Recently updated blogs

All the Monday feels here today as I'm home from my amazing trip to Morocco and slowly picking back up with normal life once again. I can't say I missed the domestic day-to-day business of tidying, sorting, cleaning, laundry-ing, shopping, cooking, parenting etc etc while I was away, but it's good to be home and back to it all the same. Morocco was absolutely mind blowing...wOw, what a country!! The …

Dan Sumption and I have started work on the 3rd issue of the Mycelium Parish News. This will cover weird, strange and wonderful events and creative projects from 2024. We mostly focus on people we know through our networks, but we’re interested in anything counter-cultural from the past year. The cut-off for your submissions is November 16th – but the sooner you can send things the better. We’re want to …

Viterbo conjecture – refuted Claude Viterbo’s 2000 volume-capacity conjecture asserts that the Euclidean (even dimensional) ball maximizes (every) symplectic capacity among convex bodies of the same volume. In the recent paper A Counterexample to Viterbo’s Conjecture, Pazit Haim-Kislev and Yaron Ostrover disproved the conjecture. Pazit Haim-Kislev and Yaron Ostrover We discussed some background on symplectic geometry in this post. Gromov’s non-squeezing theorem(1985) asserts that a ball of radius R cannot …

lingthusiasm:We’re taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don’t forget to hold on! In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It’s easy to think of literary comparisons like “my love is like a red, red rose” but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English …

“Rather, a genuine political literature would aim at the politicization of everything hitherto considered to be nonpolitical, of private life and psychology, perception and the emotions; it would imply an expansion of form and a refinement of the artistic fluoroscope such that the political character of the most remote and specialized areas of the experience stands revealed to the naked eye. Works like those of Brecht, or, more recently, of …

I remember falling in love with David Sedaris. I was staying in a Youth Hostel in the Lake District, having gone there to give a talk on ‘the fantastic fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’ to a room of people who couldn’t hear much of what I was saying. My bedroom was under the stairs, so I could hear people walk up and down throughout the night. But it was nice …

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@. Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx …

Bloomberg Green rounded up Climate Week’s notable events. We’re grateful for the inclusion of our in-person panel and happy hour: The Emerging Landscape of Green Finance in the USTime: 4pm-5:30pmA look at the future of green finance with a panel at the SoHo digs of the Jain Family Institute, which produces a reliably interesting and wonky climate newsletter called the Polycrisis.Further details here. View the story. And join us Tuesday …

Time to be a man and vote for a woman.

September 23, 2024 Tip of the Week The Only Thing That Matters. Weekend Coaching, Tips, Training, and My Right Foot I had a busy week, both coaching and playing. I coached the Intermediate junior group on both Saturday and Sunday, and the Elite Group on Sunday. With the Intermediate group, besides the usual stroking and footwork drills, we did a lot of service practice. One kid, age about eight, had …

HOW WOULD YOU EXPLAIN WHAT A TRAIN IS TO AN ALIEN?How to understand complex concepts & systemsDesigning for complexity — using my train analogy — UX Knowledge Piece Sketch #63As designers, part of our job is to deeply understand complex systems and concepts — so that we can solve problems in that specific problem space. In this article, I explain a simple analogy you can use when you start a …

Figuring out what to do with one dog can be challenging, but trying to come up with enrichment opportunities for multiple dogs can end up being exhausting. Let’s talk about how to provide enrichment for multiple dogs in the same household without it feeling like a second job. Acknowledgment Providing enrichment opportunities for multiple dogs at the same time can be tough, especially if you have dogs with any combination …

Ferroelectric memory (FRAM) is an interesting storage technique that stores bits in a special "ferroelectric" material. Ferroelectric memory is nonvolatile like flash memory, able to hold its data for decades. But, unlike flash, ferroelectric memory can write data rapidly. Moreover, FRAM is much more durable than flash and can be be written trillions of times. With these advantages, you might wonder why FRAM isn't more popular. The problem is that …

Last week I stumbled across an exhibition of photos of Jeff Buckley by Merri Cyr, including the shots she took for the cover of Grace, his only studio album released 30 years ago in 1994. A beautiful man with a beautiful voice, difficult though to approach his music with a clear perspective through the fog of the misplaced romanticism surrounding a tragic early death - in his case of course …

The Fountain of EwCoralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), about the decline of celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) and rise of her showbiz doppelganger Sue (Margaret Qualley), leans hard-- very hard-- into the idea that beauty is a daily impossible burden for women to aspire to sometimes fail to attain and if they do attain must maintain said beauty for as long as they can-- forever if possible. A lovely premise, …