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The future is weird. Last summer, while I was in San Francisco, a friend asked how I was getting back to my hotel. “An Uber, I guess,” I shrugged. His eyes lit up. “Have you tried the self-driving cars yet?” A couple taps on his phone and a few minutes later, an algorithm was piloting us across the city. As I understand it, my first experience in a self-driving car …

Slipping into old habits again, it seems, with regard to that whole “buying books faster than I can read them” thing. There are worse vices to have, I suppose. From the bottom, then: Containment by Angerer et al. (eds.) is the book which contains (har har har) my academic swansong essay, as discussed here. It’s a fully open access book, remember, so you can just download the whole dang thing …

Ship Statinfasst Excerpt from excursion 1 Tour I: Beyond Probabilism and Performance: Severity Requirement (1.1) NOTE: The following is an excerpt from my existing book: Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to get beyond the statistics wars (CUP, 2018). For any new reflections or corrections, I will use the comments. The initial announcement is here. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is [beyond] not lying, but …

“Unwonted, shimmering, ruthless, the tiger poses man a question more intractable than the ancient enigma of the sphinx, a question all the more tortuous in that it refuses to be clearly formulated. Because the anguish imposed by the tiger does not reside in a fear of not knowing the response, but the impossibility of grasping the terms of the equation.” The Passionate Puritan I intend here to pursue a couple …

I went ahead and ground a chisel I own that I never grind on any kind of mechanical or electric grinder, never, ever hollow grind, and never grind to then sharpen with two bevels. I stopped doing that back in 1965 when I did it under instruction by a college teacher who failed as a... Source

This months picture… Now the cat is out of the bag about the EFE Rail model, the real Adams T3 Class 563 on her first day of public service just north of Harmans Cross on the Swanage Railway on 09/10/2023

If you were listening to the radio in the 90s, or got a certain flavour of email forward, there's a good chance you've heard the song Jingle Cats. The original novelty single from 1993 is exactly what it sounds like—pitch-bent cat meows set to music to create the illusion cats are "singing" Jingle Bells. It was an absolutely huge hit and, between 1993 and 2009, led to the release of …

Noah Beery One hundred years ago this week, Grace Kingsley got some help with her column from actor Noah Beery. He wrote a letter to her from Texas, where they were making North of 36, and he was there when they shot a huge cattle round-up. He told a melancholy story from behind the scenes: All the old-timers for miles around have come to watch the drive being filmed. Really, …

Sometime ago, Vic Reeves posted this on Twitter - if I remember right, it's artwork for a tour poster that was never used. Immediately I flashed on Martin Parr's Boring Postcards book.And then I thought of the graphic that Julian House cooked up for my big Wire piece on Hauntology. And then the album art of second-wave hauntologists Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan And this got me thinking about the …

Check out As in guillotine... for more. In which I briefly comment on the books I read each month, so a few years from now when I’m trying to remember one of them, I’ll be able to find it here. I’m a media omnivore, too, so this immediately evolved into more than just books, but I’m sticking with the book-first theme anyway. Do we have similar tastes, or will you …

If you want your webapp to paint behind the status bar at the top of an iphone, you can just add these meta tags: <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black-translucent">

I spoke about cards at Papercamp 3 a little over a week ago. And I saw Tom Abba for the first time in person, since, perhaps, he and Duncan talked at the first card-based meetup I hosted in 2013. Which was nice. Then I repeated the talk at Friday’s monthly Cardstock online meetup. As usual, we recorded it, and you can watch it here: It was a talk about the …

What was once a vast industrial precinct in Launceston. These iconic sawtooth buildings were storage for wool and were an important visual reminder of the precincts industrial heritage. Sadly they were demolished and whilst machinery was meant to be reinstated with interpretive panels when the area was redeveloped, this never happened. Sadly there isn’t much to go off today of what once stood - it’s important, even if places are …

I was creating a simple website for my daughter’s art, and I wanted to do it quickly while maintaining a semblance of rhythm and modularity. I don’t want to spend time maintaining it, but I should remember how things work when I come back. The best way to do that was to use already-done, researched, and working methods, especially with typography and spacing. A modular scale, like a musical scale, …

Herbert in comments has been asking me about urban rail on ring roads; Nuremberg has such a road with an active debate about what to do with it. Ring roads are attractive targets for urban rail, since they tend to be wide commercial throughfares. The one in Nuremberg is especially attractive for a tramway, or possibly a medium-capacity metro if one can be built cheaply; this is an artifact of …