Recently updated blogs

Just remembering that record scratch moment when I realised that PDA no longer stood for personal digital assistant. Oh, so those celebrities aren’t actually into the latest Palm or Clie or Treo. Makes sense.

The kid started pre-k this month. Amazingly it took 2.5 weeks before he brought home the first cold. Then it was another week before I came down with it. I also finally started on my Halloween projects for the year. This year it’s an upcycled pallet wood coffin, and a PVC giant spider. So far I’ve got the coffin lid and bottom made, and now need to make the walls. …

From the International Mathematical Union newsletter: Paper mills and predatory journals have strongly professionalised their activities in the past 10 years and are now creating a substantial revenue. There is a growing parallel universe of fake mathematical science that undermines the trust in science and devaluates the classical selection criteria for scientific excellence based on the (over-)use of bibliometrics). The concrete starting point was that in November 2023, Clarivate (the …

Here are the collected posts for our Balkinization symposium on Aileen Kavanagh's new book, The Collaborative Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2023). 1. Jack Balkin, Introduction to the Symposium2. Stephen Gardbaum, Collaborative and Abusive Constitutionalism3. Mark Tushnet, Constitutional Collaboration and Constitutional Showdowns4. Lawrence B. Solum, The Preconditions for Collaborative Constitutionalism5. Erin F. Delaney, Collaboration “Devolved”6. Aileen Kavanagh, Imagining America’s Collaborative Constitution: Part IAileen Kavanagh, Imagining America’s Collaborative Constitution: Part II

American Gothic (1995) s01e19 “Strangler” [1998] D: Doug Lefler. S: Gary Cole, Lucas Black, Paige Turco, Brenda Bakke, Sarah Paulson, Nick Searcy, John Mese. Cole and Paulson go full magical in the opening, resulting in Cole hiring the ghost of the Boston Strangler (Gareth Williams) to take Paulson out. Ghosts can kill ghosts. Williams tries to bring her out by befriending Black. Williams is pretty dang evil, and it’s a …

Lincolnshire Tuscan‘Blimey,’ I thought. ’Somebody’s been looking at St Paul’s church, Covent Garden.’ The church, if you don’t know it, is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Inigo Jones and Stamford Library has a portico that’s very similar to Jones’s original. Those are columns of the Tuscan order, the simplest of the five architectural orders of ancient Rome, and the pediment, like the one at Covent Garden, is …

I love this project, the Bop Spotter! This is my neighborhood and I love its musical landscape. Sometimes I add to it myself from a bluetooth speaker on my wheelchair, but more often I’m surreptitiously shazaming the music around me from others’ speakers, from cars, from businesses I’m going by on the sidewalk. This is a cool use of a old/low end phone – hooking it up to a little …

I was fifteen when King Crimson released Discipline. I fell for it by accident. I borrowed a friend’s home-recorded cassette tape of the band’s 1969 premier, In the Court of Crimson King, which was all my AOR-addled brain was interested in 1981. Discipline was the flip side, which I never played. Then I lost the cassette. Feeling ethically obligated to replace it, I borrowed the first album from another friend …

This week we are looking at a map of Leiden from the atlas Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg. The map dates from 1574, during the Eighty Years’ War or the Dutch Revolt, whereby the Netherlands fought for independence from the Habsburg Empire, ruled by King Philip II of Spain. Map of Leiden by Braun and Hogenberg, 1574. Collection Universiteit Utrecht (public domain) 1574 is a key year in …

effective engineering teams should work *with* their product owner/manager, not *for* them

1. Photographing the Williamsburg Bridge RidersA few of my favourite shots from the <a href="https://www.instagram.

What's this? A slightly moist railway station in the West Midlands on a weekday? Are we back?We are.This is Bilbrook, on the line between Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury, and twenty four hours later trains would be unable to run on this route because the tracks at Wellington were flooded after torrential rain. For me, it was just a little damp, a bit soggy almost, as I went up to the road …

After Glasgow, York. This was a place we had both previously visited and loved, but not for well over a decade and not together. So we were curious to see if we would enjoy it as much now. Folly? Yes, but that's not important right now. It did in fact take us a little while to find our way back into loving York again, as it all felt a bit …

Last time in our look at Keeping Up Appearances, we saw Harold Snoad making a load of fake films for Onslow’s telly. But Onslow doesn’t just enjoy watching the offcuts of Snoad’s location shoots. He also likes a bit of sport. Real, actual clips of motor racing and horse racing, not fake stuff. But we get a little more specific than than that, surely? Motor Racing Let’s take a look …

As I have surely said on this blog plenty of times over the years, I will never go to any holiday or short trip without at least one meal booked that stands a better than average chance of being decent. This is partly just for the sheer joy of eating out (how sad must your life be if you don't like eating out) but particularly in the case of European …