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Of archetypical power is the fantasy story where an age calls forth its hero. As when, high up in Nerd-Olympus, the spirits of Anne McCaffrey, Frank Frazetta & Gary Gygax drew forth & braided kaleidoscopic eldritch energies with a glowing lock of Lita Ford’s hair and conjured Barbara Blackthorne, obsidian goddess of Empress… emerging from lands around & about Philadelphia, bound together they drew Metal’s mighty sword from the Rock …

Ever since I first learnt about C. P. Snow’s lecture The Two Cultures and the heated debate around it, I have been fascinated by the possibilities offered by any text or work of art that could bridge the notorious gap … Continue reading →

My new book with Marion Fourcade, The Ordinal Society, will be published in April by Harvard University Press. Here’s the cover: The book cover As of this afternoon, the book also has a nascent website. You can and indeed absolutely should preorder the book from all the usual outlets. Buy now before it’s cool. Or go look at the website and preorder from there. Your call, really.

When contributing to other users’ repositories, always start a new branch in your fork.

Introduction The close of this year’s COP28 climate summit provides an opportunity for us to reflect on our contribution to efforts towards addressing the urgent threat of climate change, and to consider some of the findings of our recent Net …

This is my second in a series of guitars which take inspiration from the work of Dominique Field, this time in Red Cedar and 640 scale. With the addition of an elevated neck and a discreet soundport, I believe these offer an excellent blend of tone, volume, projection and playability, perfectly bridging the gap between purely traditional guitars and modern, heavy body lattice braced soundboards. This set of Ziricote has …

"The startup burnout to spirituality pipeline is strong for a reason.": A glimpse of absolute perfection Short term twin study on the impacts of a vegan diet in healthy-ish patients. Compared to control, patients in the vegan diet saw decreases in fasting insulin, weight, and LDL cholesterol FAQ on Lantern Bioworks, a biotech startup producing an oral probiotic that can prevent cavities for life Scott's Beyond Abolish the FDA proposal …

“Enigmatic chemical reactions” have broken out underground inside two Los Angeles-area landfills, according to the L.A. Times. These “highly unusual reactions at Los Angeles County’s two largest landfills have raised serious questions about the region’s long-standing approach to waste disposal and its aging dumps.” If landfills are the extreme endpoint of a cultural practice of burial—we bury to memorialize, to forget, to protect, to hide, store, and retrieve—then the idea …

The rain stopped as I arrived in Manchester. I was an hour late because I’d underestimated the traffic. The load in at Gulliver’s is a nightmare - block a narrow one-way street while you get everything out of the car and through the door into a passageway leading to the toilets and the flight of stairs up to the venue. There’s usually no one to help you. You can’t leave …

The Pope of Physics is a 2016 biography of Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), written by Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin. Segre's uncle Emilio was a student of Fermi's in Rome, whereas Hoerlin's father knew Fermi from Los Alamos, New Mexico in the post-World War II years.I began reading the book earlier this year, before I knew that the movie Oppenheimer was coming out. Both The Pope of Physics and Oppenheimer chronicle …

tl;dr: Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability. Creator tools are not Uber or Facebook In product literature, the design process looks a bit like this: This works great with the kinds of transactional processes …

Over the past 20 years, I have featured these maps and images to rotate on my home page. They represent the growing depth and breadth of the collection.

I’m very pleased to feature a new post from Jill Stewart, the third of a three-part series. Jill is Associate Professor in Public Health at the University of Greenwich and has worked in housing for over 30 years. She has written previously for Municipal Dreams about the earliest environmental health practitioners before 1914 and after the First World War and on the South Oxhey Estate. This is my review of …

The library at the academic institute where I work part-time recently had a massive chuck-out. Scanning the tomes strewn across the tables, I was struck by the high proportion of reference books - encyclopedias, dictionaries, guides, thesauruses, -ographies of various types. Quite a few of them seemed to be just lists bound between hard covers - an inventory of modernist sculptures made in the UK between 1945 and 1972 along …

[Web master's note: Northern California film critic Derrick Bang — the eldest, youngest and only son of this site's primary jazz guru, Ric Bang — has surveyed the holiday jazz scene for more than a quarter century (!). Check out previous columns by clicking on the CHRISTMAS label below.] In early November, this looked like another disappointing year for holiday jazz. With fewer than half a dozen albums to consider …