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I like the stripes on this one: the contrast between the vertical stripes on the bodice and skirt, the horizontal stripe on the skirt, and diagonal of the bias-cut sleeves. The maker even made the effort to align the stripes on the cape and bodice at the center front.Dress, cotton, c.1825. From LACMA.

Back by popular demand, here are some AI-generated drawing prompts to use in this, the spooky month of October!Longtime AI Weirdness readers may recognize some of these. That's because this is a throwback list, all the way back to the times of very tiny language models. These models had not feasted on huge chunks of the internet, but had sipped delicately on hand-curated artisanal datasets. They trained rather slowly on …

I often think about writing a feature like writing a story. If I do my job well, it is coherent and easy to read, write, and maintain. When there's a lot of indirection, it feels like a book with its pages out-of-order. There seems to be a lot of similarities as well. We have readers, it just so happens that our readers are machines -- as well as our colleagues. …

Disclaimer: This post expresses my opinions, which do not necessarily reflect consensus by the whole Web Components community. A blog post by Ryan Carniato titled “Web Components Are Not the Future” has recently stirred a lot of controversy. A few other JS framework authors pitched in, expressing frustration and disillusionment around Web Components. Some Web Components folks wrote rebuttals, while others repeatedly tried to get to the bottom of the …

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.—Enrico FermiReply via email or Mastodon.

Ancient indigenous people used seven so-called “Metals of Antiquity”: gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury. Today, our complex societies require a much longer list of metals. We build components for power generation, transportation, health care, consumer electronics, defense, and many more sectors from metals and other minerals that are sourced from around the world. Industries will need to find many new metal and mineral sources, and open new …

Barbara Stanwyck enters the 1930 film "Ladies of Leisure" -- and film history -- in a rowboat. The oars squeak. Her face is marked by mascara-streaked tears and she's clutching a broken dress strap. She's Kay, a party girl who just left a wild one on a yacht.On shore is Ralph Graves as Jerry, who's also left a wild party, this one at his Manhattan penthouse. He's gone for a …

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the regional transportation planning body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), has launched a major effort to improve the coordination between the region’s 27 transit agencies. One element of this, just unveiled, is a regional standard for transit network maps. The goal is to have all of the region’s maps evolve toward the same style, so that it’s easier to explore the entire region’s network. …

Oil paintings don’t look that great in books but photographs do. This is part —but only a part—of the reason why photobooks are ubiquitous in the photo art world. No other art form seems so naturally inclined to the printed page, no other art form is so augmented (it is hoped) by being placed in sequence, a turn of the page informing the previous image as it reveals the next. …

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 …

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">

A rare example of a crazy wall in the real world or, at least, as the background for a press photo.(Thanks Šmingvin.)

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 …

In between my day job as an M&A attorney and my social responsibilities (which are legion), I have been slowly organizing the new workshop. Recently, this has included updating the tool wall that goes with my hanging wall cabinet. The tool wall itself hangs from the same french cleats the main wall cabinet hangs off, […]

If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to take a closer look at NotebookLM, a new(ish) Google tool to explore documents via a chat interface, based on a Large Language Model. It’s worth noting that NotebookLM does allow you to “chat” with documents, it does not train the LLM on those documents, though, so it all lives in the LLMs context window. I tested NotebookLM a bit over the …