Recently updated blogs

Back when I started this, the Internet was a lot more promising. You could assume that your words would be indelibly etched forever into the conciousness of humanity. I’ve seen the future, I can’t afford it Turns out, that’s not quite the truth. Corporate greed has overtaken the thirst for knowledge, one could write up a detailed passage of a certain Rock Group’s album developments or release dates, but for …

Hello everyone, this is a short housekeeping update episode. I wanted to point your attention to a new podcast project I've started. It's called CREATIVE JOURNEYS, and it's not so dissimilar to Travel Writing World. However, instead of focusing on travel literature, I'll be talking about creativity more broadly and interviewing different types of creative individuals from historians to photographers to artists and authors. We'll talk about process and practice …

for students | for scholars | for pleasure This blog is no longer being updated regularly with fresh content. Here are some self-study resources (including text and video) for those who would like to improve their academic skills, whether they are students or scholars (or dilletantes like me). For Students I have written a short paper that explains my approach here: “How to Write at University” (PDF). It is also …

Recently, I’ve been looking back at a collaborative project with John Becker of WROT Studio. The “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis” (2014) was a fictional design project we originally set in the vast limestone province of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. [Image: A rock-acid drip-irrigation hub for the “Institute for Controlled Speleogenesis,” a collaboration between BLDGBLOG and WROT Studio; all images in this post are by John Becker of WROT Studio.] The Nullarbor …

Hello all, Status updateSo.Mid-June saw me catch Covid again, which was a distinct lack of fun. I was wiped out for a good 10 days and am still feeling the its effect on my energy levels and mood three weeks later. As I approach the second anniversary of my Long-Covid it's put a bit of a damper on any sense of recovery I was feeling recently. Interestingly when Fiona inevitably …

Inforrm reported on a large number of defamation cases from around the world in 2023. Following a now established tradition, with my widely read posts on 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 defamation cases, I present my personal selection of the most legally and factually interesting cases from England, Australia, Canada and New Zealand from the past year – with three “bonus” cases from the US. After a haitus …

Episode 35 of the Ted Dabney Experience podcast is available now for your listening pleasure! If you enjoy reading ArcadeBlogger.com, you’ll love the other project I’m involved with: The Ted Dabney Experience Episode 35: Click to listen in Jeff Bell was a hardware engineer in Atari Inc’s coin-op division and officially the longest serving employee of the company; literally the last person to switch off the lights in 2004. Jeff …

Salvaging 18650 li-ion cells from dead battery pack of a ThinkPad T530.

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 …

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 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 […]