Recently updated blogs

Venus is bright and easy to spot shortly after sundown in the southwestern sky.

It was a relaxing week. L— had the week off, I don’t have any work at the moment. It was a novelty to be able to relax in a home that isn’t a construction site for the first time in many months. I cycled to Ikea to pick up a few things, and realised that it only takes me 20 minutes on the efficient, mostly segregated route that I’ve found. …

Cheyne Walk in Chelsea is known for its famous residents. Since it was laid out in the 18th century it has drawn musicians (Keith Richards, Mick Fleetwood and Ronnie Wood), writers (Mary Anne Evans, T.S. Eliot and Ian Fleming), artists (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, JMW Turner and James McNeil Whistler) and many other household names. Travel a little further back in time and this stretch of the Thames was no different, …

A little film about Bruce Conner and the making of a promo film for Toni Basil's 1966 single "Breakaway" (which is apparently a Northern Soul classic)Toni Basil, genius choreographer, had another intersection with the avant-garde - her work with a bodybopping crew called The Electric Boogaloos influenced Byrne & Eno in the early stages of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Byrne - who dated Basil for a while …

Life gets in the way sometimes, so picture heavy this one, but we all need a break from fishing and I did with a rather enjoyable trip to Glasgow for a long weekender just gone. The record label Selador and the like-minded were at the wicked Skyline bar with knob twiddlers Dave Seaman, Steve Parry, Kasey Taylor, Hannes Bieger and Tara Brooks. It felt like one big family of acid …

I reviewed Joe Danks’ last full album, the maritime-themed Seaspeak, when it came out in 2021. Gosh, was that three years ago already? How time flies. Anyway, he’s followed that up with a four-track EP of original material that’s already been out some four months. I’m rather later to the party with this one but never mind. This is a release that’s certainly still worth writing about. Take Courage marks …

Here’s one last bit of followup on my Finder/Terminal tool posts. In the first post on the topic, I mentioned that I had created a bunch of zero-length JPEG files using the touch command. And in both the first and second posts, I talked about how long the sel command took when there were hundreds of files to select. I thought it worth a post on how I made hundreds …

At the moment, I'm not referring to American electoral politics, at any level. At the moment (it could change…). A gentle reminder when choosing allies: Even if he's "our bastard," at the next opportunity he'll prove pretty definitively that he's still a bastard. (Partisan allegiance and gender immaterial.) Exhibit A: Cozying up to Stalin during the Second Thirty Years' War. Exhibit B:

From horror visionaries Blumhouse Television, and Cake Boss creators High Noon Entertainment, Killer Cakes is a one-of-a-kind competition show where bakers with terrifying skills attempt to win some of the most frightening challenges ever produced for television. Contestants will work with the best horror special effects artists in Hollywood to unleash their twisted imaginations and create cakes so disgusting, so disturbing, and so realistic, that it’s the stuff of nightmares. …

Wow, it's the site's 44 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits …

In a recent article Wanda Diamond League announced that the prize money distributed to athletes during the series and the final will get a boost, increasing by almost 30 %. Reading the article I realised that I did not know precisely what are the financial conditions now. (Unfortunately the article does not give any precision concerning next year). So I tracked down the prize list of this year's Diamond League. …

1. Just a Female Street fight duel with sand-filled socks Published in “Le Petit Journal” November 1st 1902: There are Apaches of both sexes as seen recently in the rue du Général-Morin. Louise Henin, a beautiful girl of twenty, became mortally angered by Andrée Merle, twenty-three years, for reasons difficult to specify.

I recently finished preparing Powerpoint slides for a talk titled “Ahead of the Trends: J.N.K. Rao’s Contributions to Survey Research,” that I will present in November at the Statistics Canada International Methodology Symposium on “Shaping the Future of Official Statistics.” After submitting my slides, which discuss how Rao’s work anticipated major trends in survey research, I grew curious whether an artificial intelligence (AI) system would identify the same contributions as …

Disrupting traditional western understandings of time that separate human history from natural history, Planetary Temporality recognizes that these two modes of history are now inseparable, and that meeting planetary challenges will require that we go beyond our lived experience of time, to think instead in terms of our deep-time embeddedness in the Earth system.In contrast to anthropocentric “global” issues, “planetary” issues such as climate change and biodiversity operate on vastly …

During the Cold War, the US intelligence community was able to track the development a major new Soviet warship class using satellite imagery. Dwayne Day describes how those images helped analysts provide key insights into the building of the Kirov.