Recently updated blogs

Is Steely Dan cool these days? Or is it the case that they’re deeply unfashionable? Either way, every person should make it their mission in life to listen to The Nightfly by Donald Fagen (the lead singer of Steely Dan). If I was writing one of those ‘100 Albums You Must Listened To Before You Die’ lists it would definitely feature.The reason I mention this record is that there is …

Source: Alan Bennett, extract from ‘Seeing Stars’, London Review of Books, vol. 24 no. 1, 3 January 2002, pp. 12-16, reproduced with slight emendations in Untold Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 160-173 Text: In the 1940s within a mile or so of where we lived in Armley in Leeds there were at least half a dozen cinemas. Nearest was the Picturedrome on Wortley Road but others were just …

"Dark matter makes up 85% of the universe. Recent scientific theory suggests dark matter is information—a fifth form of matter—and that we can wake it up. But waking it up can let dark things out.James Callis is Dr. John Carnack. Five years ago, his dark matter experiments led to tragedy. His redemption is working for the Department of Midnight, investigating dangerous dark matter experiments, trying to prevent further disasters. But …

I was going through the blog archive the other day and noticed that it's coming up on three years since I started reviewing again. Three years! The time has flown by for me. I also noticed that I'm posting way less often than I used to, which is a little depressing. At this point I have an enormous backlog of dolls that I'm dying to look at! I always set …

Fonts: Brauer Neue, Agentur

CORS, and the browser’s same-origin policy are often misunderstood. I’m going to explain what they are and what you need to do to stop worrying about them.Note: I’m going to talk about CORS and the same-origin policy as one thing and use the terms mostly interchangeably. This is because they are basically one system, they work together to decide what you can do with what cross-origin resources. Basically if your …

I found out today that the UW-Madison library has digitized copies of old Wright Directories of Madison. A Wright Directory is kind of like the white pages, but it also has a section where people are listed in order of their address, and it lists peoples’ occuptations as well as their phone numbers. I’d never heard of this book until earlier this week when AB and I ran across the …

Paulo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest, c. 1465–1470 This post is a work in progress about a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. The Saturday talks were all recorded, and videos will be up in three or four weeks; when the video of my talk goes up, I will a.) feel slightly sick and b.) link to it here. The …

I moved to Kaohsiung City in January 2023 after falling in love with its arty, relaxed vibe. Now, one-and-a-half years later, I’ve nearly mastered its pronunciation.There are two complicating factors when it comes to pronouncing Kaohsiung:Chinese is a tonal languageTaiwan has different ways of romanizing Chinese wordsLet’s ignore the tones for a moment—ignoring tones is something I’m unintentionally good at—and focus on the spelling.Although Taiwan has officially used the Hanyu …

It isn’t, as the Celestron website one-sidedly states on its page about observing Pluto, a “fun holiday to celebrate.” What today is is the anniversary of a terrible day for science and knowledge, a day in which a very political vote was taken, which has done tremendous harm to science education and communication over the last 18 years.“It” is the 18th anniversary of the highly controversial vote by four percent …

The open-air Voss Folkemuseum in Voss, Norway, is a wonderful place to visit. They have a great museum with a number of farming artifacts, and folk arts. Some of the most interesting artifacts are historic chests. Two examples are shown below, illustrating differing forms of assembly. These chests are both small, and simple in construction. The first uses butt joints fastened using wooden dowels or pins. The second chest uses …

Reflecting on my reading over the past year, I have found that I have been drawn to a considerable amount of historical fiction, most of which takes the lives of marginalised women as a starting point. Here are my top recommendations in this genre – as usual, in no particular order. The Maiden by Kate Foster In June I did a literary walking tour of Edinburgh (I know, a book …

Just learned this evening that my Mom has passed away.Not much to say right now. Lots to process. She was an exceptionally good person, a medical pro who cared about everyone.Not sure if I'll have much else to say on the matter. Just, marking the day, I suppose. Hug 'em if you got 'em.

In the past several years I've seen a number of posts attacking the company AirBnb, which is fine, but often they go further and attack the general concept of short-term housing rental outside of hotels. These posts have struck me as oblivious at best, and sometimes even callously indifferent. I rarely hear arguments in favor of short-term housing rental outside of travel industry promotion, so I wanted to give my …

I like the background() function in P5.js. It accepts one or multiple parameters and is very easy to use. Setting the background color is often one of the first steps when starting a new P5.js sketch. function setup() { background(200); } When comes to CSS Doodle, the background color is usually defined within the :doodle block, which indicates that the color is applied directly to the component element. @grid: 1 …