Recently updated blogs

The world is still getting warmer. Charts like this shouldn’t be necessary to prove this fact. All that is necessary is to have lived a certain number of decades, and remembering how things used to be. The scientific consensus is that a big driver of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels. But cutting down on fossil fuels may not be compatible with maintaining current material standards of living. …

Three crime films with some pretty horrific tones to them: The Black Panther (1977) The Candy Snatchers (1973) and Man on a Swing (1974). The Black Panther is one of the great unsung British crime films and chronicles the real-life robbery, kidnapping and murder spree of Donald Neilson, who most notably kidnapped, entombed and subsequently killed Lesley Whittle in a drainage shaft while trying to collect a ransom. The film …

The Lenovo ThinkVision P27h-20 screen I get from work is a decent 27 inch screen. Coming from the Retina screen of my laptop that I worked on for a long time, I was initially (and still am) not impressed by the resolution of 2560×1440. It took some time to get used to the low resolution on such a big screen, but it gets the job done… My biggest gripe with …

I have dissociative identity disorder (DID). I prefer to write about it than create videos on it, but I’m still privy to the criticism about the DID community on social platforms. Mostly the misconceptions about DID — viewpoints accepted as facts, but actually false. DID is a mystery diagnosis no one really knows about unless they have it themselves. Like autism, non-DID systems (singlets) perceive the diagnosis as problematically as …

Manipulation of chiral centers has been a driving force in the development of new synthetic reactions for many decades, and no wonder. Chirality is an essential feature of life as we know it, and the great majority of known drugs bind to chiral environments in the body (generally into various pockets and folds of proteins). Dramatic changes in biological properties can occur when single chiral centers in a molecule are …

Cartridges isn’t something.I have used a lot with my fountain pens. I used to use them back in the very early days. But I soon moved over to bottled ink and piston fillers and converters. But I have since the summer gotten a few of pens where I do use them: Kaweco Sport. I have converters for them, that I haven’t tested out yet. I have just continued using cartridges …

Surprise! I have another EP of electronic music ready for you. This one is called Difficult Time, after one of the tracks on the album, and also because [gestures at the world]. The five tracks here allude to the mess of the world, either by running toward the mess, or away from it. It clocks in at 28 minutes, which makes it a nice, compact collection (and also, now I …

Continuing Apple’s love affair with sport, if you love sport and run an Apple device you may be interested in Apple Sports, the company’s new and free app for sports fans. Apple Sports aims to give fans access to real-time scores, stats, and more. It’s a personalized service that lets users define and follow their favorite leagues and teams. The idea is that you can turn to the app to …

In an in-depth article for the Hollywood Reporter, it has been revealed that Marvel Studios is pivoting hard as it tries to overcome a series of recent obstacles to recapture the zeitgeist it imperiously commanded for over a decade.In 2008 Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an interconnected series of superhero films which shared a single continuity, canon and cast of characters, who could pop up in one another's …

“Welcome! Play Safe” reads the sign at a Fairfax County Public School playground in Virginia just outside of DC. It goes on to list 21 rules, by my count. Gee, what a normal society we live in! First of all, the sign says, the playground should never be used when it’s frozen. Or wet. There can be no climbing on things like the safety rails (which are…fences?). And kids must …

In reply to: Scaling accessibility beyond compliance at VA.gov through community and culture If “accessibility as compliance” is a staircase where outcomes are restricted to the normative limitations of the law, Accessibility Beyond Compliance is an exponential curve. It isn’t limited to fulfilling legal constraints, and we can use it to explore, understand, and better address the needs of the full, complex, and intersectional diversity of the disabled experience. A …

Screenshot of the demo featured in the article. In Chrome 122 the backdrop is light purple because it can access the custom property from the dialog element. If you ever struggled with ::backdrop not having access to custom properties, here’s some good news: As of Chrome 122 – and also in Firefox 120 and soon Safari 17.4 – ::backdrop is a tree-abiding pseudo-element, meaning that it inherits any inheritable properties …

On Thursday, February 29, I’ll be giving my talk “Towards a New Philosophy of Progress” to the New England Legal Foundation, for their Economic Liberty Speaker Series. The talk will be held over breakfast at NELF’s offices in Boston, and will also be livestreamed over Zoom. See details and register here. This is a talk I have given before in other venues. The description: Enlightenment thinkers were tremendously optimistic about …

Perhaps it was inevitable that Parts and Labor Design, a New York interiors studio noted for its atmospheric hospitality projects — including the subterranean Negroni bar Sotto, which we featured last fall — would launch a furniture design studio. After all, some of the more memorable details from their interiors have often been custom, in-house designed fixtures, which explore the tension between kinetic material and earthly texture. Called Known Work, …

Arum italicum will prosper in the driest of dry shade and provides year round interest. The marbled leaves emerge in autumn and last all winter, a pale yellow spadix/spathe flower appears in spring looking rather like a rod in a cowl. Then in summer the leaves wither and the inflorescence morphs into a spike of green berries which turn bright red/orange as autumn approaches. A lush looking plant but every …