Recently updated blogs

The weekend markets live-ish and direct in my hand A few years ago, I ended up spending 9 months living in South Gippsland, about two hours from Melbourne. We were doing a renovation on our house and had wonderful builders who took care of everything, so we left town for 9 months and left them to it. It was mid-Pandemic, too, so that provided a bit of extra incentive. My …

It's time to bring the curtain down on Stats, Maps n Pix now, after 1.5 million page views and 150 posts. I'll leave the blog archived here, but if you're looking for me, you can always find me via my business website. When I started this blog as a replacement for my original one I was still working at a university doing academic stuff and it kind of fitted in …

Good morning, I’ve been thinking about the “Goldilocks principle” lately. You know, how the correct amount of something is great for you, but too little or too much does nothing, or even ends up hurting you. Like how ten minutes in the sun can be rejuvenating. Ten hours, however, can leave you burned. Everything in life has a correct dosage. But that dosage is not the same for every individual, …

Introduction Antimatter is a platform for teaching and learning through memes. Teachers use Antimatter to invite students to create memes based on their current unit as a means of what teachers call formative assessment, because, in the classroom as in life, in order to create a good story, joke, or puzzle, you have to really understand the subject matter. Antimatter was founded in January 2021, before DALL·E and other foundational …

Love is sacrifice, sacred land life-affirming (Gunnison River Valley, Colorado; 1948—1970): Crying can soothe us. All the more reason to let Shelley Read take you on this absolutely beautiful and sad journey. “There is a kind of sadness that transcends sadness, that runs like hot syrup into every crevice of your being . . . This is the sadness that changed everything.” Sadness is the pathos, beauty the richness in …

I’ve been writing about eyewear quite a bit this year. And as I mentioned recently, I’ve noticed that more men seem to be approaching spectacles as a collector’s item rather than a purely functional product. While I might not be quite at that level (…yet), I definitely know that managing a pile of glasses in random cases is a bit unwieldily. The best solution that I’ve come up with is …

In Japan, riding a steam train through outer space is a melancholy symbol of the human journey. Like the gentle drift of the sakura petal, the whistle of a train means a transition in life. That human quality... those melancholy, bittersweet coming of age lessons... were inherited from renowned writer Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad, whose own life was a tragic and all-too

A few weeks ago, the database publisher Gale organised an online symposium on the archives of social movements called ‘Power to the People‘. I took part with a talk on online radical archives. You can view the video below:

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 …

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, …

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"

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 …

The following piece was written months ago, right after the “We Are Developers World Conference” took place in Berlin. So far I have not been reached out to for providing feedback to the conference, and I am not expecting it will ever happen, so I am going to publish this (unedited) here on my blog instead. There are some (at least one) swearword in here, for those of you who …

I help maintain a couple of projects and one aspect I find surprising — and a bit troubling — is how often people ask for features without explaining their problem. Maybe it’s already in the name, “Feature request”. Despite asking for a feature, often it’s not what’s needed. What’s needed is a solution to a problem and many problems have more than one solution.

I have been working on moving a collection of about 20-30 AWS accounts from two different AWS Organizations into a new AWS Organization with Control Tower enabled. During the process I have run into a number of different blockers and issues which have not always had the most obvious solutions due to cryptic errors that the AWS Control Tower enrollment process shows. This blog post lists out some of the …