Recently updated blogs

Vincent Simonetti collected his first historic tuba - a ~1910 Cerveny BB-flat Helicon - in Boston in 1965, while playing tuba on tour with the Moyseev Ballet Company. Today the collection has grown to more than 350 tubas, and is now the largest private collection in the world that is dedicated exclusively to members of the tuba family. The collection entirely fills five rooms of a bright yellow house in …

Many things have been said about the Andromeda Galaxy, arguably the most majestic galaxy that amateur astronomers can image due to it's sheer size in the sky—many times larger than the Moon appears to us, but also many times dimmer.With the naked eye, even in dark skies it appears but a tiny little fuzzy patch. But once you start collecting those photons photographically with long exposures it comes to life.Total …

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 …

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.

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 …

IntroductionToday, TLS certificates in the Web public key infrastructure (PKI) have long validity: almost all remain valid for at least three months! An attacker compromising a certificate early enough in its lifetimenote 1 keeps it compromised for months. Certificate revocation addresses this problem: a client must know to distrust a certain key for a domain, even if the valid key hasn’t expired yet.The issue? Billions of clients use the Web …

Pointless Exposition I’m not in the Apple ecosystem, but I was quite enthused about the announcement of the airtag and the FindMy network back in 2019. The private-by-design protocol / implementation looked great, especially compared to literally any other existing tracker. And the reporting network being more-or-less all iOS devices made sure that it would have a very large userbase to begin with. I wanted to use an airtag at …

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 …