Recently updated blogs

It's now been a fair few months since changes to UK Duty legislation made it advantageous for breweries to produce beers at a strength of 3.4% or weaker, and we should be starting to see the effects of this at the bar counter as breweries seek to offer beers meeting this criteria.Speculation at the time suggested that this could be the death knell for cask ales in the 3.5 to …

The Partnership for NYC, alongside its partners at the MTA, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, NJ TRANSIT, and NYC Department of Transportation, launched a call for applications for the 6th annual Transit Tech Lab this week. To kick off this year’s program, the Transit Tech Lab is seeking early and growth-stage tech companies with compelling solutions to one of three local transit system challenges: Customer Experience …

My annual, lengthy, round-up tradition continues into another year. 2023 brought a return to Japan, a return to work, a lot of fatigue and health challenges to navigate, but also a lot of lovely memories. This post is part of a yearly series dating back to 2011(!), of which the previous post can be found here. Overview Before I dive in, I haven’t been on social media nearly as much …

I have a new novel coming out in July (amazon page here): a utopian novel mashed-up with some space-opera Lovecraftian/Dennis Wheatley horror. My teenage son, when I explained the premise, suggested I call it Space Satan!!!, with that many exclamation marks, and this may have been a better title than the King Lear reference with which I have actually gone. But here we are. And isn't the cover-art, above, splendid? …

Paul Simon got there first.. I’m giving up ‘intelligence’ for 2024. That is, I’m not going to use the term ‘intelligence’ except to critique it as an inherently flawed construction firmly grounded in race science and unable to sustain the weight of current usage as a measure of cognitive ability that can help us assess human, animal, or machine-based capabilities. It doesn’t do the work we want it to in …

Lorrie Moore’s 2009 novel A Gate at the Stairs offers among its attractions several passages and exchanges of lexical and linguistic interest. This post looks at some of them. The book’s narrator, Tassie, is a Midwestern farm girl now in college. She’s also employed as a nanny by Sarah, a restaurateur. One of their early conversations has commentary on the semantic inflation of awesome: “You have a mother?” I said. …

Despite being twice included on lists of influential Black Britons, Olive Morris is still frequently overlooked in British history. Still, she achieved much in her tragically short life and her legacy remains alive today.

Thoughts on 2023 The Big Stuff:A year of contentment. Family life atop the miller’s hill is bliss, and the kids are so much more relaxed and confident now we’re more comfortable letting them explore. Felt like a slower year at work. I’d have rather made more, but it wasn’t to be. The sabbatical in the middle of it didn’t help matters. But it did allow me to make a lot …

I love a lot of things about Chicago, but the number one thing is that it works. It's the city that brought the world the eight-hour day, the city that rebuilt itself from ashes. It's a city of immigrants and of the great migration; a city of neighborhoods forged by working class hands. And it's the city that brought the world the hardest-working typeface, Cooper Black. Created in Chicago in …

PRC Pittsburgh Railways PCC Route 28Location: Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaDate: July 1958Photographer: UnknownPittsburgh PCC #1562 was built in 1944 by the St. Louis Car Company. The Roxian Theatre is located at 501 Chartiers Avenue, McKees Rocks, PA 15136. It was built in 1928 and had 1,200 seats. It closed in 1979 and was converted into a concert venue for a time. In 2019, it reopened as a film and performing arts theatre. …

On stage at Radio City Music Hall, I hid The Power Broker. All 1,200+ pages of it. I clutched the paperback close, under my academic regalia. On stage, helping deliver diplomas to eager graduating students at SVA, I sat behind the unmatched Robert Caro himself during a not-brief graduation ceremony where he would deliver the final Commencement address. I would ask him to sign the hidden book afterward as we …

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 …