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We’ve both been home all week which has been nice and easy, getting back into the usual routines, plus a walk up and down Sugar Loaf. On the way up Sugar Loaf § No major music listening this week, although I’ve enjoyed Dance, No One’s Watching by Ezra Collective, Love is Overtaking Me by Arthur Russell, and SOPHIE. § In the several years I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch I’ve …

While flying down the side of Tamalpais via Eldridge for the first time in a couple months I found myself wondering if that trail somehow managed to get even rockier. Once I regained the pavement at sea level I went to shift and my twist shifter just spun. Turns out I had rattled the shift box off the hub. To be fair, I hadn’t popped off the rear wheel or …

Our decision to homeschool our children is often a hot topic of conversation among friends and colleagues. There are the usual jokes, and many people bring up something about socialisation. Britt’s favourite response when asked why we homeschool is, “Why do you send your kids to school?” Honestly, I love her cheeky nature. I wanted to distill my thoughts on the subject into a blog post so I could share …

For several years now, I’ve shared examples of my short fiction here on this website. Today, though, sees the start of something new — the publication of The Lammas Ghosts, a collection of fifteen of my own original, Norfolk-based short stories in printed form. You can find out more here. For me, ghost stories have, first and foremost, been a way of talking about two specific places — often, the …

My iPhone 16 Pro Max preorder arrived this week, and it’s glorious. New iOS is great and I’m enjoying the new button + camera control, but the best thing is that I no longer have any devices that use a Lightning Cable! We are a USB-C only house. One of my main focuses has been rolling forward a bunch of low-intervention changes which, once live, will make it far easier …

At work, my team launched a new design guide last week. My colleague, Nikin, did most of the hard work putting it together with Eleventy static site generator, whilst I advised on accessibility and navigation structure. Public transport decided to fail at varying levels of disruption on multiple routes for my commutes to and from work last week. Both London Underground and Thameslink were cancelled or delayed significantly. That combined …

• A cooler Underground: TfL eyes more stations for its new cooling technology (Ian Visits) • Ashley Down Station – the first ever train: Video (JenOnTheMove) • Germany faces major challenges for its trains (MediaRail) • Europe’s answer to the Suez Canal breaks ground after 20-year delay (Euronews) • Singapore East-West Line MRT disruption: Faulty train left a trail of destruction (Straits Times) • Circle Line leads Lisboa metro expansion …

The military regime banned long hair, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Euripides, Russian-style toasts, strikes, Aristophanes, Ionesco, Sartre, Albee, Pinter, freedom of the press, sociology, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, modern music, pop music, new math and the letter Z, which means HE LIVES in ancient greek. Z ★★★★½ Comentar este post · Me gusta

A few years ago I shared my translations of poems by the Odesa-born Victor Mall (1901-1989), a former student of Kazimir Malevich who, after settling in Los Angeles, built a career as a graphic designer. Mall, it turns out, wasn’t the only visual artist among the Russophone Angelenos with a sideline in verse. In fact, an even more accomplished painter, the Kyiv-born Sergei Bongart (1918-1985), wrote poems that are, in …

I heard this morning that Richard Hamilton passed away yesterday early this morning. He was a renowned figure in geometric analysis, and a faculty member here at Columbia since 1998. In terms of mortality, the last year or two at the Columbia math department have been grim ones, as we’ve lost five senior faculty at relatively young ages: Igor Krichever at age 72, Henry Pinkham at age 74, Lars Nielsen …

I had two basketball sessions this week. I struggled to shoot the ball well in both, though I was able to make some shots and gradually felt more confident as the sessions progressed. I had planned to attend a third session later in the week but chose to stay at home instead. On Saturday, I travelled up to London to watch Brighton lose 4-2 against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Trust …

What a remarkable work Glory is. A brilliant satrical novel about post-colonial struggles, the way that the hopes and dreams of liberation struggles can be diverted and destroyed, and how that despair can turn into revolution. But perhaps most remarkable is how NoViolet Bulawayo tells the story.George Orwell's famous political satire on the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, tells the story using

The rationale of Laura D’Olimpio’s manifesto (as she calls it) for the compulsory aesthetic education for all school-aged students at all levels of education is simple and straightforward: “Aesthetic education is necessary due to its distinctive ability to offer, invite and invoke aesthetic experience. Such meaningful experiences, of flow, harmony, beauty, the sublime, shock, awe, wonder, etc., are integral to a flourishing life and, therefore, educators have a responsibility to …

Conferences can be hit-and-miss. It’s easy to go through the motions on autopilot and find the experience lacklustre. Earlier on this summer, I attended one that started out lacklustre, but then became memorable, and I realized there’s a lot one can do to influence the outcome. Adam, the lurking third autodidact, has spent a good portion of the last six years going to lots of conferences, and has made something …

Summer over in a flash, autumn wind and rain outside – perhaps cosy evenings will speed up both my reading and review-posting. I just finished AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, having long been a fan of the blog of the same name. The book is a really useful guide through the current hype. It distinguishes 3 kinds of AI: generative, predictive and content moderation AI – …