Recently updated blogs

Visibly moved after a visit to the Galleria Borghese, my friend recounted their first encounter with Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina, especially the texture and yielding softness of the skin. Years later, after spending an hour before that cruel yet tender marble, I felt deflated. As exquisite as Bernini’s statue is, it couldn’t quite surpass my friend’s emotional re-creation of that initial experience. This memory resurfaced as I read Everything …

This past week I was in Durban, South Africa presenting at the Innovations in the Science of the Teaching and Learning (ISOTL) Conference 2024: Bridging Ethics, Equity, and Innovation in Higher Education, organized by the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It was a pretty hectic trip, flying out Monday night and getting back Saturday afternoon. That said, […]

Today's post features a moderately adequate representation of a bad photo with bad kitchen lighting and a very nice fall garden harvest. :) Allow me to introduce you to this afternoon's random late season garden haul. I took Philip to the soccer field by my community vegetable garden to try a Chuck it with him...Read More

Neil from Ebeaut has launched a new forum named “Renovate Forums” dedicated to all things renovation. This platform features multiple category forums covering various aspects of renovations, along with a marketplace where you can buy, sell, or trade goods. Get ready for great deals and professional and amatuer insights! Please be aware that ensuring security is challenging, as there are individuals actively seeking to exploit others for financial gain and …

I booked in to the Yr Wyddfa Ultra 100 Mile race on a bit of a whim after failing to fully complete the Swiss Alps 100 mile race in Summer. I was still yearning to fully complete the 100 mile distance on a tough course this year. (The last time I had run 100 miles+ in one go was last year when I ran the Wild Horse 200). Mindset Learning …

The Unimate robot pouring a coffee at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on October 3, 1967 (Photo by Frank Q. Brown for the Los Angeles Times via the UCLA Department of Special Collections) When the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles featured a new “coffee robot” in October 1967, the newspapers covering it sounded both excited and terrified. “Experts contend that, as a group, robots are actually harmless enough,” the …

A selection of read books from my shelves What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s the August installment of this column. I often think back to how I got hooked on science fiction. As I have mentioned many times before, I primarily read fantasy–in particular every bloated Tolkein ripoff I could get my hands on–before I moved to science fiction in my late …

nice cold swim after our chores were donedisembarking the ferry at the whitianga wharfhahei, as seen from hereheretaura pāhahei beachthe view towards lonely bay and whanganui-o-heiloading the borrowed car with groceries, suitcases and laughter + a holiday house full of bodies, moving lazily around our environment as the days trundled by + the symmetry of the spring equinox + learning the inherent language of the terrain we were temporarily enfolded …

Setting up an 1825 game with all the Units has been an arduous task. I hoped to make it a yearly tradition in 2019, but then Covid-19 happened. After that, every attempt has failed somehow. Today, one of our players got stranded in Berlin, but as we had four players present, we made it. This time, we used 18xx.games as a moderator. This speeded up the game greatly. With the …

In 1596, Kepler claimed that the planetary orbits would only follow “God’s design” if there were two more planets: one between Mars and Jupiter and one between Mercury and Venus. Later folks came up with the Titius–Bode law. This says that for each n there should be a planet whose distance from the Sun is 0.4 + 0.3 × 2ⁿ times the distance between the Earth and Sun. • For …

If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed Let’s not leave unspoken the irony that the guy who basically is WordPress.com, and WordPress.org, and the WordPress Foundation, wants you to think the name “WP Engine” is confusing. Curious about the WordPress vs. WP Engine drama? This is a good rundown of the situation.

Perhaps the best reason to raft the Grand Canyon is to hike its side canyons, and our trip hit most of the classics. They’re classic for reasons, a major one being that they’re the ones you can hike in summer without dying of heatstroke (we also did one that did not quite meet this qualification, but that’s for a future post). Fortunately, the qualities which make them hikeable also make …

Luke Owen of Death Is Not The End just recently put out a really interesting release: Making Records: Home Recordings c. 1890​-​1920 - a collection of DIY home recordings, transferred from blank and repurposed brown and black wax cylinders, dating back to the early years of widespread phonographic technology, from the late 1890s and first couple of decades of 20th Century. In the words of David Giovannoni, whose collection is …

I tend to forget about my photos once too much time had passed, so today I deliberately dug into the archive from my korea trip a couple months ago. It is an interesting experience: trying to curate a set of photos – what is the criteria for my selection? I don’t have a concrete idea myself. Perhaps it is some intuitive algorithm of interestingness that exists in my mind. I …

We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orientation and direction. In a normal aircraft, the artificial horizon shows the orientation in two axes (pitch and roll), but the F-4 indicator uses a rotating ball to show the orientation in three axes, adding azimuth (yaw).1 It wasn't obvious to me how the ball could rotate in …