Recently updated blogs

Something had been bugging me for a while; I had a legacy shortcode that would render external links, when really I wanted to use markdown to improve portability. Hundreds of instances lurked within dozens of markdown files, waiting for the day where I update my site and they all break. I’ve also changed my position on external links. I want to let the user and browser decide on how links …

This popular annual event returns to KCL on 17th May 2024. This one day event features a range of papers of original research in all areas of film culture in Britain and areas affected by British colonialism before 1930. It will take place at the Lucas Theatre, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS Please see below for the schedule and detailed abstracts. You can book via the KCL estore …

A game show for the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society This is the long story of a frivolous, fleeting creative project that came out of nowhere, completely took over my life for a few weeks, and was gone as quickly as it came. Let it be known that I regret none of it! I’m a proud member of the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society. In the organization’s own words: We carry on …

What We Do In The Shadows, S05 E09Some crazy vampirical plotting is afoot.

Hi! I’ve moved all the content to my own blog. See you there!

Listen to upcoming artists at your favorite venues, all on Spotify. Updated every Monday. Put in your city, put in a venue. It doesn’t 100% work for all – e.g., Seattle’s Chop Suey doesn’t seem to hook up correctly – but mostly you’ll get back a Spotify playlist with one song from each upcoming headliner at that venue. A theme you’ve heard from me before: It’s a lot easier to …

Hello, it's Tom Robinson with my final BBC Introducing Mixtape before handing over to my friend and BBC colleague Emily Pilbeam from Monday 22 April 2024. This the second of two retrospective programmes showcasing a cross-section of my favourite tunes from the last 16 years. This week we present: PAUL MORRICONE , FEMME, ATHLETES IN PARIS , AMY HOPWOOD , HOPE & SOCIAL, BRAPURPLE, NEPHU HUZZBAND, STICK IN THE WHEEL, …

The 37th Annual Irish Economic Association Conference will take place at the Galway Bay Hotel, Salthill, Galway from Wednesday 8th to Friday 10th May 2024. The keynote speakers are Prof. Costas Meghir, Douglas A. Warner III Professor of Economics at Yale University, and Prof. Lucrezia Reichlin, Professor of Economics at London Business School. The programme for this year’s conference is now available to view at https://iea2024.exordo.com/programme. Please note that the …

Four years ago this production was supposed to happen – the pandemic happened instead. On the occasion of Alan Ayckbourn’s 85th birthday, however, I thought it was high time that I reshared my thoughts about why working on this theatre giant’s plays is always a delight

Easter is a holiday that I like more and more. We don’t have any special traditions, we do what we like and what we do one year might be completely different from the year before. I like that the plans can be somewhat undecided and rather spontaneous. The Easter egg hunt for the kids, and lots of delicious food are two things we don’t change though. I love to watch …

Link: https://tenacity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/When writing code or tests in Python, one issue I had was when the code would fail due to random things like network issues or external peripherals not responding in time. Just rerunning the tests would make them pass. The unreliability wasn't in the code but in things out of my control, like network issues.So I had to add extra code to retry the code, but this added unnecessary …

Reluctant to wait for the first translations of Mircea Cărtărescu’s latest novel to start coming out in the second half of 2024, I taught myself enough Romanian to read it in the original. This “pseudo-historical novel”, as the author prefers … Continue reading →

As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I was able to get something half-decent working in a couple of hours.

This post was inspired by the Turba philosophorum lecture on the 4th Feb 2022 An athanor is an alchemical furnace, but what exactly does it mean in practise? And I really do mean practise because there is copious evidence for early modern alchemists building and using furnaces for their work even if we do not have such good evidence for earlier times. (The problem here as well is that translations …

[This post has been auto-deleted several times, presumably at the request of Carla Rossi, and every time it is reviewed, Google reinstates it quickly ... again and again]A couple of weeks ago I said on social media that I would blog about the very earliest origin of the plagiarism accusations against Carla Rossi, so here it is.In several of her many attempts at self-defence, Rossi says that the only basis …