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(One of my summaries of the Dutch PyUtrecht meetup in Utrecht, NL). Joris started out as a bond trader, with his MSc in financial management. So definitively no programmer by education. Bond trading meant shouting on the stock market's floor, something that was in risk of being automated. So he moved on. In his case to Reuters, one of the two big financial information suppliers. Later he started using python …

"A microsecond passes, / I’m in memory’s territory— / a glazed light over alien shapes, / the land always speaking to me"

Ok, there are three kinds of mystery in stories--Classic 'What's Gonna Happen?' Mystery (diegetic mystery)This is a mystery to both the audience and the main characters in the story: They are wondering how events will play out (or, in the case of a Sherlock-Holmes-style-mystery have played out). What will happen to Jack, Wendy, and Danny in the Overlook Hotel is a 'What's Gonna Happen?" Mystery, as is who framed Roger …

most "blue zones," concentrated areas of supercentenarians, can be attributed to pension fraud or bad record-keeping #

What’s up, Internet? In the continued efforts to keep our young family entertained on the weekends we decended upon the Wellington Brick Show 2024 put on by the Wellington Lego User Group. If you think that all we do is attend Lego shows and exhibits, well, we don’t… There’s just a few of them on around the country at the moment 😛 We all really enjoyed the show. There was …

This weathervane was photographed from our hotel room window in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.This was our view from our hotel window, the Marriott Renaissance, located between Independence Hall and the Museum of the American Revolution. It was a beautiful, gilded weathervane, and it took a long time on Google Maps and the internet to figure out which historic building had this weathervane. Finally we discovered it was atop the Merchant Exchange Building. …

I love the way that Claire L. Evans writes. adactio.com/links/21423

It's rare for me to even mention anything with an internal combustion engine in relationship with PNAERC, but on occasion, something pops up that's cool enough that even I can't manage to find it uninteresting. And so, courtesy of some timely photos and information from our friend Bill Wall, I present the Evans Auto-Railer.Back in the 1930s, there was a small market for rail buses, with many of the examples …

The settlement of Hampstead sits within the London Borough of Camden, in north London, and is one of the capital city's most exclusive and expensive places to live. In fact Hampstead village has the highest concentration of millionaires in the country. The geology of the area meant that natural springs were present. Hampstead had its own Chalybeate spring (meaning the water had a high iron content), and this was regarded …

Last week the whole time I sat on the beach in front of the pounding waves my mind wasn’t on what I was doing. I wasn’t thinking about how to combat the conditions and winkle out a fish, in my head I was in the valley sitting beside a quiet, tree lined river. I tuned out the roar and rush of the breaking waves and in my head could only …

Just one quote from This Is a Philosopher on Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu, Wired, Mar 7, 2023: “Early in my new life as a late-blooming pothead, one thing that struck me was just what a crummy deal we in the West had been given, whereby all mind-altering substances had been prohibited and stigmatized, except for the one that has such negative medical and social consequences in its overuse as to …

I’ve got to say, I’m lurking in various pregnancy/“new parent” subreddits and it’s weird to me how often I see comments like “in our parents’ generation breastfeeding was discouraged” or “dads didn’t change nappies then” or whatever. I was born in the early 90s and my mum/aunts absolutely felt the same enormous pressure to make breastfeeding work as exists today… and the men did their fair share of active baby …

The vast majority of public race events build upon the help of unpaid volunteers. This had been obvious to me since the first running races I did and it didn’t take much longer for the urge to form to one day start “paying back the favor”. I figured when I’m old and grey, possibly injured or for some other reason couldn’t or wouldn’t run myself anymore, that would be a …

Apostle of Noncomformity “I’d say you’re always involved personally with the biography you’re writing, no matter how hard you work to muss the trail.” That’s what friend and fellow author James Marcus told me some time ago.He ought to know. He’s the celebrated author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, newly out with Princeton University Press. I’ve been following James’s long labor for …

L— was away for most of the week at a conference in Vienna and then taking a long route back on trains via Zurich and Paris. I entertained myself by cooking unreasonably spicy food and attempting to render some of Bashō’s haiku into English while still being haiku (according to an English concept of syllables). Some were more successful than others. 物いへば 唇寒し 秋の風 You might say it— but your …