Recently updated blogs

“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality” once said director Tim Burton. Celebrated for his weird and wonderful imagination, Burton exemplifies the beauty of individuality, reminding us that we all come in different shapes, sizes, and states of mind. This October, we have the chance to explore the psyche of this artistic powerhouse in a major exhibition opening in London: The World of Tim Burton. To celebrate his exceptional career, …

Words Worth Books, Waterloo, ON Canada (Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)Before Words Worth Books, co-owner David W.’s background was in a used book store. If he wants to venture beyond the bookstore business he might have a future in comedy. A really funny and fun guy and the type of person you’d want to go have a beer with at …

Oh fuck i idly put on Kid A and accidentally let it get all the way to “Motion Picture Soundtrack”. 😭️😭️😭️ REEEED WIIIINE 😭️😭️😭️ AND SLEEEEEPIIIING PILLS 😭️😭️😭️😭️ HELP ME GET BACK T

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incredibly illegal friday weeknotes. i'm on a most wanted list for bloggers now i'm sure. really enjoying web curios for, would you believe it, curios on the web, like crowdwave. love the idea of this site a lot even if i high-key assume i am unintelligible without captions (and the site would be better with captions anyway!), i know some people will love it. researching for my talk next week …

Here’s a quick round-up of new music this week! The Headline Track: Sunday (1994) – “Blossom” Sunday (1994) has done it again with another perfect track in the form of “Blossom.” The band masterfully balances introspection with euphoria, and dark humour. Lines like “I’m not in possession of a Smith & Wesson / Or I’d decorate the ceiling / The Sistine of my feelings” strike a brilliant balance between wit …

Ship Statinfasst We’re embarking on a leisurely cruise through the highlights of Statistical Inference as Severe Testing [SIST]: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (CUP 2018) this fall (Oct-Jan), following the 5 seminars I led for a 2020 London School of Economics (LSE) Graduate Research Seminar. It was run entirely online due to Covid (as were the workshops that followed). In this new, relaxed (self-paced) journey, excursions that had …

In 1962, V. A. Antonov did some remarkable simulations showing that in Newtonian mechanics, gravitating systems can violate the usual rules of thermodynamics. Instead of reaching equilibrium they can get hotter and hotter! Suppose you put a lot of stars in a large sphere, and suppose (unrealistically) that they bounce elastically off the walls of this sphere. In fact suppose they’re point masses, so they never collide, and interact only …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

I saw the Jenny Holzer show at The Guggenheim this week; close friends will know that I have a strange relationship with her work. The exhibition, which closes next week, is sort of a reprise of her groundbreaking show there in 1989. Here’s Roberta Smith’s review in the Times from December of that year (emphasis mine): Ms. Holzer has been given the run of the Guggenheim, or more precisely half …

To chase, or not to chase, that is the question.

I went to a conference in Stockholm and wrote about it on LinkedIn.

Let's call an artificially intelligent system a person (in the ethical, not the legal sense) if it deserves moral consideration similar to that of a human being. (I assume that personhood requires consciousness but does not require biological humanity; we can argue about that another time if you like). If we are ever capable of designing AI persons, we should not design them to be safe and aligned with human …

Inside you are two Lupins… Yes when he got his top surgery he got bespoke bean nipples.

Chris Carter. When I was sitting in my office in my surf trunks, barefoot, playing ball with the dog every twenty minutes, writing the pilot for The X-Files, I never imagined that they would be making X-Files underwear and that 10,000 people a week would be logging onto the Internet to talk about the show… — Chris Carter, 1995 Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, couldn’t have been more …