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patgavin:Former Bethlehem Steel siteSteelstacks, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Yep, that’s it: I like painting with watercolors. As a hobby. As a student, I thought hobbies were lame. Because: why be a hobbyist when you’re developing a skill that you can get really good at? Surely the old masters weren’t painting as a hobby? Drawing (and barely any painting) became something I only did as part of design. I had another thing that started as a hobby: photography. A …

In this somewhat different post, I am hosting the long-running Carnival of Mathematics. First I’ll talk about 223 (the issue number) and then I’ll round up some mathematical posts from December 2023. It’s primetime we talk about 223. First of all, it is a lucky prime, to which it is unknown if there are infinitely many. To write the number 223 as the sum of fifth powers requires 37 terms, …

A look into the books I read in 2023, the goals I set and how I did.

Untethered. Photograph of a milkweed seed. We planted milkweed on our deck this summer to attract butterflies. At the end of the season, I saved their seed pods so we could plant them again next year. When the pods dry and split, their seeds explode out, and float freely through the air on these little puffs. While beautiful, this makes them difficult to photograph! The slightest motion, even the natural …

Who is Iain Sinclair, and where did he come from? That’s what people in London wanted to know in the early 1970s, east of Liverpool Street Station. His formative years were gradually disclosed in instalments on the covers and fly-leaves of small poetry collections and the bylines to essays in journals and magazines, as he began to make an impression on the little press scene and the world of low-budget …

There are a couple of things I always want to be true when I install Python packages for a project:I have a virtual environmentPip is up-to-dateFor virtual environments, you would like them to be created as fast as possible and (usually) with the newest version of Python. For keeping pip up-to-date, it would be nice to not have to do that for every single virtual environment you have.To help make …

My 23 hopes for 2023 didn't all come true. I'd say overall it was a pretty rough year for me in some ways, with high highs and monotonous lows, but hey, it ended on a redemptive and positive note! I'd say I achieved 12/23. Half really isn't bad. For 2024 (once again, not wishing for world peace here, as we all know what happens when you do that): I hope …

Cloudflare has a really generous free tier, and it gets a lot of free users. I often see comments on Hacker News saying "Cloudflare must be doing something shady, so many people use it for free, and if you're not the customer, then you're the product". This is mostly wrong -- Cloudflare gets a lot of value from its free users, in normal, not-shady ways. Here's why it's helpful to …

Ramses exhibition at the Australian Museum

This blog post explores the role of quality documentation, looking at different documentation types, effective strategies, and great documentation tools to start your documentation journey.

With another new year, Putin (24-year reign, if you include the tandem of 2008–2012) is catching up to the nineteenth-century rulers Alexander I (also 24 years), Alexander II (26 years), and Nicholas I (30 years). And just as getting to know the nineteenth century means learning about not just watershed dates, but gradations within one reign—like the comparatively open period under conservative Nicholas I in the mid-1840s, long after the …

I have worked for two newspapers over the course of my career (three if you count my high school newspaper). One thing I learned there is that the top half of each and every newspaper homepage is a daily battle of priorities. The idea here is that the thing that is highest, largest, and leftmost on the page will get the most attention. Placement and ordering of this content is …

I try to make myself and my immediate surroundings as self-sufficient as possible. There’s something innate in me that makes me want to do everything myself, to not depend on anyone, and even more so to be free. Of course, “free” can hide a lot. Despite how ingrained this part of my nature is, though, I can see where it’s been reinforced. As always, it begins with a “there but …