Recently updated blogs

Well, a lot has happened, hasn’t it, since we last discussed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his falconry records only a couple of weeks ago. See “RFK Jr.’s Falconry Records Still Secret—For Now” (Sept. 6, 2024). Having dropped out of the presidential race (obviously because of the falconry scandal), Kennedy has endorsed Trump and started working on his campaign. Not coincidentally, Kennedy is fighting to get his name off the …

Thandii “It Only Takes 2” Thandii are funk minimalists in the tradition of ESG and Liquid Liquid, though I think their grooves come out feeling less tightly wound and neurotic. “It Only Takes 2” in particular strikes me as being like if Swim-era Caribou made an 80s freestyle song. The stark arrangement keeps your ear focused on the most functional elements of the groove, but it also implies a sweaty, …

Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn), Claude Monet; oil on canvas, roughly 28 x 40 in. (66 x 28 cm); in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which offers both zoomable and downloadable images on their site. Here’s a question for you: in this painting by Monet — one of several in his series of paintings of haystacks — are the color relationships intense and vibrant or …

“Your time’s your own, and don’t you forget it, my girl: for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can do what you bloody well choose,” Eva Wotton reminds herself at the start of Argument with the East Wind (1986), the last of Joan O’Donovan’s three novels about older single women trying to find the place in the world that fits them. “So what was she going to …

One of the things I think we all struggle with is keeping up to date with changes in web development. You might hear about a super cool new CSS feature or JavaScript API, but it’s never supported by all the browsers when you hear about it, right? So you think “I’ll have to make sure check in on that again later” and quickly forget about it. Then some time down …

Previous: First Amend This! An IDOC Newsletter, Aug. ’24 Welcome to the September issue of First Amend This! This publication provides an insider look at issues affecting the Idaho Department of Correction community. If you wish to assist this effort, share the link, copy and paste, or print and send this issue to another. Loved … Continue reading "First Amend This! An IDOC Newsletter, Sept. ’24" The post First Amend …

Update– The Spiral Tribe do at Rats Run/Longstock Free Festival, Hampshire was on the same weekend. Shout going out to watermouse who alerted us to this first video, thanks! And an even bigger shout out to dj jenjen (aka mis-chief) who shot both videos

I think we need to normalise leaving meetings that are wasting your time.

September's Pylon of the Month is one that I've wanted to feature for a long time but until now, I've always been driving when passing by. This time, I was more organised when returning home after visiting friends in Bath and grabbed my chance as a passenger. You can find it when heading North on the A46 just before joining the M4 at junction 18. What has always caught my …

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 …