Recently updated blogs

Here’s a line you don’t often hear in a classic movie. A man greets a friend with, “How’s everything in Winnipeg?” You heard that right: Winnipeg. And why not? There was a time when Winnipeg was touted as the “Chicago of the North” with its rail transportation systems and rapidly-growing population. Big money was to be made, until it wasn’t. … Continue reading →

Last week I visited the University of Pennsylvania for a fireside chat with Roger Greenberg, a Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology, as part of the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club (WUHC). I shared my personal history and answered questions from an audience primarily consisting of Penn undergraduate students. This inspired me to write down advice that I wish I could have given to my younger self. This blog is …

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest …

Happy (belated) Equinox! In honor of Fall Equinox, I've made an updated list of popular lights. Days are getting shorter in the northern hemisphere. It might be time for a new flashlight. The best flashlight There is no best flashlight, so this is an amalgamation of what enthusiasts have been buying and recommending to others lately along with the author's arbitrary preferences and biases. Please take note that prices and …

What's a ktls I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago. kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection... as soon as you have a TLS connection. For the handshake itself (hellos, change cipher, encrypted extensions, certificate verification, …

I bought two of these in Norway last spring. One I shared with two friends on top of a local hill at sunset. This one I found in the gel and sports nutrition drawer that’s mostly sugar. I’m saving it for something. I just don’t know what.

Fuck Time Fuck Space by Spooky Jaguar

Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases until you have clear logical statements a computer can follow.

Not a new idea, but just another visualization and reminder. Wealth, feeling like you have plenty, is an equation. Wealth = Have ÷ Need If you have nothing, then focus on having some. Once you have some, the easiest way to increase your wealth is to decrease your needs. Have 10 but think you need 100? You are poor. Have 10 but only need 5? You are wealthy. Have 10 …

La semaine prochaine, nous fêtons les 35 ans de la sortie de Prince of Persia, en 1989. Les fans de PoP ont beaucoup à fêter, cette année : deux tout nouveaux jeux (The Lost Crown et The Rogue Prince of Persia), le remake des Sables du temps qui a été confirmé et arrivera en 2026, ainsi qu'un nouveau DLC pour The Lost Crown, sorti la semaine dernière. Aujourd'hui, j'aimerais partager …

5/5 golden merles Variety’s “Plover” is Texan avantpop rock composed of compelling narrative subversion, sticky melody and tone. The hook is a compacted material derived from descriptions of naturalistic imagery, the conflict of the domesticated and undomesticated in comparison to the authors interpersonal dilemmas. It’s thoughtful and pretty dang fun. I need my streams and mountains tempered by the grim specter of death. Gluck and Johnson, Bly and Ruefle. Some …

I’d like to feel that every reader of this blog gets value for money, so today I’m going to give you a real bonus and hand back the fifteen or so hours it would take to read Nexus, the latest 500 page outpuring from Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and the sort of person who can describe himself as ‘one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today’ without …

In the mid-14th century work Bughyat al-ruwwād fī dhikr il-mulūk min banī ʕAbd al-Wād, Yaḥyā Ibn Khaldūn (brother of the more famous Ibn Khaldūn) ventures two possible etymologies for the name of Tlemcen (Standard Arabic Tilimsān, dialectal Arabic Tləmsān): تسمى بلغة البربر تلمسنين كلمة مركبة من تلم ومعناه تجمع وسين ومعناه اثنان اي الصحراء والتل فيما ذكر شيخنا العلامة ابو عبد الله الابلي رحمه الله وكان حافظا بلسان القوم ويقال …

A century of motorways This month marks 100 years since the opening of the world’s first motorway, the Autostrada from Milan to the Lakes.On 21 September 1924, if you were lucky enough to be living in Milan and wealthy enough to own a motor car, you might have driven your machine through the busy cobbled streets of the city to Viale Certosa, where the north western suburbs gave way to …

About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the wider Fediverse. At the time, I wrote a very long blog post about the whole experience. It was a fascinating …