Recently updated blogs

I love that browsers are now shipping new CSS features that may not necessarily have been fully baked yet behind feature flags. I can’t actually pinpoint the exact date or event that started this, but my personal observation (because I was there) tags it at the development of CSS grid. If you were not around for it, all the major browsers supported the stable version of CSS grid within 8 …

Speaking of Conservatives losing, Andre Tartar and Demetrios Pogkas for Bloomberg show the other end with party gains. Angled arrows have become a staple to visualize net differences for regions on a map, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen the shaft of the arrow double as a stacked bar. Colors represent party gains. The head color represents the winner. Tags: Bloomberg, election

Figure 1. Survey done in 1949 by 17-year-old George Washington, County Surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia. Source: https://virginiahistory.org/learn/george-washington-land-surveyor. I learned two things about George Washington’s early life in school: the cherry tree “I cannot tell a lie” story (ironically, this tale about honesty is now thought to have been totally fabricated by biographer Mason Weems — it first appears in the 5th edition of The Life of Washington in 1806, …

SEGURA, Alain. Une saison avec Marianne: la dernière surréaliste. Bassac: Plein chant (coll. « La font secrète »), 2022 SEGURA, Alain. A Season with Marianne: The Last Surrealist. Trans. Bill Brown. Brooklyn: Common Notions, Dec. 2024 We are excited to announce the translation of Une saison avec Marianne, to be released in December 2024 by Common Notions (who also published our book a few years ago). Best remembered as the …

A gift from Bonner to a budding woodworker On this this July 4th holiday I’m re-posting this tribute to a woodworker and mentor, Bonner Hall. Bonner Hall stooped down and flicked a Japanese beetle off the barely open rose blossom. He paused to relish the fragrance and take in the beauty unfolding before him. Bonner was sixty years my senior, quiet, spent most of his time putzing in his rose …

A great little documentary about the history of breakdancing. It's in multiple parts, check out the channel for the full playlist. [View video on Youtube] [View video on Invidious (tracking-free)]

Denis Izotov is a graphic designer from Moscow. He specializes in packaging and print design. For a long time, Denis worked at a record label where he collaborated with several well-known bands in Russia. He is currently a senior designer at Alpina Publishing Group. He can be found on Instagram @deni_izotov.Here he takes us through a year-long labour of love - redesigning the works of his favourite author, Eduard Limonov. …

In what looks like a very smart move, the team at Mastodon just released a very nice new feature for media organizations, journalists and bloggers: when someone shares a link to an article by certain news outlets like The Verge, MacStories, or MacRumors, the official Mastodon app as well as the web version will now show a direct link to an author’s fediverse profile. What is primarily aimed at journalists …

The Commodore Amiga Port of Cecconoid -- by Ian Ford [h0ffman] & published by Thalamus -- is out! As you can see, Thalamus have put serious care and attention into the production of the big box version, and it really is special. Massive thanks to Andy Roberts for the tireless work, over many months, putting this together. You can order your copy, here. When I was working on Cecconoid, back …

I've been at this old beer writing game for a long time, which is likely why I don't do it nearly as much as I used to. Thanks to the What's Doing archive, though, I can sometimes be reunited with stuff I wrote way back when I were a lad. What is (painfully) reproduced below, is one of these. When I say I have been banging on about the Beer …

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. …

Over the years I’ve written several open source libraries. They’re mostly unglamorous and utilitarian, but a bunch of them obtained got a decent download count, so I thought it would be fun to try and get a grand total and show a ‘live’ download counter on my blog. This is how that looks like: My open source packages were downloaded roughly 138945563 times. Like most live counters, this number isn’t …

If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity], an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which, over fifty years later, is …

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 …