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An unexpected splash of sunshine on Friday 16th February led to a window into a world of wonder. With almost Spring-like temps and semi clear skies I thought I'd take the new 60mm Macro lens along to Warriston cemetery. Get to know how to use it before we go off on holiday and I'm trying to read instructions in the sweating undergrowth being eaten by bugs, lens caps on the …

The first time I met Yoko Ono, at the Apple HQ in Savile Row in September 1969, I was impressed by her obvious engagement. She and John Lennon were doing a day of interviews, and I got my couple of hours on behalf of the Melody Maker. At that stage she was being treated by the media as a bit of a sour joke. The film she’d made of people’s …

The site Décapassion has just published a great article on French decathletes. I have already written about this superb site due to Frédéric Gousset. It is, to my eyes the best decathlon site on the web. For the Gousset family, decathlon is not just an athletic discipline, it's a passion.This time they published an article on the history of french combined events. It's in french but you should not let …

Here are the February 2024 statistics for this blog. I wrote three posts: Over Two Years of Recording my Calories & Weight January 2024 Book Reading List An Ariel Cake for My Daughter’s Birthday Google Analytics Users → 2,300 Sessions → 2,500 Views → 4,900 Google Analytics Graph for February Google Search Console Clicks → 1,190 Search Impressions → 60,000 Average position → 30.1 Google Search Console Graph for February …

Searching for John BindonBelgraviaBelgravia's story is one of dramatic transformation. Once a soggy expanse known as "Five Fields," notorious for highwaymen and muddy paths, it rose in the 19th century to become a symbol of elegance and wealth. This metamorphosis began with King George III's residence at Buckingham Palace, which spurred development in the area. But it was Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster, who envisioned a grand vision. Partnering …

The Bay | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin I have a few upcoming readings for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in the San Francisco Bay Area. On March 27, 2024, at 6:30 pm, I’ll be reading at Berkeley Public Library’s North Branch, in Berkeley, CA: “Author Talk with Susannah Breslin.” And, on April 27, 2024, at 11 am, I’ll be reading at Book Passage, in Corte …

This has been on the website for a few months now, but I have joined the editorial board for Experimental Mathematics, following the "reboot" led by Al Kasprzyk. Please submit your interesting and high-quality experimental papers, so that the journal can continue its role as a leading journal in this particular niche!

A post from Remy on Mastodon recently got me thinking: Been picking up some of the jsbin archive work. Today, there's currently 62 millions bins stored. The last full copy archive I ran (which downloads the full html, js + css into a single page) holds 42 millions bins, consumes 130gb and the names alone (not even the urls) takes up 750mb. That’s a lot of data, and I’d be …

STEFANO GUZZETTI & IAN HAWGOOD - HERE Due to serious health issues, Ian Hawgood has been somewhat off the radar in the past year. He's back - and started 2024 with a bunch of new releases. Some were released physically and others digitally. This hopefully marks the beginning of a brighter future for Ian personally. Here is a short EP featuring the musical collaboration of Ian Hawgood with Stefano Guzzetti. …

Last week, my mother and I attended an author event at Boston College featuring Celeste Ng, which we enjoyed. BC has a freshman seminar in which many read Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You. It was great to see several hundred students listening to Ng describe her writing process, including her habit of beginning her books with a very dramatic sentence. I had to check this out:Lydia is …

"where's the forest?" my father asks, while staring at a thousand trees. Why yes, I have been binging Survivor. There was a particular moment in Survivor: Pearl Islands when I realised the desert island had turned into a forest. You’d think it would be an easy border to see — especially from above with the gratuitous helicopter footage — but down on the surface, the lines blur together in fascinating …

Last week, Daniel Bingham announced that peer-review.io, the system he built for crowdsourcing peer review of academic manuscripts, will be shutting down (it seems to be already offline). It was an interesting experiment, and I’m disappointed, but I am also completely, utterly, 157% unsurprised. Here’s why. Peer review is a form of academic service. For […]

I really should say “railway” in Lichtenstein, since there is only one and it just passes through the country.

Ridgeline subscribers! Hello, it is I, Craig Mod, writer of this newsletter. And runner of one membership program called SPECIAL PROJECTS, of which many of you are members (thank you!), and which makes Ridgeline and many other things possible, and which is now — somewhat unbelievably — FIVE YEARS OLD. That is, five years ago I launched this thing. This membership program. Somewhat sheepishly (OK — pathologically sheepishly). And the …

The Daily Telegraph reports that an increasingly abstemious younger generation are blowing a large hole in the government’s revenue forecasts: Clean-living youngsters threaten to blow a multibillion-pound hole in public finances as alcohol and tobacco tax income declines, the head of the spending watchdog has warned. Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), has questioned whether assumptions about future tax income from what are often dubbed “sin …