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Introspection only gets you so far. Gut feelings are not a particularly good way of evaluating the outside world. Gut feelings are a reflection of all our biases and intuitions and heuristics. Those all grow, largely unconsciously, out of our experiences. Our experiences are our own; they do not generalize. The phrase “the plural of anecdote is not data” describes all the reasons gut feelings are not reliable for evaluating …

In the Chinese Zodiac, this is the Year of the Dragon, beginning on February 10, 2024. The Dragon symbolizes power, nobility, honor, wealth, and success. Those born under this sign are said to possess intelligence, confidence, tenacity, and courage; they can also be, at times, temperamental and impulsive. Famous people born in the Year of the Dragon include John Lennon, Bruce Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Adele, Stanley Kubrick, Robert …

It’s that time of year when the garden is coming back to life and my seed growing fingers start to itch. It’s too soon to sow anything here though. Anything I sow inside will get leggy in search of light and anything outside will just rot in the cold ground. I’ll have to wait until March but that’s not so long away. Meanwhile I’ve done my seed audit, raking through …

Edgar Award© Mystery Writers of America. DB here: Some good news for Perplexing Plots. It’s gotten positive reviews in various places; they’re sampled on its Amazon page. Most recently, Geoffrey O’Brien has written a very generous review for the New York Review of Books (February 8, 2024). He has, needless to say, kind words for Martin Edwards’ monumental Life of Crime as well. More broadly, he shares his insights into …

Snowy Greetings, Chris has been sprucing up things around here and on his list has been to build a new entrance bridge that leads to the Farm Stand store’s front doors. This new bridge replaces our old one and it has beautiful bent willow decoration. Local artist, Michelle Taylor, has been creating a new Farm Stand sign, since the July hail storm ruined the existing one. The new sign will …

A beer festival? In Wigan? With rave reviews and recommendations? Well I wasn’t going to miss that! The late kick off (doors 6pm) on a Thursday was less of a deterrent and more of an excuse (as if I need one) to spend the afternoon exploring the lovely pubs of Wigan. And yet…I am back on SlimmingWorld now and, after the disaster of Preston the other week, I knew I …

Following on from the first bits of Irvine, I walked from Puffers Cafe towards the coast, via the edge of the Scottish Maritime Museum. This whole area was regenerated in the 1990s with some substantial Georgian-style buildings. Past Boyd’s Automatic Tide Signalling Apparatus, there is a cracking big beach. It was wet and windy, so I stuck to the beach park – a wide open area in between the beach …

You can get surprisingly far, before it bites you, with only a fuzzy and incorrect understanding of how you should read from a TCP socket. I see this often in (failing) Protohackers solutions. Once you are over the initial hurdle of reading enough documentation to actually get a TCP session connected, there are 2 key things you need to understand: TCP gives you a stream of bytes, not packets. read() …

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Busy was the Chinese Communist Party in the first few days after it brutally suppressed pro-democracy demonstrators on June 4, 1989. It produced a series of horrifying photos and a photo book to justify its brutal suppression. The post The Truth about the Beijing Turmoil appeared first on Iconic Photos.

Attempting to describe the ways that mathematics touches our hearts. Or the author's specficallly.

Dan Janes writes: Spam is nothing new, spam on GitHub is also not particularly new. Any site that accepts user-generated content will need to figure out how to prevent people from submitting spam, whether that is for scams, malicious software, or X-rated material. I have been getting tagged in Crypto related for the past 6 months or so. In the past 24 hours I have been tagged in two of …

Following on from last week’s catchup on Delfinen, this week we’re going to look at Hästen, which has been a long time in the making. Hästen (pronounced like “hesten”) is Swedish for “The Horse”, being this is a build based on a Fender Mustang, a hold over from the early days of my guitar building when I had a series of people ask me to build them Mustangs after I’d …

Modave

An interesting piece by Alfred Moore over at The Conversation talking about “Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names“. This hearkens back to a lot of thoughts I had about online identity back in the day – it’s interesting to see newer studies examining the space. The basic gist is that when comparing online discourse using real-life names, pseudonyms, or “durable pseudonyms”, …