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When someone so much as touches a state vehicle, the wheels of justice begin to turn, and that’s that.

Wow, I haven't shipped anything in a year and a half, huh? Not even a blog post? Sure, I've generated lots of ideas, at different stages of development, but in the end, all that matters is what's out there. So this month, I'm shipping this blog post about all the projects I haven't shipped (yet). Motivations for this post: To scratch an itch. To give y'all a look into the …

In the early 1980s, companies began to realize that changes were occurring in the way cookies were consumed in the United States. People were buying more packaged cookies and baking less at home. Store-bought cookies were crisp and didn’t resemble those fresh from the oven. Manufacturers started to wonder, "Is there a market for a new type of ‘soft’ cookie?" If so, how could they be made and packaged? As …

While scrolling social media pages awhile back, I found one friend appreciating, in a moment, her current writing project—a book manuscript. The appreciation arose in the context of editing her Read more The post Indexing: Lost Art, Dead End, or Missed Opportunity? (Part 1) first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.

By the 1990s, Hong Kong cinema had become beloved around the world for its restless innovation and dizzying hybridity. Few films exemplify the spirit of that era more fully than The Heroic Trio (1993) and its sequel, Executioners (also 1993), both made by director Johnnie To and action choreographer Ching Siu-tung. Combining the mythical traditions of the wuxia genre, the grit and melodrama of the Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking …

How much is "too much?" I'm sure you've seen that eye glaze from time to time. The answer is actually deceptively simple. The post How Much Data Viz is Too Much appeared first on Evergreen Data.

Ever since an infantile fascist billionaire (hereafter, the IFB) decided to turn Twitter over to the racially hostile anti-science set, folks who previously used that network daily to discuss and amplify topics they cared about have either given up on the very premise of a shared digital commons, continued to post to Twitter while holding their noses, or sought a new digital place to call their own. This post is …

Video: Waxahatchee – “Bored” Directed by Corbett Jones and Nick Simonite. From Tigers Blood, out on March 22 on Anti-. I love the Joey Santiago-style guitar that opens this song. Katie Crutchfield says, “I feel like my comfort zone when writing songs lies somewhere on the emotional spectrum of sadness and heartache. Writing from a place of happiness scares me. Too earnest. Anger scares me even more. I wrote ‘Bored’ …

Steer clear of Google Chrome if you value your privacy. They've just introduced a misleadingly labeled "privacy sandbox" feature, which, paradoxically, undermines user privacy rather than protecting it. [direct link to source]

As with guitars, you can never have too many songs, surely? My modern period of writing and recording began around April 2012, although I’d done a lot of noodling guitar instrumentals with beats and synths for many years before that going way back into my teens. But, this modern period which started in my 40s when I co-established an Arts Night happening got me writing and recording on a more …

The resourceful young agents of James Ponti’s terrific middle grade series City Spies are back for their fifth adventure, this time protecting a young environmentalist from forces who will stop at nothing to silence her powerful voice for change. Teenager Beatriz Santos is a rock star in the global protest movement, with dedicated followers who…

Another underground magazine, this one originating in Seattle during the first wave of the counter-cultural publications that flourished from the mid-60s on. Wikipedia says that Helix managed 125 bi-weekly issues from 1967 to 1970; the Internet Archive has the first 42 issues which run to October 1968 (the uploader’s dates are out by a year each way). When so few of these magazines are available online this makes a welcome …

There is a sort of truism in the education world that non-profit means white hat* and for-profit means you should be skeptical or something stronger. And because Bellwether is a non-profit it would be in my interest to perpetuate that notion. Except it’s wrong and not at all useful. Not-for-profit and for-profit are just corporate structures. Those structures matter, for instance, legally, to some aspects of operations, to compensation, and …

https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article/95/2/281/344231/Poetry-Will-Not-Optimize-or-What-Is-Literature-to Abstract Literature, poetry, and other forms of noncommercial creative expression challenge the techno-instrumentalist approaches to language, the predictive language generation, informing NLP (large natural language processing models) such as GPT-3 or -4 as well as, more generally, generative AI (text to image, video, audio). Claims that AI systems automate and expedite creativity reflect industry and research priorities of speed, scale, optimization, and frictionlessness driving much artificial intelligence design and …

INSPECTOR FOWLER: We have all seen the musical Oliver, and are familiar with the images of jolly, apple-cheeked urchins in big hats. Well, dispel this cozy impression. The Artful Dodger was a thief, and I don’t think he’d have considered himself quite so “at home” in a juvenile detention centre, which is where I’d have put him. Thieving is thieving. And no amount of “oom-pah-pah” or “boom-titty-titty” will change that. …