Recently updated blogs

I like riding bicycles. The Tanglefoot Moonshiner is a very, very weird bike. It's also an excellent bike. It might just be the perfect bicycle for Northern New England in 2024. moonSHINin' When we lived in Colorado, I thought mountain biking was ridiculous. A bunch of Lycra-clad crazies riding lifts to the top of giant mountains to try to zoom down as fast as possible on bermy trails that might …

Steve Wasserman and I go back. In 1971 he was a student in the American Studies honors seminar I was teaching, or faking, at Berkeley. In 1979, when he was an Op Ed editor at the Los Angeles Times, he asked me to write a premature obituary for John Wayne, which, as it happens, was the right time for me and for the story. I was lucky to write for …

Over at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander digs into the science behind anti-obesity drug Ozempic, and the subsequent array of secondary effects that have emerged in the scientific literature. “GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. “There’s a pattern in fake …

"My participation in diet culture was not only time-consuming, but mind-consuming"

I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’. The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, …

Last month, I started full-time on a new startup. It’s early days, but we’re having a lot of fun. A startup, fundamentally, is a search for a repeatable, scalable business model. You rapidly try things, run experiments, learn, and iterate your theories about how to build a useful product that people love. This experimental nature makes many founders reluctant to talk about their startups early on. What if I share …

The Tenor Commodordion is an ergonomically improved version of the Commodordion.

Books After completing my visit to the Sir John Soane's Museum, I headed to the British Library to see which of their First Folios is currently on display. Fortunately it isn't the copy exhibited at the Shakespeare North Playhouse last November but a different one to tick off the list (or make bold and put [IRL] afterwards), with the shelf mark C.39.k.15 and available to also view online at First …

I broke the XML on my MLP Atom feed with unescaped HTML. Good times. Retro. Very early this millennia vibe. I got to visit the W3C Feed Validator which is a time capsule of a site. Confirmed that modern news aggregators for the most part still don’t rely on feeds to be valid XML. Except Slack. Slack’s aggregator apparently does. Got me wondering if it was possibly still Magpie under …

An adventure you say? Alex was keen to get me on a kayak so we planned a trip to Loch Laidon via loch Ba. I gazed at the map and it did not look too bad – the river that connects Ba to Laidon is around 2 miles and on one report it stated that it was 95% paddling with about 5% pulling the kayak. On the day it turned …

This set of week-notes is a bit of a catch-up on one guitar I’ve been fixing up, and another I started reworking a little. Whilst it’s easier to get people excited about new builds, every luthier I’ve met does work to maintain, repair or restore old guitars. Even the best guitar if it’s being used will need occasional work: new strings being the most frequent and obvious one that most …

Howdy to Deliberate Internet – my newsletter combining nuanced perspectives on Remote Work, Technology, Psychology, and other latest obsessions. Guilt, like pain, is a very useful signal: It means you are doing something you should not be doing. So when we feel guilty about “not being productive enough”, why do we do the same thing twice as hard? In this issue of Deliberate Internet, I’m going to share my simple …

Had a very nice and special POTA activation of DE-0094 Niedersächsisches Wattenmeer National Park: Conditions were rough but I've managed to get 16 stations into my log, including two from the Azores. It was great to sit on a dyke, watch people kite and enjoy the view of the sea while talking to stations all over Europe. My rig was the usual: Xiegu G90 and a 5.4m long telescopic vertical …

Weibo Fu wrote an interesting paper on upper bounds for spaces of Bianchi modular forms, pushing previous results of Simon Marshall and Yongquan Hu to get more or less optimal results in the weight aspect. More generally, for any number … Continue reading →

Tamara Andreeva in 1930 Nearly a decade ago, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, of which I was not yet the editor, I reported on some of the earliest discoveries I made on my long search for the voices of LA’s Russophone past. Among them was the journal The Land of Columbus (Zemlya Columba), which folded after two issues in 1936 and 1937. As I wrote in 2015, …