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The first time I ever presented publicly about cybernetics and sorcery was at the Ekstasis! seminars (“Magical Seminars for the Postmodern Mind”) hosted by the Illuminates of Thanateros in 2007. It was during my research for that presentation, “Re/Considering the Cybernetic Model of Magic,” that I first encountered conceptual blending theory via Jesper Sørensen’s A Cognitive Theory of Magic. Since then, the basic ideas of conceptual blending have contributed significantly …

Today I’d like to show you a small pen set that once belonged to my grandmother. For me it’s very special because of the stories […] Source

The Sodium extension in PHP 8.4 now supports `AEGIS-128L` and `AEGIS256` Authenticated Encryption ciphers. They are significantly faster than `AES-GCM` and `CHACHA20-POLY1305`. This article benchmarks them and explains how to securely encrypt and decrypt data using `AEGIS-128L` and `AEGIS256` on PHP.

Two giant clams near Eilat in the Northern Red Sea. To the left is the small giant clam, Tridacna maxima, and to the right is a mature individual of the rare endemic giant clam Tridacna squamosina, only found in the Northern Red Sea. You are what you eat, and clams are too. We’re made of atoms, which come in “flavors” called isotopes, relating back to the mass of the atoms …

The BL Labs team provided support to the Living with Machines team at critical points in the project. If you’re inspired to contribute to the future of BL Labs, now’s your chance! LwM Co-Investigator Maja Maricevic is recruiting for the British Library Labs Technical Lead, and has shared some information about the post. (And this […]

CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:

“Shall we walk back the way we came?” There had been, as Constance reflected later, no possible argument against Xander’s suggestion — not that she felt disposed to argue with Xander. Lunch at the pub — a busy old place in the village next to the one in which they were staying — had been as long, cosy and convivial as either of the two might have wished. Under the …

An afternoon at Big Trees Dear Reader, I am happy to report that Calaveras Big Trees State Park sits a scant three miles past the town of Arnold, California and is home to two groves of Giant Sequoias. I am delighted to tell you that ample, affordable, highway-close parking makes them the most accessible in the Sierras. I am elated to let you know that being a state park translates …

Yes, I’m crazy about winter white coats. And if you’ve been around here long enough, you know that I already have one! Still there’s something about them that I can’t resist. I also have a fascination with the capote, a traditional handmade coat made from a Hudson Bay blanket. The candy striped ones are my favorites. I had actually put away a LL Bean knockoff blanket years ago, thinking that …

Retro Puzzle Maker is an amazing little free game engine. It’s a web-based tool that allows you to make Sokoban style games that output as playable NES ROM files. The engine is code-free and any beginner can use it, and while means that while you can’t change much in terms of the type of game … Continue reading "Retro Puzzle Maker: The easiest way to make an NES game!"

I have now had the opportunity to complete the Healthy Bees Academy modules created by Menter a Busnes to help … Completing the Healthy Bees Academy Modules Read More »

Eldiario.es, an independent online newspaper based in Madrid, has just published a remarkable data-driven story about how inequality perpetuates itself (perhaps we should say that it's inflicted upon people) in Spain.Notice the combination of different types of charts —dot maps, scatter plots, stacked bar graphs,— the effective annotations and highlights that emphasize the main points of the narrative, the use of color, and the addition of individual stories to exemplify …

In our programs we often have to deal with whitespaces, for example to sanitize input we received from users or other applications. With the release of Java 11, there have been some changes to the way whitespace is handled, and it’s important for developers to understand these changes in order to avoid potential pitfalls and write efficient, error-free code. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at whitespace …

Let be a non-empty finite set. If is a random variable taking values in , the Shannon entropy of is defined as There is a nice variational formula that lets one compute logs of sums of exponentials in terms of this entropy: Lemma 1 (Gibbs variational formula) Let be a function. Then Proof: Note that shifting by a constant affects both sides of (1) the same way, so we may …

I found myself wanting to host a private website that I could reliably update, but only serve it to users on my tailnet. I didn't find anything obvious that could do the job, but I did realize that between the existence of s3fs, tsnet, and the batteries that come with Go, I could probably bodge together something that does the job for me. This is it: offbyone/tailscale-s3-proxy. It's not complicated, …