Recently updated blogs

I’m very picky with lip products and I have a reason to be. I have eczema-prone lips so I need something that’s moisturizing, hydrating and mild. Only a few lip care products have made my cut. There are some that feel average to me and some that triggered an eczema flare. I try to stick […]

Dear Captain Awkward, Several months ago, I (he/him) fell into an affair with Ethan, a much younger coworker who seemed like a breath of fresh air in my life. From the moment we began talking, I was captivated by his intelligence, energy and charm. He was adventurous, spontaneous, and made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. I believed we shared a deep, soulful connection—a bond …

I have Google Takeout setup to periodically export to GDrive as a series of 10Gb .zip files. I’ve been meaning to get these over to S3 for a bit in part for backup purposes, and in part because I wanted to futz with the photos. I’m quite confident I’m not the first person to want to do something like this. But we’ve reached an awkward and unfortunate moment in the …

Emma Hunsinger’s How It All Ends hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves, perhaps because of the title. That’s a shame, because it’s a wonderful book, an affecting, informative portrait of a kid worrying about growing up. Tara is thirteen and starting high school (ninth grade). She was skipped ahead from seventh grade, along with a couple of other kids, because she’s a “high-performing student”. That gives her a lot of …

It’s time for my annual update on crime statistics, following the September release of 2023 numbers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). We also have preliminary numbers on homicides in 2023 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Data sources are listed at the end of this post along with my comments on data quality; see …

While today we are inundated with color images of the Earth, our earliest views from space were confined to monochromatic or black and white images (see “First Pictures: The View of Earth from Space – October 24, 1946”). During the post war years when we began to explore the frontier of space, color photographic film was not sensitive enough, compared to black and white film of the era, requiring longer …

John McTiernan's Predator, with Jess Dunne and Joe Griffin. At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database. Show notes, including links: https://them0vieblog.com/2022/06/04/287-top-gun-maverick-this-just-in-50/ Follow us on twitter at @thetwofifty.

Threats against a small Nevada town Pride celebration

I was there at the beginning with Frelux, buying one of their very first lights. And now, years later, I am delighted to own one of their newest. That first light caught my eye because it ran a rare form factor (found only in the Spy series from Cool Fall, the Spy 007 review is here, and various rip offs) and was exceptionally cheap for a custom—coming in at $95. …

SOPHIE's posthumous album SOPHIE is out now on Transgressive and Future Classic - and there's some great stuff on it. An interesting piece at the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino looking at SOPHIE's career and work in terms of "plasticity" On "Bipp""black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to …

Lots of interest in gene editing startups but in practice they don't do that well: Few diseases can be corrected through gene editing, hence valuations of such companies, despite FDA approvals, are low. Compare with addressing shared causes of multi-morbidity like aging or obesity. If you want to work on the former, at Retro.bio we are hiring :) The decline of social status of stay at home moms as cause …

I’m in New York this week for a work thing, stationed close to the Empire State building. The last time I was here it was almost a decade ago and...I didn’t have a great time. Actually, I haven't liked New York the three times I’ve been here. I’m sorry! I’m absolutely not walking over here! Despite how excited I was when I first entered the city, New York felt like …

In the mid-19th century, school reformers made the distinction between head-and-hand learning in children and youth–both had to be schooled. After the Civil War, reformers introduced “manual education” into schools. Working with tools to fashion wood, iron, and other metals into useful objects, teachers and students balanced the then nearly total focus on academic subjects (see here and here). While adding such courses to the high school curriculum was common …

I mean, emails, of course I’ve sent emails, I’ve been sending emails since (checks) December, yes, but see, the thing about December is, in December I was still writing the forty-third novelette? of forty-four? And though I was pretty sure I’d finish it all within the year to come, I mean, writing an epic is hardly a precision enterprise, it’s not like I can point to a section of the …

UPDATE 5 October 2024: in addition to the pretty printing pdf version of the “Nonviolent personality” by Giuliano Pontara that I translated from the Italian original, the booklet is now also available for free in reflowable epub version, for easier reading on a wider variety of devices. The remainder of this post below, which introduces the booklet, is almost the same as the original post from 3 March 2011. ~~~ …