Recently updated blogs

I was invited to give a talk to a graduate-level NLP class about my work on Filipino resources. It was fun preparing and giving that talk because I was able to synthesize my thoughts and look back on my previous research. This blog post is my lecture in text format. You can find the slides in this link. Finally, thank you to Dr. Charibeth Cheng for the invitation! Given all …

by Laura Luebbert and Lior Pachter Background (by LL) Four years ago, during the first year of my PhD at Caltech, I participated in a journal club organized by the lab I was rotating in. I was assigned two classic papers on the honeybee waggle dance: “Visually Mediated Odometry in Honeybees” (Srinivasan et al., JEB 1997)1 and “Honeybee Navigation: Nature and Calibration of the ‘Odometer’” (Srinivasan et al., Science 2000)2. …

Patrice Lejeune and W. Patrick Edwards show off their creations, the "Treasure Box" series, 2008-2024. When the economic crash of 2008 happened, all our business plans for making expensive marquetry furniture changed. We needed to revise our approach to creating new and exiciting objects in order to follow the money which was still available in a dramatically changed market. Previously we had had little difficulty in selling objects that involved …

Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in […]

This review of a Nottingham restaurant is a break from the Picky Glutton’s usual London-based coverage. I occasionally wonder what Japanese people think of the Japanese food they encounter outside the Home Islands. There must inevitably be a mixture of curiosity, bewilderment, mirth, along with more outright negative sentiments too. But kept politely bottled up, of course. Everyday People in Nottingham doesn’t claim be a traditional ramen-ya, but it’s similar …

Every few years, I remember that the whole reason I started woodworking was that I needed to build bookshelves for my family. Some things don’t change. When we moved into this house a year ago, we had big plans to turn our front room into a proper home library, complete with a whole wall of built-in bookcases. But as of last month, most of our books were still in boxes. …

Crossness Pumping Station is one of those amazing places that are always worth revisiting. It looks pretty snazzy outside, but inside will consistently take your breath away. And it was designed to do so – even if its purpose was pumping sewage. Victorian London had a sewage problem. As the city and its population grew and grew, removing ‘night soil’ became more and more of a challenge. ‘Solutions’ included dumping …

Back in 2014 I published the first edition of my Rudy Van Gelder Collector’s Discography. That version focused on albums I was interested in collecting at the time and didn’t contain any albums recorded after 1965. In 2020 I gave the discography a minor update, adding some smaller independent labels as well as ... More→

Excuse the corny title and associated video but I couldn’t resist it. What3Words’s accounts for 2023 have just been published and the cynics who have doubted W3W’s commercial model were confounded by the outstanding progress that the company has made in 2023. Here are a few highlights to save you reading through 45 pages. Revenues surged by 28% to break through the £1m barrier for the first time Employee numbers …

Imagen generada con Dall-e 3 La semana pasada, exactamente el 16 de junio, fue el 18º aniversario de Ikkaro. En estos 18 años he visto evolucionar la blogosfera, las redes sociales e Internet en general. Lo que veo no me gusta, todo parece haberse desvirtuado y no se cumple ninguna de las expectativas que teníamos de la WWW. Pero echamos un vistazo al pasado y al presente y no hace …

My 2018 12.9 iPad Pro has been one of my greatest tech purchases. I’ve used it nearly every day for the last 5.5 years, and it’s still in great shape. Why upgrade now? While I’m not an artist, I love my Apple Pencil for taking notes, sketching my thoughts, and drawing; andwhen I tried the Apple Pencil Pro in a store the other day, I really liked the new squeeze …

Imagine you’ve set up a shiny new crowdsourcing project. How do you let people who might potentially want to volunteer online know about it? Here’s how we did it for one of our final crowdsourcing projects on Living with Machines. We called it the ‘language of mechanisation‘ internally, but you might have seen them as […]

Jhanas – a series of altered mental states that are accessed via concentration – are often described as an “advanced meditation practice,” a phrase that suggests that one must be a skilled meditator to access them: just as only a skilled outdoorsman would embark upon an expedition to the Arctic Circle. It implies that meditation exists on a spectrum of difficulty, with perhaps mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace on …

The Golden Rule of Game Promotion: No One Cares About Your Game (YouTube) Thomas Reisenegger gives a fascinating and actionable overview of how to think about marketing indie games. Some principles are timeless; others are targeted to the current social media landscape. My favorite insight (and one that has frustrated me when it isn’t followed) is that all your marketing should “work for the newcomers”. It’s important to remember that …

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