Recently updated blogs

I've been pondering my love of reverberations. Last week, I received a request from a very kind listener: the filmmaker Grace Wang suggested a Linda Rondstadt track, and my first impulse was to drown it in static and reverb. Why?Perhaps the answer is simple: echos and fog generate mystery. In 1973, the painter Gerhard Richter said, "I've never found anything lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can …

I was struck by something important to understand during my recent trip to Africa. I was carrying two new (to me) "pocket cameras," the Fujifilm X100VI and the Leica D-Lux8, alongside my usual top-end mirrorless kit. Curiously, my initial impression of both the compact cameras changed. When I had unboxed them, I was frustrated with the Leica and familiar with the Fujifilm (uses the same menu structure and controls as …

As the days tick down to the major European retail property show, MAPIC, on the South coast of France in Cannes the key themes to be covered have been highlighted at a preview event in London. Catherine Stevenson, Cushman & Wakefield This year’s exhibitors and speakers will again highlight the ongoing move away from old school retail involving simply flogging goods to a broader proposition. Whereas back in 2020 75% …

Until recently, Adobe Lightroom Classic was more of a heavy user of a computer's CPU and RAM, than the graphics processing unit (GPU). However, the AI denoise functionality introduced in 2023 has significantly changed the goalposts. The AI denoise functionality is extremely reliant on powerful "AI enabled" GPUs. So which graphics cards work well, and which don't? There are only limited benchmarks available, so this article is based on a …

As long as computers have existed, we've had the desire to type funny little symbols into them. Until emoji was standardized globally in the 2010s, though, we really didn't have that many options for typing funny characters—unless you had a computer with dingbat fonts. Windows users of a certain era probably remember the Wingdings font that came with the operating system, but for many people that was probably their only …

I’m not at all surprised Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff is a European import (translated by Jenna Allen). It pretty much has to be, given the subject matter: a woman as famous for whom she slept with as what she wrote, and when she wrote, her work involved sex and desire. (Plus, a lot of biographical comics seem to start outside the US.) What struck me …

I got friends in New York City‘Cause everyone I know left townThat’s the place your daily dreams goWhere you can’t see the sun go down Hold your head up, you’re a beaconYou pull me northward in my carYou don’t have to hit the big time, babyWe know who you are I got friends in LA CountyWhere the hillsides shine like starsAnd the people float like gold dustThrough the red rope …

The Iliad and the Odyssey are often regarded as being among the greatest works of world literature and many people have an interest in reading them—but how does one go about starting? Which translations are the best? In what manner should one read them? In this post, I will give advice in response to all these questions and discuss both the strengths and shortcomings of the most widely read translations, …

Explore Satellite Imagery of 59,507 Basketball Courts

Like most academics these days, I spend a lot of time filling in online forms. Mostly, this is just an annoyance but occasionally I get something out of it. A recent survey in which the higher-ups tried to get an idea of how the workforce was feeling, asked the question “Do you think of the University as We or They?”. Unsurprisingly given my reference to “higher-ups”, my answer was “They”. …

In the forgotten age of the Mystical Kingdom, nestled beyond the reach of time, a serene land flourished under the protection of The Gleam. This ethereal force bathed the world in golden light, its brilliance illuminating even the darkest corners of human hearts. People lived in harmony, unaware of the shadows stirring beneath their feet.Yet deep in the bowels of the earth, beneath the pastoral hills, a dark art festered—necrosorcery, …

The readableContentGuide(docs) API was (and still is) such a quintessential quality of life fix for UIKit developers. With the rise of # h u g e iPad devices emerging with iOS 9, the need to reasonably size views primarily meant for reading became important. As such, Cupertino & Friends© gifted us a straightforward way to do just that: private func setupTableView() { tableView = UITableView(frame: .zero, style: .grouped) tableView.dataSource = …

The Pentium as a Navajo weaving (\(\mathbb{M}\)), a 1994 rug by Marilou Schultz in the the National Gallery of Art designed from an image of the Intel Pentium integrated circuit. On matching algorithms to solve single rows, columns, and boxes of sudoku puzzles (\(\mathbb{M}\)). As mentioned in my first blog post, 19 years ago. The 2024 arXiv accessibility forum (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Planar point sets with forbidden four-point patterns and few distinct …

Solar powered.

I've written a number of pieces on this blog about various Alabama maps; one of these days I may put together a post that's a list of those posts. At any rate, here we are again.Son Amos and I were recently going through some of the endless stuff around our house and came across this map of Hoover. We both agreed these kinds of graphic maps are pretty neat.This map …