Recently updated blogs

Fellow bird photographer, Steve G, found a lost SD card. It was back in August, in Snettisham, Norfolk, UK, a popular birding spot. The interesting thing about the card is that it had 3700 photos from a trip to Iceland, mostly birds as I understand. Steve has been trying to track down the card’s owner ever since. There are no people in any of the photos, not EXIF data, no …

The other morning I noticed there was a dead mouse in our yard right by the door, and I didn’t feel like dealing with it, and Dr. Mrs. Q didn’t feel like dealing with it, and that night we didn’t feel like dealing with it either, and we said, knowing we were just procrastinating, “well maybe some animal will carry it off in the night but if not we’ll deal …

The following photo is from 1984 and shows one of the many Blue Coat figures which can be seen on surviving charity school buildings from the late 17th and 18th centuries across London: Forty years later, the statue is still there, looking good and has obviously been restored since the 1984 photo: The figure is on the building that was once a Bluecoat School in Caxton Street, Westminster, and as …

[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 …