch, they’ll have lain low during the colder months, snug in your compost heap, hiding in a pile of dead wood or burrowed into mud, only coming out to forage during …

Slowly creeping towards reopening up my online store! Do you like how I do this after the holidays? I’m a professional 😎. However, I have lots of prints, pillows, zines and othe sundry items available IRL if you live in Portland. Swing by during @outletpdx open hours to peruse the selection. Above is a 11x14 risograph print, kelly green on light cream. Edition of ten. Printed on #barbaratheriso 🌈✨ (at …

I wrote Responsible JavaScript for A Book Apart. I hope you’ll consider buying it, and if you do, I hope you like it.

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 …