Recently updated blogs

A September Yo-Yo in SoCal; Record hot to cool to hot again September was a bit of a roller coaster month in California (especially SoCal). In the southern half of the state, a record-breaking early Sep heatwave kickstarted a major wildfire outbreak that coincided with a major late monsoonal surge–leading to a dramatic mix of […] The post Major autumn heatwave to continue streak of record heat in interior Southwest; …

Autumn greetings! Reading: Every night for the past week or so, I’ve been curled up with Dustin Pittman’s New York After Dark and Mark Bozek’s The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973 (photos by Bill Cunningham) — just living in the past, I guess! I attended launch events for both books. Audio: The news, more than I have in a long time…to keep up on presidential election updates …

Basic Apple Guy: Mac OS X Tiger, Apple’s fifth major release of OS X, was much beloved by the Apple community & holds the title as the longest-running version of Mac OS X (30 months). Released in 2005, Tiger introduced notable features including Spotlight search, Dashboard, Safari RSS, Automator, and more. It also felt like a very refined version of Mac OS X, with a lot of fit and finish …

How Apple's Macintosh design philosphy affects the web.

Inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. A reader suggested to me that this could be interpreted as a story of sexual violence. I don’t contest the validity of this interpretation, though I intended a reading that more specifically underscores the relationship between body horror, childbirth, and pursuit. I’m putting this under a “read more” to alert any readers that might prefer to avoid any themes referenced in this paragraph. Outrunning him in …

Here we are at Night 5, the penultimate game of this phase of the CSW Mordheim Campaign. For this evening we ventured out to the suburbs where Michael hosted us in his lovely home. GAME 1 For this game Michael had assembled a remarkable table that combined the original card-and-plastic Mordhiem buildings with traditional bases, other terrain elements, risers, water and even a ship! A three way battle with Mattias's …

“Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing you have received - only what you have given. A full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.” Francis of Assis

I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned about conducting skip level 1-1s. What is a skip level 1-1? Skip level 1-1s are a way to sense what is happening in your organization. The basic idea is: You schedule meetings with your “skip levels”. A skip level is the person two levels down. Your direct reports’ direct report. So if you manage Alex, and they manage Beth, you would …

September 30, 2024 No Blog Next Week I’ll be out of town Oct. 6-11 (Sunday through Friday). I’ll be competing in the Huntsman World Senior Games on Mon & Tue (Oct. 7-8) in Saint George, Utah. Then I fly directly to Houston for the US Table Tennis Hall of Fame Inductions and Banquet on Thursday (Oct. 10), where I’ll be doing the presentation for Dennis Taylor. I’ll write about this …

Shift networks (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Jeremy Kun asks how to permute vectors using few vector additions, elementwise multiplications, and rotation operations, for an application involving homomorphic encryption. Our fractional universe (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Jim Propp and his guest columnist Jeff Glibb parody those breathless but vague pop-sci expositions of new mathematical discoveries. Byrne’s Euclid (\(\mathbb{M}\)), the one with colored diagrams replacing all the symbols, newly digitized and available online from the Harvard library. Noted …

If anything looks wrong, read on the site! Hi there! As September ends, it's time to wake up for a new edition of Cool Links! This month's links are mostly web development related, with a couple ideas on how to build some fun components, a brilliant jab at the current state of commercial web, a jab at React and a jab at Safari. Honestly, it's a pack of somewhat negative …

We're just coming off of another heat wave in the Bay Area; temperatures have returned to a comfortable low-to-mid 70's Fahrenheit and humidity is hanging out around 30% (or so my weather station tells me). Temperatures in the 80's and 90's don't sound like much unless you don't have air conditioning (which many Bay Area homes don't) or insulation (ditto). This means that, under such conditions, life kind of sucks …

Cheiracanthium sp. – yellow sac spider, Boulder, Colorado, September, 2024. I found this spider inside the house the other day and managed to get a picture showing the 8 eyes. In case you were wondering what it is like to be a bat, think about what it must be like to be a spider. Spiders have simple eyes, as opposed to compound eyes like those of a dragonfly. Because the …

Could 2024’s hype beer, cask Bass, ever replace the traditional hazy, hoppy keg pale ales British drinkers have enjoyed for years? Its fans, a small group of contrarian hipsters, seem to think so. They share intelligence on the internet and trek to obscure out-of-town pubs to find it. And they boast about drinking it on social media and in blog posts. It seems to be as much about bragging rights …

Criterion did a giallo series and I went straight for the John Saxon movie. Nora is a young “New Yorker” visiting Rome (Letícia Román, also of a Russ Meyer erotic comedy and an Elvis flick). Her Aunt Ethel was being cared for by Dr. Saxon, dies almost instantly after he leaves, then Nora runs outside for help and is immediately mugged – tough town. She has a Blow-Up fever dream …