Recently updated blogs

It's gotten cold out there! Autumn is finally here and with that comes cooler weather and the need to heat homes. Residential wood smoke from home-heating should be expected, especially at night and in the mornings when woodstoves and other wood-burning devices are regularly used. Temperature inversions and light winds can cause smoke to stagnate, especially in valley communities. This blog is intended to focus on wildfire smoke, but forecasts …

My new poetry pamphlet from Melos Press, The Dictionary Speaks, is now out and can be ordered post-free via this link.From the publisher’s blurb:-NICHOLAS MURRAY’S many books include poetry, two novels, critically acclaimed biographies of Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell, and Matthew Arnold, and studies of Liverpool, Bloomsbury, and British poets of the First World War. He is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy and, with his …

On curation, or fighting back in the age of the algorithm TL; DR – Our digital spaces are run by algorithms: they dictate what we see. The fight back againt this begins with curation. That means bringing our human agency back, to define the digital worlds we inhabit. Does anyone remember Twitter lists? They’re an under-promoted, underappreciated feature where you hand pick your favourite Twitter handles and add them to …

This year’s race season didn’t go the way I hoped at all. After a strong start at Ironman 70.3 St. George in June, I failed to finish Ironman Coeur d’Alene and had to drop out of the Echo Triathlon in July to deal with my knee pain. My make-up race, Ironman Canada, was canceled at the last minute due to the wildfires in British Columbia. After all that, I was …

Previously, this park was the pits, but thankfully, the playground has undergone an almost full renovation. I loaded up two ten-year-olds to check it... The post Spring Garden Park appeared first on StrollerParking.

By far the largest part of Schumachers book is in regard to the third world and this section really hasn’t aged well at all. The world is different place 50 years on, but it exposes in one way just how little economic progress some countries have developed and just how much progress countries have made. Schumachers approach is very much a what we can do for them or really to …

This three ingredient fig jam is designed for canning and uses just fresh figs, sugar, and lemon juice. It’s bright, flavorful, and so easy to make. If you find yourself awash in figs every year, keep this recipe handy! Hello friends! I realize that it has been an absolute age (more than a year!) since I’ve posted anything new here. I have desperately missed sharing my canning practice with all …

I quit the old bird site last December, and I’ve been a happy Mastodon user instead ever since. Nonetheless, I’ve recently begun dalliances with Threads and Bluesky. I’m not looking for greener pastures, but I’m curious about what’s on offer now, and I want to find some of the people who I don’t see on Mastodon. Juggling social media platforms is inconvenient, but seemingly unavoidable at this particular moment, as …

We’re thrilled to unveil our latest endeavour – the IMMERSIONS project! Our new initiative, the IMMERSIONS project, is funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program, and is set to transform the world of electronic music and cultural engagement across Europe. This collaborative effort brings together four countries – Poland, Norway, Portugal, and Lithuania – in an ambitious endeavour to create a European hybrid music network that bridges geographical and …

http://chat2024.com is a candidate simulator that lets you chat with them to get their positions, in a good simulation of their style of speech. In a quick session this morning it seemed ok at that. It even responded appropriately when I challenged “Biden” about shipping cluster munitions to Ukraine. It did an appropriate job when […]

A as was changed in the 1997 redesign of the London Review of Books. There were no editorial innovations: the table of contents remained undifferentiated, giving the same emphasis to contributions be they book reviews, essays or poems. The Caslon masthead stayed, as did the four-column layout, itself indebted to, if not precisely inherited from, […]

Here we are going to look at several diagnostic plots are helpful when attempting to answer a causal question. They can be used to visualize the target population, balance, and treatment effect heterogeneity. Setup I’ve simulated data to demonstrate the utility of the various plots. In each simulation, we have four pre-treatment variables: var1, var2, var3, and var4, a treatment, t, and an outcome y. I have also fit a …

I recently left my job at Netlify and have been looking at what's next. At Netlify I became very interested in the power of ML, AI and LLMs in particular, and that's the area I've been looking in. But there's a lot of hype and buzzwords around, so I wanted an explainer I can point people to when they ask "but what is all that stuff really?" It's intended to …

I wrote this for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago: The people who work in universities are made up of two tribes: tragedians and comedians. These tribes view each other with bewilderment across a seemingly unbridgeable mental and cultural divide. What makes things worse is that the tribes are not named as such, and no one ever declares or even knows which tribe they belong to or why. …

It’s been awhile since I blogged about mathematics. You know why, of course — there are so many issues in the real world, the imaginary world is just not as relevant as it used to be. Well, at least that’s how I felt until now. But the latest paper we wrote with Swee Hong Chan was so much fun (and took so much effort), the wait is over. There is …