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You may well be familiar with the Holborn Viaduct, an impressive Victorian construction acting as a bridge over Farringdon Street linking Newgate Street and Holborn. Did you know though that it was once home to the world’s first ever coal-fired power station? The Holborn Viaduct Down the Western edge of London once ran the Fleet […] The post The Holborn Viaduct And The World’s First Coal-Fired Power Station appeared first …

The mild robotDreamworks' latest (and arguably last to be fully animated in-house) movie has at least two things going for it: 1) the flattened handmade painterly look of the Spiderverse movies and Puss n Boots: The Last Wish that's currently all the rage; and 2) the fact that it's not Pixar or Disney.On the minus side are two: 1) It's not Pixar or Disney but sure as hell feels like …

‘Noel can usually spot a camera 500 yards away so it’s unusual to capture him unposed. And Rich Fulcher’s bellybutton was an essential part of his act – if it wasn’t out, the comedy wasn’t as good’I met Noel Fielding at Croydon art college, then we lived together when we were at Buckinghamshire College of Higher Education, along with Nigel Coan who went on to do all the Boosh animation. …

If, like me, you sit at the intersection of being someone who likes music, and someone who has a nostalgia for when people could design interesting interfaces, then I can commend upon to ye the works of Mario Guzman. For a long time now I’ve been using Music MiniPlayer, which is a custom UI for interacting with the current playing album in Apple’s Music app, something you need as the …

Last week I wrote about the designer furniture district, and I pointed out that these high end corporate big businesses are the direct competition to furniture makers like yourselves. If you're a professional furniture maker, you are competing for customers who walk into this these giant showrooms, see a lot of similar furniture from showroom to showroom, and are convinced to buy by professional sales people who work on commission …

Amy Sillman, Faux Pas I’m reading Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas and when I was searching her name in the Podcasts app I came across this conversation with writer Sheila Heti: SHEILA HETI: With my novels… at a certain point I just have to do the thing that I absolutely don’t want to do, that’s going to embarrass me, or that’s going to make me feel like I’m doing something bad. …

Do I always have to write a tldr? I live in Britain, I like to talk about the weather. While all my favourite writers on the internet are pouring their thoughts on the current debate about what a social web is, I deleted my Echofeed account, de facto quitting my sterile 'social media' broadcast routine. Instead, I'm enjoying the sound of heavy rain battering the roof. There was this brief …

In the next decades, climate migration will redraw the demographic map of America. Two recent books tell an unsettling story of migration and displacement that is already underway. Read on Places Journal

Every can needs a tram.// Disneyland Resort, 2007[Source: Jason Schultz / Parkendium. Used by Permission.]

September EditionWho thought the algorithm behind machine learning would have cool complexity implications?The Complexity of Gradient Descent: CLS = PPAD ∩ PLSJohn Fearnley, Paul Goldberg, Alexandros Hollender and Rahul SavaniLet's unpack these classes, subclasses of TFNP, where for every input we know there is an easily verifiable solution and we are looking at the complexity of finding it. PPAD is the class famous for having finding a Nash Equilibrium as …

"From what I've seen, I shouldn't think there's a house or cottage in Thornden where they aren't chewing over the crime at this very moment."[Mrs. Haswell] and Miss Patterdale were agreed that although it was disagreeable to persons of their generation to have a murder committed in their midst, it was very nice for the children to have something to occupy them, Thornden being such a quiet place, with really …

I got the latest volume in The Red Menace series by James Mullaney from Bold Venture Press: The Sky Is Red. Mullaney is probably best known as a ghost-writer for The Destroyer #111-131, along with the later “new Destroyer” novels. I had gotten into The Destroyer in the late ’80s, reading many of the earlier […]

Earlier this year, Zach Leatherman published an epic article on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Web Components, based on his talk at JSHeroes. One of the most interesting and surprising things I learned was just how widespread Web Component usage already is… Despite some notable criticism, web components are already widely used across the web. In August 2023, Chrome Platform Status reports that 19.4% of page loads …

A great list this month, possibly the largest number of high quality history books published in a single month since my records began! (in 2019) There are four in particular that I'm looking out for, detailed below. Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there. ✕ book cover [title] [by author] [publish date] Our Review Amazon …

I’m joining the inimitable Carson Ellis for a conversation at Bart’s Books this month! Come help celebrate the release of her new book, One Week in January, on October 12th in the Bart’s courtyard from 6-7pm. We’ll be chatting about creative booms in funky towns, spending time with our younger selves, and finding community in rural spaces. Event details here. Here’s a bit more about the book: In January 2001, …