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Very few LPs radiate a level of spiritual grandeur quite like the 1974 summit between Alice Coltrane and Carlos Santana, Illuminations. With Coltrane’s harp and soaring orchestration, uncharacteristically patient, technically precise lead work from Santana, and an aura of calm, fluid interaction among a top-tier rhythm section anchored by Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, the album is equally humble and humbling. Aurally transcendent by design. Illuminations was not necessarily new …

When I was given the chance to host the live on stage conversation with Werner Herzog for City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco I was barely able to believe it. What a gift! What a chance! In preparation I did all the reading–and watching. I watched Aguirre Wrath of God again, marveled at Grizzly Man and the tragedy–or maybe triumph?–of Timothy Treadwell. I watched Stroszek again, my favorite Herzog …

The Templar, Leeds, Yorkshire LS2 7NU A long but shallow street-corner pub on the north-east side of the city centre, the Templar has an impressive tiled façade advertising Melbourne Brewery, who were later taken over by Tetley’s. It now belongs to Greene King, but still offers a wide range of other beers, including Tetley Bitter as a permanent beer, and brews from both Yorkshire brewers such as Acorn and Bradfield, …

Hey folks! Long time, no post! Between vacation, a new job, more vacation, a new school year for the kid, and trips to visit family, I haven’t had much time to write here. What have I been up to lately? Work I took a full-time job at one of mu consulting clients in May. It’s been a good experience, but I recently received a very exciting offer from an old …

There are those who believe that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. The argument is that when AI systems become intelligent enough, they may hurt humanity in ways that we cannot foresee, and because they are more intelligent than us we may not be able to stop. Therefore, it becomes natural to want to regulate them, for example limiting which systems can be developed and who can develop them. …

A recent paper of mine performs an intersection test in a ray tracing shader. To this end, I had to compute all real roots of a polynomial of moderately high degree (10 to 26). Overall, computing polynomial roots is an extremely well-studied problem where many highly accurate and reliable methods are available [Press2007]. However, implementations of such methods on GPUs are rarely found. After experimenting a bit with different options, …

“Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House. And we who walk here, walk alone.” – Eleanor Lance, The Haunting (1963) My earliest memory of […]

By Margaret Bennett I recently spent a few days in Italy, in the city of Bologna. One of Bologna’s nicknames is ‘Bologna la Dotta’ or ‘Bologna the Learned’, as it houses the oldest university in Europe. So maybe it is not so surprising that Tripadvisor has a list of the ten best libraries to visit in Bologna alone! Given the dire state of repair of our own central library in …

Abstract Cixin Liu’s “Wandering Earth” is a more recent depiction of Earth being used as a Starship. Like Stanley Schmidt’s “Lifeboat Earth” (1976) it does seem like something of a rush job – the Sun was about to undergo the Helium Flash in Liu’s tale and – and so there was no time to create … Continue reading "A Work In Progress – Starship Earth"

It’s been a while! Last time, I went over how the 3-stream Huffman decoders in Oodle Data work. The 3-stream layout is what we originally went with. It gives near-ideal performance on the last game console generation’s AMD Jaguar cores and is also a good fit for 32-bit x86 and ARM targets, both of which were still a pretty important target for us at the time the scheme was designed …

ENO La traviata Review – 28 October 2023 by Maxine Morse The ENO’s La traviata has the feel of a Parisian 1920’s nightclub, enveloped in blacks and reds, with a cast in tuxedos and bob haircuts. The pared down staging puts the focus firmly on stand-out vocals, intense dramatic sequences and beautifully controlled conducting. We are invited on a two-hour rollercoaster, taking a stomach-churning lurch to the highs of Violetta’s …

Recently I have been very fortunate to be given access to a superb collection of Old Walton photographs .More than one hundred new images of Walton have now been added to my Old Walton Archive thanks to Daphne Horton who owns the collection made by her late brother, Tony, (pictured below) Daphne & Tony Horton Tony, who was born in North Street, was an avid collector of images of Walton …

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Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors and readers. I’ve also had a few friends outside of academia ask me how publishing research papers works, so it’s a good opportunity to write a post about the messy world of academic publishing. The …

Before there were cocktails (as we know them), there were punches; lots and lots of punches. Big bowls of swirling booze and fruit juice ladled out by the cupful to an anxious party of imbibers. When Jerry Thomas, the great-granddaddy of modern mixology, came to publish his book, “The Bartenders Guide,” he had already thought of distilling the contents of the punch bowl down to a single serving glass. One …