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I can't stop thinking about this quote from Ted Chiang (originally snipped by Simon Willison). Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When …

Simon Mullings – “Spike” – died at the weekend while on holiday in Scotland. Most people reading this would have known him, I guess, as the bass player for 80s indie band The Snapdragons whose songs included Dole Boys on Futons We were closest between 2020 and 2022. By then, we’d both been working for […]

From the Garbage Day newsletter, some reflections on the connection between virality and popularity (highlights mine): The conclusion I’ve come to this summer — one I’m still not totally sure I fully believe yet — is that what’s really happening here is that virality is decoupling from popularity. And I think you could even argue that the very idea that mass appeal had to be accurately reflected back at us …

A Trainmaster is a person in charge of the movement of trains in a division or subdivision of a railroad. A Train Master is a diesel locomotive, designated H24-66, built by the Fairbanks-Morse company. Two Words. Train Master.This story began decades ago, long before The Shifter. Facing the big Five-Oh soon I decided to revisit some old projects. This quickly rose to the top of the list. Look for more …

Mars Express was launched by the European Space Agency in 2003, and is ESA’s first Mars mission. In one shot, you can see Mars as a half-lit disk, with Phobos, its tiny moon, hovering above. Right below Phobos is Olympus Mons, the solar system's largest volcano, towering 22 km high and 600 km across—or as the Bad Astronomer says, “about the size of Colorado”.Posted by Andrea Luck, by way of …

I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does, instead of sleeping), and one particular slide jumped out at me: It’s a little graphic advertising the different kinds of modeling software that are part of something called the SIERRA framework, as part of a pretty standard “overview” presentation on computer modeling …

I normally try to avoid arousing the trolls on our local Nextdoor site, but occasionally I get interested in a particular item. Such was the case the other day when one of our local curmudgeons posted an announcement for a newly formed group that is opposing the city’s plans to build a new water treatment plant. The current plant is about 80 years old, nearing the end of its useful …

This traditional Neapolitan spaghetti frittata recipe is a fabulous was to use up leftover spaghetti. You can eat this frittata hot or cold and serve it as part of a buffet. potluck or with an aperitif. This classic version includes eggs, two kinds of cheese (parmigiano and scamorza) and pancetta. History Spaghetti frittata, also known... The post Spaghetti frittata appeared first on The Pasta Project.

Acknowledgements The code in this post is indebted (and in some cases wholly ripped off from) work by the glorious Finn Lindgren, who emailed me some code to do this probably a decade ago. Yes I am behind on my emails. Finn’s code can be found here as part of the glorious INLAbru project. Code availability The code from this post can be found in my github repo. The time …

Featuring sessions from Papa Wemba and Pavement.Listen HerePutters - Muscle Car (Empty)Pavement - Secret Knowledge Of Back Roads (Session)The Moles - What's The New Mary Jane (Ringers Lactate)Papa Wemba - Madilamba (Session)The Fall - Arid Al's Dream (Volume)Zubbizeretta - Don't You Do It (Bass Sphere)Kill Subil - Lucid (Empty)Babes In Toyland - Sometimes (Volume)Cobra - Hearse (Penthouse)Flophouse - Right Now (Harp)Pavement - Kentucky Cocktail (Session)Aquastep - Oempa Loempa Instrumental (Wonka …

My proposals and invoices now include carbon emissions data, because even the smallest public acts might encourage others to take action too. My guess: it feels easier to take some climate action if you see that others are already taking steps, even if those steps are small. If that’s true, it’s worth showing people that climate action is real, and part of the world already. A Holdfast Projects invoice includes …

Contributed by Stephen ColesSource: www.flickr.com Kit Karzen/Harris for President. License: All Rights Reserved. The Kamala Harris 2024 campaign identity, designed by Wide Eye Creative, is built around Sans Plomb, a condensed gothic not unlike the Bureau Grot used by Wide Eye for Harris’s 2020 primary bid – in turn inspired by Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign. This time, though, the typeface is from a French foundry, rather than from Anglo-American origins …

Creative incoherence – human and penguin Twenty years ago I wrote about the intriguing imaginary ‘language’ spoken by the much loved cartoon character Pingu, a charming animated penguin. In August 2024, in a short but comprehensive video documentary, France Culture reviewed almost the entire history of the creative use of gibberish (in French ‘charabia‘), also known as ‘Grammelot’ or ‘Macaronic Language’, in performances on stage, in public, in poetry and …

The latest issue of Henry and Glenn has some nostalgic and/or cursed images for punk rock and/or Dell Comics fans:

Back in the late 80s, my mom bought me a 386sx 16MHz computer equipped with a 2400 baud modem. It was my first computer that enabled me to connect to an online world. Back then, there was large behemoths like AOL and CompuServe but there were also independent services called bulletin board systems, aka BBSs. A BBS was somewhat of a one-to-one connection. Most independent BBSs had only one or …