Recently updated blogs

A building on a street corner often provides the opportunity for visually striking designs with this being the case for the former Commonwealth Bank building on the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth streets. The impressive concrete ribbing and sheer visual bulk provides a commanding presence. The building was officially opened in 1954 to great fanfare, with thousands lining the streets to take a glimpse of the bank which was described …

Another year, another list of new translations! Though I haven’t been writing regular posts this year about my recent reading, I faithfully started compiling this list in late 2022. Despite this year’s challenges – thinking globally, there are wars and their ramifications and, thinking locally, there’ve epic quantities of water flowing into my street and yard – I’m doing fine and reading a fair bit in Russian, often to determine …

Previously we covered early chatbots, bots talking gibberish, and self-taught number crunchers. But what we got so far is still boring. AI was promised to overthrow the world order and not just classify arrays of floats. Can we have a chat? GPT As unimpressive as it is, neural networks take arrays of numbers and return arrays of numbers. Just like our brain takes electric signals and emits electric signals. It’s …

Palm Springs, CA, 2023

==== WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD ==== If you have not yet read the short story Melokuhle – good things, published recently by East of the Web, you are advised to do so before continuing to read this post, unless you are an academic who really insists on looking at some research first. ======== This post is not about analysing the story about the somewhat culturally aware cooperative care robot, but about …

If you’ve wanted to try a Nolty Gold planner but haven’t wanted to deal with shipping from Japan and high prices, now might be your moment! I just spotted a listing on Amazon.com for the model 3121 that I use, the 95 x 145mm size, with a gorgeous leather cover. The price I am seeing … Continue reading 2024 Nolty Gold Planner, Low Price and Free Shipping! →

Another more quiet year. 2023 was another quiet year. The number of plays and the hours spent were slightly up from 2022, but if I remove the single most played game from those numbers, the numbers are about the same or slightly smaller than in 2022. This is clearly the new normal. More new games. I stopped avoiding new games as much as in 2022, and the numbers shot up: …

Wanted to fire up OmniOS to play with and didn’t have any spare x86 hardware to hand so decided to figure out running it in UTM on Apple Silicon, meaning it needs emulation as OmniOS is x86 only. Grab the ISO from the OmniOS downloads page, I used the LTS release but the current stable should work too. Just make sure it’s the ISO version, not USB, etc. Open UTM …

1. Close Your Eyesby Victor Erice"The unluckiest filmmaker in the world," was how Ben Sachs described Victor Erice. The funding cut or witheld entirely for projects realized and unrealized, years without financing, dear friends dying before their time, and lately a great movie going undistributed after of a fiasco of a Cannes premiere. As always the central tragedy of film history is people not knowing what they have on their …

Greetings and Happy New Year! While reading a recent call for workshop proposals, I was struck with a thought I decided to contemplate for a few days. This thought is how much things have changed, but also how much they have remained the same. Prior to the pandemic, the Association for Living History, Farm and… Continue reading President’s Message Jan 2024 →

There have been at least nineteen murders in Barbados for 2023. January to December 2022 data and analysis can be found here. My analysis is based on media reports only. The steps involved in the following analysis are similar to my 2020 analysis. Note to Table 1: Data was obtained from reports in the Media and keyed into…

The remains of The Cluniac Priory of Our Lady of Thetford The Cluniac Priory of Our Lady, Thetford, was first founded on the Suffolk side of the Little Ouse river by Roger Bigod in the early twelfth century during the reign of Henry I. Bigod founded the Priory instead of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Approach from the south View of the remains of choir arch from the …

So much of life is invisible, hard to define, harder to be sure of. So finding evidence of something you’ve maybe felt for weeks comes as a shock. I came down with Covid on October 20 last year. For the first time, as far as I’m aware, and that makes me lucky. And I didn’t get long-Covid, which makes me doubly lucky. Still, it knocked me out entirely for a …

“We now use about eighty percent of the net primary product of land-based photosynthesis,” he said. “One hundred percent is probably impossible to reach, and our long range carrying capacity has been estimated to be thirty percent, so we are massively overshot, as they say. We have been liquidating our natural capital as if it were disposable income, and are nearing depletion of certain capital stocks, like oil, wood, soil, …

An alphabet of still-undiscovered names across the style spectrum It’s the ultimate baby name treasure: an undiscovered name. As name styles shift and expand, these hidden gems become harder and harder to find. But we’ve uncovered a trove. Each of these 78 girls’ names is genuinely rare. None appear in the current list of the top 1000 names for American girls. Some are antiques that have yet to return to …