Recently updated blogs

I’m an artist and maker from southern Scotland, designing and hand printing bespoke textiles for interiors. My work focuses on the relationship between pattern & place; all of my designs are inspired by a particular location and aim to interpret the story of their surroundings. My curtains are designed and made to commission, and I also print ‘building collage’ cushions inspired by special places which are available to buy or …

I’ve written elsewhere about the funeral I attended at Mortlake Crematorium last Friday, and I had it in my mind that Mortlake represented a stretch of the River Thames in London that I hadn’t been to before. I’d visited Kew, Richmond, Hammersmith, and Twickenham, but had no recollection of Mortlake - or so I thought. It wasn't until I’d walked the short distance from Mortlake station towards the Thames, that …

The kitchen sink cabinet door has water damage along the top edge — not from a leak, just from being less than careful and being constructed of materials that don't handle water very well. It's been on the todo list since we moved in and my great idea was to use clear fingernail polish to stem the issue. While looking for that I paused to admire the Goody colors and …

“Route 2 bus and Spring St traffic” by Oran Viriyincy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. I’m continuing to explore accessed-based route productivity measurements by examining four routes that, like route 1, serve Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. Routes 2, 3, 4, and 13 make their way up its eponymous hill. These are some of the quirkiest routes in King County Metro’s system. The former three are putatively long routes connecting …

I wasn't sure if I even wanted to write about this. It feels like I'm bragging by acknowledging it, but it was so exciting that I have to talk about it. Yesterday, I woke up to Monday's article about OSM, Rust, and WASM at the top of Hacker News. Here's how I found out: I woke up early and started poking around on my phone and scrolling through Hacker News …

Made up a 2×2 after a long time. And am kicking off a new Lunchtime Leadership blogchain. Name inspired by Hitchhiker’s Guide joke about most work being done by random people who wander into offices while leaders are out to lunch, see something worth doing, and do it. BDFxing, the idea I introduced in the […]

Paul Lukas stars as Josef, a butler employed to Prince Alfred, portrayed by the dashing Nils Asther. Josef loves working for the prince because he not only admires him but wishes to emulate him... especially when it comes to the prince's wooing technique, for the prince has a reputation of being a "great lover". One of his favorite methods of enchanting women is by candlelight. This method involves Josef turning …

Join or Die is a film about why you should join a club—and why the fate of America depends on it. Screening on Saturday February 24 in NYC at 3.30pm at FIT. Tickets and more info here. (Thanks Casper)

I know you’ll never read this, but I’m putting this (digital) note in a (digital) bottle and lobbing it into the (digital) oceans anyway. We probably weren’t as close as we should have been. A lot of little reasons for that, but it was what it was. Still, we were family and that’s what mattered. But you were one of the first people to look past my daughter’s disability and …

At the Green Jello show the other day, the singer opened with the following anecdote: This is what's left over, after the comedy night here tonight? Did you know there was a big comedy night here? Nah? It was fuckin' packed! It was jam packed, line around the corner! We pull over after driving 82 fuckin' hours to get here, and we're like wow, look at that fuckin' line down …

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 …