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Getting a grip on some fundamental survival techniques is a must for outdoor enthusiasts. We will scare you with stastics later but the fact is that everything we do has risks and it’s our responsibility to learn to handle them as best as we can. We owe it to ourselves, our loved ones, and to the random stranger we encounter who is in trouble. This blog post is your starting …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

I mean… the writing was on the wall, wasn't it? Didn't we, the tech nation desperate to actualise the ten-ecks developer, make our own bed? I know it's the cynic in me that doesn't trust copilot assisted work to produce long term "good code" (aka: code of a reliable quality that can survive time), but at the same time I'm one of those grumpy old hacks that hand codes. One …

It is not that the world is becoming entirely technical which is really uncanny. Far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age. — Heidegger

It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed. There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their …

When I was in University I had a few good teachers, and I remember fondly Professor Lorenzo Farina. Once, he§ came to class and ranted a bit about some job advertisement he had read: the job was for a software engineer, and mentioned they were looking for someone with a smanettone mindset. Smanettone is an Italian term which in context meant something like “hacker” (in the Jargon File sense) or …

A new paper was published in Science Advances today. Its title says what it is about: “Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course.” The study follows one by Danish colleagues which made headlines last July, likewise looking for early warning signals for approaching an AMOC tipping point (we discussed it here), but using rather different data and methods. The new study by van Westen et al. …

I’m thinking its fewer than I’d hoped. But I tacked my discussion onto a (fifteen year old!) geeklist on the subject.

Setting your own vertical or horizontal alignment guide isn’t something I’ve thought about much when writing my own SwiftUI code. When they were announced, and later demo’d during a dub dub session in SwiftUI’s early days, I remember thinking, “Yeah, I don’t get that. Will check out later.” Lately, though, I’ve seen two novel use cases where using one is exactly what was required. Or, at the very least, it …

“Bending the law,” of course, means adhering to the letter of the law while committing all sorts of unsavory offenses against the spirit of it. You might think a faction aligned with the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus would hold both the letter and the spirit of the law in equal, paramount regard … The post Planescape Faction Agent Tactics, Part 5 appeared first on The Monsters Know What They’re Doing.

Now we all know that the way to save cask beer from its inevitable demise is to charge more for it, don't we? Well no. Of course not. Well, not in the general sense anyway, though of course there are exceptions.A couple of weeks ago I read with a sense of disbelief that yet again this daft idea gets prominence in trade news, this time as it often is, in …

There’s a new book out by Chris Dixon, an investor at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. I haven’t read it. (And after reading Molly White’s excellent review, I probably won’t.) But! Yesterday, Anil Dash mentioned something about the book that caught my eye: Fun fact: in his promo for this book, Chris repeatedly describes smart contracts on the blockchain as being equivalent to collective bargaining, presenting this as an …

The Apple Vision Pro represents the end of something. Or possibly the beginning. It’s an apex product from an apex economy. What we know about capitalism – liberal democracy, Western economic dominance – suggests some kind of discontinuity is coming, some kind of historic break or epochal crisis. A lot of people accept this. Meanwhile, the happy plateau we were expecting from the 21st Century never materialised and the steady …

One of the most enjoyable things to read in the music papers back in the day were the ritual encounters between the writers and the Metal Monolith - via the metal festival review. Enjoyable to write, not so much! Verily twas a short straw assignment: the rock paper equivalent of latrine duty.... And yet, and yet, in terms of the review filed, if not the actual lived experience, heavy metal …

We are hardly shocked when visiting different countries and cities to hear a variety of languages. However, the reality of multilingual spaces and societies predates our modern times, as a study of the Anglo-Saxon period shows.