Recently updated blogs

I'm really proud to announce that my new book, Dinosaurs to Chickens: How Evolution Works, is out now. This is a book that I would have devoured as a kid, as it makes critical connections between modern and prehistoric animals. Growing up it felt like we learned about two totally separate groups of animals: extinct dinosaurs and living everything else. The dinosaurs had their time, and now modern species had …

At this point we may have recorded all of the instrumental parts. I mean, we reserve the right to add a trombone here or a french horn there, maybe a synth part, etc., but for now we have got all the instruments recorded according to the current plan. Next month we’ll work on backing and […]

I carried out a preliminary excursion a few days in advance of Terminalia. I wanted to check if there was any safe and legal route I could take from the Beech Woods to Fulbourn Road. The Beech Woods are immediately South of the Worts Causeway, a road which sits on the boundary of the City and South Cambs District, at the Southern extremity of Cherry Hinton City Council Ward. But …

WHAT I SMELL: L’ÂME D’IRIS opens with a tender embrace of cashmere iris, warmed by a subtle kiss of mandarin. Dreamy from the first spritz, it feels like a celestial whisper. As time unfolds, the soft perfume is gently powdered with violet, replacing the mandarin’s sparkle. A familiar note of makeup emerges, fresh and promising, hinting at a glamorous evening ahead. Yet, this is no ordinary night; it’s an opera-worthy …

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient …

The Breaking IceNana (Zhou Dongyu) is a tour guide whose dropped off the face of the earth from her family, constantly dreaming about her previous life as a figure skater before an accident injured her body. Hao Feng (Liu Haoran) is a tourist in town for a wedding who seems to be enamored with dangling his body on the edges of tall places and almost daring himself to jump. Han …

Never toured the inside of the Houses of Parliament before, seeing all the red and green colour coded areas (lords and commons – look at the benches next time you see debates in either place) and busts and statues of some of the shapers, for better or worse, of much … Click to continue reading this post → The post Westminster Wonders appeared first on Asymptotia.

A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to get better results, and what else you searched for before and after. That then applies …

In yesterday's post, we looked at a vintage photoshoot from the mid-'50s that featured some rather peculiar bikinis. Today, let's travel further back in time while staying on the same topic, as we explore a feature published in Life magazine in its July 9, 1945, issue. The cover model, 20-year-old Paddy Ellerton, sported a striped panung bathing suit with trunks that buttoned up the sides and the magazine included an …

A few stunners from a yearly delight – the Flower Exhibition at the Carbon County, Penna Fair. All shot with a fully manual TTArtisan 50mm f/1.2 on a Canon digital back (the TT is a $100 corker of a Chinese copy of a ZEISS Sonnar 50mm, amazing build quality & response. More here) Shooting fully manual was a joy that late afternoon – gold, creamy light soaked everything. Beyond exposure …

A dataset of 187 thousand high resolution face images from movie trailers! Download it from huggingface. # Before the advent of giant web scale image datasets FFHQ used to be considered a big dataset full of images of faces on which many, many GANs were trained. One of the many issues with FFHQ (side note: don’t get me wrong there are lots of others, but I was focused on this …

I realize I don’t need ruler to draw little house this since every line is organic and natural. Same for its construction. Just nearby resources, simplicity, easy and can be made in a few days with help of family and friends. The result is something in harmony with the place. I guess this is real wisdom.I saw that giant lizard around my hut most of the days there. Quite scary …

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 …

The rise and fall of our interest in progress?