Recently updated blogs

We’ve heard plenty of beats sampling the Legend of Zelda (looking at you, Thoto_Leing) but I never considered it the other way around. In 2015, Andrew Martin wrote how Koji Kondo was inspired by 70s British rock but in the 90s and early 00s, there was another realm of music that Kondo dipped into for the Zelda soundtrack: sample CDs. Before the times of Splice and Tracklib, musicians would use …

The episode I'm one of the leads in has aired. Yay!

It appears to be Galileo vs The Church month in my corner of the Internet. It started a couple of weeks back Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy drew my attention to the fact that somebody, who calls himself Planet Peterson, had called me an ignoramus on his YouTube channel. He played a clip of me, during an interview with Tim O’Neill from History for Atheists, saying, correctly, that Galileo had …

Poor Dear Charlotte by Anabel Donald published 1985 I very much enjoyed recently re-reading Anabel Donald’s Notting Hill mysteries: I had also read a couple of her straight novels in the past, but not this one. So I gave it a go. And what a strange book it is, and not one you would associate with the private eye stories of Alex Tanner. It is a book of two halves, …

Old software joke: “After the apocalypse, all that’ll be left will be cockroaches, Keith Richards, and markup characters that have been escaped (or unescaped) one too many (or few) times.” I’m working on a programming problem where escaping is a major pain in the ass, specifically “\”. So, for reasons that seem good to me, I want to replace it. What with? The problem My Quamina project is all about …

Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that they can verify each other’s contributions. It has been challenging to organize mathematical projects at larger scales, and particularly those that involve contributions from the general public, due to the need to verify all of the contributions; a single error …

A difficult part of technology instruction is not that things are unknowable, but that no one is ever starting at the beginning, not in 2024. How I work – image from State Library of New South Wales I was reading this post by my colleague Alex talking about digital decluttering. Like Alex, I can get stuck into a hyperfocus jag where I am doing nothing but cleaning up data and …

New article from Special Needs Jungle: The government’s ‘national conversation’ on the future of education has launched. Its lead, Professor Becky Francis, has issued a call for evidence, seeking views on the current curriculum and assessment … The post “The curriculum belongs to the nation” Let them know that includes children with special educational needs appeared first on Special Needs Jungle. Tania Tirraoro ⓒ Special Needs Jungle 2008-2023 All Rights …

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been posting on social media about some of the books in my surprisingly extensive J-Lit library, and each time I’ve done so, it’s led either to new purchases (with a number of Shūsaku Endo books having just arrived) or an enjoyable reread (of Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters). However, in the case of Kenzaburō Ōe, lining my books up …

From BBC News, a few days ago: A businesswoman who was arrested after sharing a fake name for the Southport attacker online will face no further action. Bernadette Spofforth, from Chester, was arrested on 8 August after reposting the fake name, commenting that if it were true there would be “hell to pay”. The 55-year-old, who has more than 50,000 followers, later deleted the post and apologised after realising the …

Found photo Do you remember curlers? I do—a kind of torture device from my youth that I used to tame my curly hair. The sort I used had brushes inside with plastic sticks to keep them on overnight. Perhaps they were the source of my teenage insomnia. Why anyone would want to have a picture of their hair in curlers? Was this perhaps taken to document an impromptu visit? Neither …

The Psychotronix Film Festival has been producing movie events in various venues since 1992 - and shall return to the Orinda Theatre at 2 Orinda Theatre Square (Moraga Way and Brookwood Road) with an improvised, sometimes ragtag, all over the map but highly entertaining lineup of films this Saturday night.These films include 1950's commercials and "educational" films, the most bizarre obscure classic cartoons, trailers from the worst movies, the campiest …

There are those who define as AGI (or ASI) as technology that will "outperform humans at most economically valuable work". Ok, but then this work will simply cease to be so economically valuable, and humans will mostly stop doing it. Humans will instead find new economically valuable work to do.This has happened repeatedly in the history of humanity. Imagine telling someone 1000 years ago that in the future, very few …