Recently updated blogs

I guess I have used part of it for a week now, and the whole thing for 5 ish days. What I like about it is that it is much smaller and lighter. I also like that it is fewer things than before. What I don’t like about it is that travelers notebook refills don’t open flat.

In Part 1, we looked at what happens when you try to record a signal whose frequency is higher than 1/2 the sampling rate (which, from now on, I’ll call the Nyquist Frequency, named after Harry Nyquist who was one of the people that first realised that this limit existed). You record a signal, but it winds up having a different frequency at the output than it had at the …

We take class warfare to 300mph as we pit the aristocratic Mosquito against the no-nonsense proletariat muscle of the Beaufighter to find out who the real war-winning twin is. A well-born beauty with two Merlins running on blueblood, the ecstatically swift Mosquito was the most refined fighter in the war. The Mosquito was stealthy enough to choose […]

Had to head out to Oakland to celebrate the Mai Tai becoming the official cocktail of the city, popping into a bustling Kon-Tiki in mid-evening. The crew has decorated the venue for Halloween using a variety of retro looking decorations including some nice pumpkin lanterns hanging over the bar. There was quite the crowd too, with lively music that made Tuesday seem like a Friday. I’ve been pretty transparent about …

My wife and I picked up the then-unknown-to-us 3M game "Regatta" (1968) a few years ago at an antique shop. And after playing it, we instantly fell in love with it; movement is based on wind direction, the components are top-notch (metal boats and buoys, and great island terrain), it's a tiny easy-to-teach ruleset, and fun to play with larger groups (we bought a second copy and have had up …

You can find all of my Tokyo Game Show 2024 coverage hereWe knew it was coming. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio had already confirmed that it would be announcing the next Like a Dragon in time for Tokyo Game Show, and the RGG Summit, streamed just a few days before TGS, seemed like the logical time to do it. It was reasonable to expect that this would be a Gaiden-like spin-off, …

From September 18-21, a dedicated team from Teach the Future attended the once-in-a-generation UN Summit of the Future, marking a significant milestone for the organization. The participation was the culmination of extensive behind-the-scenes work involving numerous partners and collaborators, with the team dedicating a full year to preparation, attending interventions, and seminars leading up to the Summit. This long-term commitment demonstrates the depth of thought and effort that went into …

Then they came for the teachers

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others. Ayelet Tsabari’s novel Songs for the Brokenhearted is a profound and masterfully told debut. Publishers Weekly wrote of the book: “In this heartfelt …

WelcomeYesterday we played a show in the Great Hall of the Dominion Museum in Whanganui a Tara. I returned for the second day to Akin for breakfast, the café with a name that I still couldn’t think of a pun for but an establishment that I now trusted to provide me with the nutrition to get me through a day of travelling and performing. Moving into the savoury section of …

Have I talked about this super cool bit of research and writing yet? As I look through the Pilgrim in Narnia archive, I see a couple of hints of the “Archangel Fragment,” but not much more. In a cultural moment … Continue reading → The post The Other Side of Screwtape: C.S. Lewis’s “Archangel Fragment” first appeared on A Pilgrim in Narnia.

Vladimir Nabokov: “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something …

The amazing thing for me is that only last week I heard Nilay Patel say on the VergeCast that virtual nametags would be the killer app for smart glasses. Well, two Harvard students took that notion and ran away with it, using Ray-Ban Meta glasses to dox people in real-time using AI and public databases. And, get this–most of the tech and databases already exist. They’re just paired with consumer …

Let’s talk about the basic concept of the "making app". I’ve written about this before, and demoed it in some of my public project walk-throughs, but there’s no single straightforward explanation out there, so let’s take a swing. What is a "making app", and why might one want to roll one for a project? In […]

Melbourne's got a great public transport infrastructure legacy. Unlike most US cities it kept substantial metropolitan and regional rail systems. And unlike most other western cities it kept a large, substantially intact, tram network. These factors give us a big advantage over other cities that need to make do with buses and/or rebuild their rail and tram systems (at great expense). With easy day trips possible to destinations like Geelong, …