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[fragments from a prototype book review much different from what made it into print...]Few would claim that we’re living through a golden age for music. But there does seem to be an emerging consensus that this is something of a golden age for music books. Early in 2011, U.K. magazine The Wire staged Off The Page, a two-day festival dedicated to music writing that was so well-received it’s now set …

A man planting cherry saplings on his field in Salkaya village near Elazig, eastern Anatolia, found a huge ancient floor mosaic depicting a dazzling array of local animals and plant life. It dates to the late Roman Imperial period or the early Byzantine period. Mehmet Emin Sualp spotted glimpses of patterns through the planting holes and reported it to the Elazığ Museum Directorate and the gendarmerie. The museum and the …

Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a good opportunity to reach across “the great divide” and try to find common ground rather than another opportunity to dunk on each other. Ryan Carniato started the latest round with “Web Components Are Not the Future”. Cory LaViska followed up with “Web …

The publishers at DC Thomson like any excuse for a good old knees-up. Any time one of their comics reached a landmark issue or anniversary, the entire edition would very often be given over to celebrating the milestone, usually in an epic feat involving all the different strips running at the time, and sometimes this would even extend to the anniversaries of specific strips (such as the Beano marking fifty …

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.