Recently updated blogs

Gaming hasn’t exactly been one of my most intensive pastimes of late–it has its highs and lows, and typically tends to be more intensive in the cold seasons. But this year, with the public demise of Switch emulation and my interest in preserving a time capsule of my high-performance Zelda setup, I decided to create a VM snapshot of it and (re)document the process. Either way, these steps will yield …

I was aware of The Geysers, a geothermal field about 35 miles north of my home in Santa Rosa, but I never gave it much thought until my first bike ride through the area. Then I learned a number of interesting things. It’s the world’s largest geothermal field, producing more than 700 megawatts. It accounts for 20% of California’s renewable energy. The naturally-occurring steam was used up almost 30 years …

Is this a young Kelly Bert Manning at BC Systems Corp circa 1980? A former staffer thinks so. The device is probably an IBM 026 keypunch or a model of the same vintage. My father died four years and three months ago after a struggle with cancer. None of us had the heart to write an obituary in the early days of the COVID epidemic. This is my attempt to …

Fall is here and I’m excited for my October class at Pete Galbert’s. I’ll burrow into the shop for the winter, then we’re going to do it again in spring. Registration for a class at Pete’s March 10-15 opens up … Continue reading →

Tuesday A new month. In the city there are blue coats, black coats, tan coats and a boxy fake fur jacket with shoulders so wide it could be concealing an actual box. Question: Who grew the sunflowers at One Exchange Square? I’ve been wondering about this for weeks. One Exchange Square is a never ending building site. Scaffolding, tarpaulins, hoardings and tall boards conceal it. And all summer, peeking out …

I think the reason Bresson’s films resist singular interpretations is that they are composed of multiple, overlapping perspectives. His films contain elements of humanism, nihilism, absurdism, existentialism, transcendentalism, and numerous[...] The post Bresson, Schrader, and the Fool: Transcendental and Materialist Interpretations in the Films of Robert Bresson appeared first on Bright Lights Film Journal.

L’ECONOMIA DEL POST-LAVORO Finora abbiamo assistito alla rivoluzione di internet e dei computer ma in generale l’automazione è stata relegata per lo più nei processi di produzione nelle fabbriche; ora lo sviluppo dell’intelligenza artificiale generativa sta creando un’iper-abbondanza di lavoro cognitivo e la cosiddetta sostituzione del lavoro umano riguarda compiti fisici e intellettuali indifferentemente. Siamo infatti già in grado non solo di automatizzare i lavori della produzione, ma anche quelli …

Albert Einstein? Paul Arthur Schilpp? Marilyn Ferguson? Apocryphal? Picture of chairs in a lecture hall from Unsplash Question for Quote Investigator: An overly rigid approach to education is counter-productive because it extinguishes natural inquisitiveness. This viewpoint has been expressed as follows: It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. The famous physicist Albert Einstein has received credit for this remark, but I have never seen a solid citation, and …

A print from my generative series Astronomic Comics has been chosen to be in the Austin People’s Gallery! It is on display at City Hall until April of next year! I am honored have my work shown at a prestigious event like this. You can read more about The People’s Gallery here.

Here’s all the writing about beer and pubs that grabbed our attention in the past week, from splitting the G to the GBG. First, some news: if the disappearance of various big beer festivals in the past year seemed significant, then the return of the Campaign for Real Ale’s Great British Beer Festival must also mean something. It’ll be back in 2025 but not at Olympia in London, where it’s …

If you think of the politics of rural America, you probably think of it in terms of conservativism. A mixture of rugged individualistic politics, cynicism about government and conservative political leanings. There's a lot of truth to this. In 2016, 62 percent of the US rural electorate voted for Trump. This reflected the way that Trump's political movement had become the outlet for general

Ari Levy at CNBC has a great article covering the battle between WordPress and Silver Lake / WP Engine: Why WordPress [co-]founder Matt Mullenweg has gone ‘nuclear’ against tech investing giant Silver Lake.

Valerie Antwi, Emma McDonald and Christopher York in Foreverland, Southwark Playhouse Photo: Charlie Lyne If medical science made it possible to live forever, frozen at the age you have the procedure, would you do it? The ability to stay young and live way beyond what is normal is the premise...

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MIT Spinoff Liquid Debuts Non-Transformer AI Models and They’re Already State-of-the-Art Carl Franzen | VentureBeat “Unlike most others of the current generative AI wave, these models are not based around the transformer architecture outlined in the seminal 2017 paper ‘Attention Is All You Need.’ Instead, Liquid states that its goal ‘is to explore ways to build foundation models beyond Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs)’ and with the new LFMs, …

“Time for Peace” (זמן לשלום), Lyrics: Amnon Abutbul, Yair Dalal, Fathi Kasem; Melody: Amnon Abutbul. Performing Shlomit Aharon and Yevgeni Shapovalov. This year I had the rare event that the new Jewish year coincides with my birthday, and “time for peace” expresses my wishes for both these occasions. Click here for the previous post on exciting mathematical irrationality news.