Recently updated blogs

The Estonia disaster of 1994, in which a Baltic Sea ferry sank and hundreds of people lost their lives, symbolizes a problematic phenomenon in Swedish society: faith in the state. This event has raised deep questions about the limits of trust in state institutions, especially in Sweden, a country known for its strong faith in state institutions.The immediate reaction to the disaster and the subsequent investigations showed that many Swedes, …

Over recent months, I’ve not spent too much time reading ‘the news’. There’s a lot going on in the world and have found that on a day-to-day basis, ignorance is bliss, but I do want to dip my toe in the water every now and again. I especially have no mental space right now for “breaking news” of events happening on the other side of the planet – just give …

UI = f(data)(state)

This note is mostly for myself - Digger is built for a userbase of 1 - you are welcome to fork and copy it, but I am not proposing to support it. About eighteen months ago I released a small tool to pull annotations from Diigo into local Markdown notes. With version 0.5.0 (released yesterday) there is now also a basic capability to pull annotations from Hypothes.is. To upgrade: get …

I didn’t write a yearnote last year, which is a shame, as it was an eventful year, with being promoted to Director at dxw, my extension being completed and finishing Murmuration and running it at 3 festivals. But this one has been a bit calmer, so I have the time to write one. Sorry you just get to hear about the chill years. The Job I started my new job …

Every now and then, I see someone post their latest and greatest set of CSS resets. Here’s mine: @layer reset { *, *::before, *::after { box-sizing: border-box; } body { margin: unset; } button, input, textarea, select { font: inherit; } img, picture, svg, canvas { display: block; max-inline-size: 100%; block-size: auto; } @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) { *, *::before, *::after { animation-duration: 0.01ms !important; animation-iteration-count: 1 !important; transition-duration: 0.01ms !important; …

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 …