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I read Sam Freedman’s Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It with a mixture of nods of recognition and gasps of disbelief. It’s all too apparent that – as the subtitle puts it – nothing works in aspects of life in the UK dependent in some way on the successful design and implementation of government policy (which is most aspects tbh). Those of us who have engaged …

In the last episode of this series, we looked at two popular sixteenth century texts on statics, the oft published and widely read pseudo-Aristotelian Questiones Mechanicae, and Guidobaldo dal Monte’s highly influential Mechanicorum liber. Today we are going to leave Italy and travel to The Netherlands to look at the work on statics of the Flemish polymath, Simon Stevin (c. 1548–1620). Source: Wikimedia Commons Stevin is usually referred to as …

You can tell the nights are getting darker. Dog poo is back on the pavements I found some on my trainer that I brought into my wee house, it was the last thing I needed. As soon as the weather gets better I will be out with the poo bags to clean up. Dog Poo Comments welcome.

A new location has just been announced for the Great British Beer Festival for 2025 which takes it away from London for the first time for many year, and whilst we are now in the midst of the festival season here's a look back at the history of large scale beer events....So the Great British Beer Festival is to leave its longstanding home at Olympia in London, and is moving …

“He was not of an age, but for all time.” Ben Jonson’s description of William Shakespeare certainly holds true, with a variety of productions of his plays showing in theatres of all kinds across the globe – as well as countless film, TV & audio versions, not to mention spin-off ideas inspired by certain characters or locations. But these original plays didn’t appear in a vacuum; the early modern theatre …

In this first of a three part series of blog posts, we explore the CDS Plugin mechanism in CAP to find out how it works, so we are well prepared to write our own plugin. Background This series of blog posts accompanies my session in the Developer Keynote at SAP TechEd Virtual this year. In particular, the content I presented in that session is reflected in this first blog post, …

RIYC?? In the early 90s, a couple of friends of my sister left the Woo of Findhorn to settle and make a living in Ireland. They bunked with us for a few weeks. But as soon as they got some gig work, they left our spare room and rented a teeny tiny flat in Dun Laoghaire. One Saturday a few weeks later, we piled into the car for a surprise …

I start every morning by opening up a GitHub search that shows me all the open pull requests across Laravel's open source ecosystem. It’s kind of like my personal to-do list for the day. Some mornings, there are just a handful, or...

It's like one of those ghosts that doesn't know it's dead. The Lauterbacher brewery claims a foundation date of 1889, with a history in Bavaria going further back to the mid-17th century. The website tells the story in the first person: "we at Lauterbach..." Except you don't have to dig too deep to discover it's a sub-brand of Riegele, centred around a pub in Augsburg but with no brewery of …

As a science fiction kid in the 1970s, one phenomenon I recalled well was the “ancient astronaut” works of Erich von Däniken. These took a look at various artistic and architectural creations of various ancient peoples and claimed they were the result of extra-terrestrial contact. As von Däniken didn’t have the scientific or academic background […]

📝Editor note: Due to this article's unexpected attention, I've included a few more alternatives that people suggested. I've also added some contextual notes you should know before diving into these options.Due to gestures vaguely, everything going on right now with WordPress, I thought I'd put together a list of alternative CMSs that better fit the criteria someone might have for their website. The modern CMS landscape is super broad, with …

A few books stood out this month, including Radio Girls, about the early days at the BBC, and The Trap, the newest book about Emma Makepeace. I also enjoyed The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher, which follows what seems like a recent trend in senior citizen sleuths but features an appealing heroine who is both vulnerable and resilient. I couldn’t decide if I liked or disliked The Second Lady …

The article notes that the prize actually went to two humans, but this headline from MIT Tech Review may just be ahead of its time. Are we one generation of tech away from a Nobel Prize going to a machine itself — assuming the next gen is more autonomous in terms of what it applies […]

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation has awarded a $12,000 grant to the New York Genealogical & Biographical Society to support a Fellow for their New Netherland Settlers project. I am honored to announce I have been named in that position. As a Fellow, I will research underrepresented and underexamined populations within New Netherland such as free and enslaved individuals, Indigenous people, and the many others who contributed to the diverse, …

It's October, and that means it's inversion season in Washington.Tuesday's 5 a.m. sounding, a vertical snapshot of the atmosphere measured by a weather balloon launched by the National Weather Service, shows a stout inversion above Spokane. The red temperature line increases sharply to the right in the lowest levels of the atmosphere. The surface temperature was a cool 46°F but warmed to a balmy 63°F approximately 1300 feet off the …