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Prolific Texas songwriter/legend Bill Baird shares an enchanting video for the gorgeous opening track from Astral Suitcase, one of two stellar new albums that Bill released simultaneously this month... Continue reading…

Science fiction and fantasy media regularly include magical or exaggerated substances as essential parts of the story. In this piece, I explore my top fantasy metals that appear in movies, comics, literature, and other popular media. When starting out my research, I found an overwhelming array of fantasy metals with more showing up all the time, particularly in role-playing games. I picked eight, with the first example being more of …

“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read aloud from a newspaper. Ironically enough the book itself is one of Dickens’s least exuberant performances, written in his maturity, and with enormous and …

In the past two weeks I posted on the arXiv two very different papers. One is in Discrete Geometry (joint with Karim Adiprasito) and another is in Asymptotic Group Theory (joint with Martin Kassabov). Both are fundamentally combinatorial, resolve (or at least advance) some rather old open problems, and leave some room for future work. And both are completely constructive, in a way a combinatorialist would appreciate. If there is …

After learning more about the history behind my Grandparents' idyllic home, I have taken away some valuable lessons about adapting financial strategies to fit the times we live in. The post What My Grandma Paid to Build Her Home Will Shock You! (Really, it will!) first appeared on Financial Mechanic. The post What My Grandma Paid to Build Her Home Will Shock You! (Really, it will!) appeared first on Financial …

This is the 3rd post in a small series we did on form accessibility. If you missed the second post, check out “Managing User Focus with :focus-visible“. In this post we are going to look at using a screen reader when navigating a form, and also some best practices. Editor’s Note: Edits were made throughout in regard to some of the best practices and code sample additions. If you have …

This is a small utility that I wrote to compliment git bisect. git bisect is a fantastic tool. In the most basic usage you give it one “good” commit (a commit that doesn’t yet include some property) and at least one “bad” commit (one that does have it). git bisect will then guide you through the search, picking commits to test that cut the search space in half. This allows …

Nobody has to build the next Facebook or TikTok. Are you familiar with Kevin Kelly’s essay “1,000 True Fans”? The former editor of Wired Magazine writes about how finding your niche and serving a limited number of people with an exceptional product which is just tailored to them specifically can be more rewarding and more easily attainable. It’s a fallacy to think that true success is only possible if you …

One may observe an axis, or a “spectrum”, along which free and open source software licenses can be organized, where one end is “permissive” and the other end is “copyleft”. It is important to acknowledge, however, that though copyleft can be found at the opposite end of an axis with respect to permissive, it is not synonymous with the linguistic antonym of permissive – that is, copyleft licenses are not …

I've made it a rule not to cover compilations, best of's, greatest hits, etc. as I'd rather introduce you to records released as discrete snapshots of a band or musician at a particular point in time. However, I'm making an exception to that rule today. But, as you can imagine, since this is a collection of tracks that are already considered great, it's gonna to be difficult to pick just …

I remember the first time I met Gareth Ward. Not the initial lunch – a steal at £55 back then – or the lengthy tasting dinner that same night he upsold us to. It was the bit after, that after service twilight where the counters are cleaned down whilst bills are settled and hazy friendships formed. We sat briefly in the bar, thumbing through record collections and discussing 90’s hip …

Last fall and early winter I posted a series of four blogposts (here, here, here, and here) about or related to Ralph Hawtrey as I was trying to gather my thoughts about an essay I wanted to write about Hawtrey as a largely forgotten pioneer of macroeconomics who has received the attention of two recent books by Robert Hetzel and Clara Mattei. After working on and off on the essay …

Film Companion piece on most streamed shows released in India, done in partnership with Ormax Recently, the media criticism platform Film Companion partnered with Ormax on a regular feature which listed the five most viewed Hindi TV shows and movies on Indian streaming for the week.[1] The feature notes that “streaming platforms are notorious for their lack of transparency allowing them to quote numbers that are tough to verify”.[2] They …

The Enlightenment produced many great thinkers, but Immanuel Kant stands out as one of the most influential philosophers in history. As celebrations take place around the world to mark the 300th anniversary of his birth, it’s an ideal time to reflect on his legacy in the world of rare book collecting. While Kant may be most renowned for his work in philosophy, his books reveal contributions in areas as diverse …