Recently updated blogs

Earlier in September I was in Stroud, for the first Festival of Commoning. It was a lovely event, full of people working on commons projects in different ways. What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders. (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier and others - "a pervasive, …

Fuengirola in Southern Spain is a town of two parts. Towards the Malaga side is more of a resort, popular with Belgians, Dutch, and some Brits, with its attendant sprinkling of "British" pubs as well as a paseo crammed full of lookalike restaurants. Strolling through at night, you are accosted by "propaganda" types, trying to persuade you in. It is the sort of place that has plenty of buzz, but …

Where we're at: Drovers Brook in the intermediate stage of being on the short trestles while the basic track and wiring went in. This meant I was back to having a layout in the middle of the room again, something that is not in the slightest bit convenient. In some ways there is nothing to see here, and any description could just refer to c2017 when the AoTC was under …

There are very many irrational numbers but proving irrationality of a specific number is not a common event. A few weeks ago Frank Calegari, Vesselin Dimitrov, and Yunqing Tang posted a paper that proved the irrationality of . In fact they proved even more: that and , are linearly independent over . This is, of course, a fantastic result. According to the short abstract, “The argument applies a new kind …

By Sabrina Lim Fang. 1 Introduction 1.1 Today is the 15th of May, Tuesday. The rail operator has put out a text notification: Due to a train fault, service has been disrupted. I read it onboard a train that has not moved for twenty-five minutes. Good to know, thank you. Mobile phones are coming out of pockets and bags; mine goes back in. 1.2 Train breakdowns are really just practice …

After over a year of work, our very first stable release of ESM-friendly 3.0 is now available: Eleventy v3.0.0 🎈🐀 We are very excited to see this ship and look forward to what y’all build with it 🏆 Eleventy v3.0.0: Possums ❤️ ESM (includes full release notes, features, upgrade guide, and thank you notes!)

There are a lot of unhappy people out there in the IndyCar world these days. Team owners, series officials, media types and fans all seem to be struggling to smile recently. Over the years, I’ve referred to them as The Legions of the Miserable or The Humorly Challenged – realizing that there really is no […]

What follows is an unusual story of perseverance. We start with a conjecture and after some plot twists end up discussing the meaning of truth. While the title is a spoiler, you might not be able to guess how we got there… The conjecture The bunkbed conjecture (BBC) is a basic claim about random subgraphs. Start with a finite graph G=(V,E) and consider a product graph G x K2 obtained …

I’m always interested in expanding my bookish horizons, so when I was approached by a new-to-me publisher about a forthcoming release I was very interested. The publisher is The Irish Pages Press, an award winning outfit based in Belfast, and they’re a non profit organisation; as well as issuing “Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing”, they also put out some very intriguing sounding books with an Irish angle. The …

The poem featured in this post, Autumn Leaves, is found in Mary A. Maitland's book by the same title, published in 1907. Amidst the autumn gloom and the sad sight of fallen and crushed leaves, the poet is reminded that seasons will change again, ending the sense of grief and pain.

Roald Dahl evokes mixed feelings. He’s one of the greatest children’s storytellers, whose macabre books have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide; he was also anti-Semitic, and used racist and sexist stereotypes in his work. So despite the huge theatrical success of the musicals Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches, Dahl exudes a very unpleasant personal vibe. It is this that is the subject of director …

My discoveries made during my rewatch of CHINATOWN on the big screen of Cameo One are maybe REdiscoveries of things I noticed before and forgot. But here they are. I might write something about the sound design. It’s very simple in that pre-80s way, but each atmos and spot effect has an emotional, thematic or […]

Me, tracing my fingers in and out of the coarse surface of cupmarks on a stone in the sun, with red paint marks on the rock beside me. Again. Not in Faifley, but Oslo. To be precise this happened on a walk with fellow archaeologist Ingrid Mainland in Ekebergparken, on the south side of the harbour fjord of the Norwegian capital city. The park is better known for a stunning …

Team Ratings for Week 9 The basic method is described on my Department home page. Here are the team ratings prior to this week’s games, along with the ratings at the start of the season. Current Rating Rating at Season Start Difference Wellington 7.81 10.63 -2.80 Waikato 6.16 5.30 0.90 North Harbour 5.63 3.06 2.60 Hawke’s Bay 5.48 6.09 -0.60 Bay of Plenty 5.31 3.52 1.80 Taranaki 3.64 5.21 -1.60 …