Recently updated blogs

Her nighttime routine consisted of forty different steps involving fifteen products and five parts of her body. First, she lit a white wax candle. Sweet, pink-petalled freesia swept into the room. Her head swam. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she meditated for ten minutes using a loving kindness app. “I forgive you,” she intoned, under the Benedictine guidance of a honeyed British voice. It was said with a genuine attempt …

I am so sad tonight, thinking about Navalny. If you've seen the recent oscar-winning documentary they made on him, you may remember the scene of him trying to film in Novosibirsk, while a guy was taking a piss in the background. Navalny says "welcome to the Russian ghetto" or something. I was in Russia for 3 months in 1998. Yeltsin time. I was in Chelyabinsk, outside of Yekaterinburg (it's the …

A commission chaired by former Attorney General Dominic Grieve recently published a report on the current state of UK governance, which has identified substantial problems and made recommendations to improve matters. Here, Dominic outlines the report’s key conclusions and recommendations, ahead of an online Constitution Unit event at which he and fellow commissioner Helen MacNamara […]

I’m giving this talk at the category theory seminar at U. C. Riverside, as a kind of followup to one by Peter Samuelson on the same subject. My talk will not be recorded, but here are the slides: Spans and the categorified Heisenberg algebra. Abstract. Heisenberg reinvented matrices while discovering quantum mechanics, and the algebra generated by annihilation and creation operators obeying the canonical commutation relations was named after him. …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]This is the Union Pacific Railroad’s Austin Subdivision in central Texas. It’s a busy corridor that moves both freight and passengers north and south between Austin and San Antonio… But it’s mostly freight. Trains run twenty-four-seven here, carrying goods like rock from nearby quarries, cement, vehicles, intermodal freight, and more. So, when Crystal Clear Special Utility District was planning …

I feel like I am both closing in on victory and getting farther away from it, insofar as the last remaining puzzles seem to be stumpers indeed. Not quite succumbing to hints yet but probably next time if I can’t push any farther. From a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, where Ariel and Prospero discuss Ariel previously being trapped in a pine. First, a fairly straightforward bit of …

A few weeks ago, I held a guest lecture in the DSBA 6188: Text Mining and Information Retrieval Class at UNC Charlotte on using large language models (LLMs) for annotation. It was fun because I could expand my previous blog posts on LLM annotation into a full-fledged lecture. This blog post is my (abridged) lecture in written format. You can find the slides here. Finally, thanks to Ryan Wesslen and …

Thanks to Wesley Paulson for reaching out to Bill Wall, and thanks especially to Bill for writing with a series of updates from the Connecticut Trolley Museum, aka Warehouse Point. Bill even sent along a series of photos taken just a couple of weeks ago at CTM. All photos below are taken by Bill Wall except where noted.First, the good news: as shown above, Connecticut Company box motor 2023 has …

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again. Mary Oliver Footnotes Oliver, Mary. Upstream: Selected Essays. Penguin Books, 2016. ISBN: 978-0143130086 Reply …

About a decade ago I stumbled across the cycling world of audax. Long distance endurance riding that was described to me as “…like fast touring”. The word audax intrigued me, hinted at an aesthetic, at something mysterious and foreign. I asked other cycling friends about it but no one really knew much, it was talked about in a “here be monsters” kind of way, all third hand rumours about mudguard …

Ernest Shackleton embarked on four journeys to the Antarctic in his lifetime, and his aptly-named Endurance expedition was his third and perhaps most challenging. South (1919) is the first printing of his account of the expedition, which may have failed in its mission, but has since been remembered as a feat of great fortitude, survival, and leadership. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917 Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was the last …

I find myself in the position of too much to do at the moment, to the point where I spent near on12 hours standing today working on the 009 project. Bliss some would say, but only from the position of having a choice. There is a 16t mineral on the bench which is headed for Rhiw2 that needs finishing, not to mention a runner wagon conversion promised for an RM …

Ebony Magazine, via the New York Times, 1991. Eunice Johnson is in pink It is hard to overestimate the contribution of Eunice Johnson (1916-2010) to African American fashion in the United States. She and her husband were the founders of Ebony and Jet. Although she worked as secretary and treasurer for the Johnson Publishing Company, early on she began to follow her passion for couture fashion. Rather than keeping that …

Philosopher Nic Bommarito looks at George Herriman's early 20th century comic Krazy Kat Continue reading → The post Nic Bommarito on Krazy Kat appeared first on Aesthetics for Birds.

By Dr Luke Truxal Editorial note: On 26 January 2024, Apple TV+ launched the much-anticipated series Masters of the Air. This series follows the actions of the US 100th Bomb Group during the Combined Bomber Offensive in the Second World War. As the series is being aired, our Book Reviews Editor, Dr Luke Truxal, the … Continue reading #FilmReview – Masters of the Air, Episode Four →