Recently updated blogs

Once again, it was recently that part of the year where a good number of science enthusiasts, natural historians, wildlife artists, scientists, researchers and interested members of the public gather in London for what we call TetZooCon: the annual Tetrapod Zoology Convention… Caption: at left, the front entrance of our venue... Bush House. At right: what's this... DinoCon? Images: Darren Naish; Gemma Hazeborg. Held once more at Kings College in …

“Make films about the people, they said”, Jean-Luc Godard once quipped, “but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity.

Italian Limes (screenshot) Part research project, part art installation, the Italian Limes project explored a quirk about the Italian border that frankly boggles my mind a bit. Italy’s alpine frontiers with Switzerland and Austria generally follows the watershed line. Thanks to climate change and shrinking glaciers, that line has been shifting, so Italy entered into agreements with Austria (in 2006) and Switzerland (in 2009) to redefine their borders as moving …

‘This iceberg in Antarctica was so vast, I had to dive down and take 147 photos in sub-zero water, then get a computer to join them up. Ten years on, my toes are still damaged’As a kid, I was fascinated by the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau. There was nothing else quite like them – they were a weekly TV appointment. My family lived not too far from the sea and, …

By: Kathryn ConnellAlways #RadicallyOpen Our mission is to be #RadicallyOpen, we like to share - so our newsletter is a short update and an invitation for you to take a look at our latest data projects and tools. Despite being a small, independent not-for-profit team, we fit a lot into our schedule. Everything we do is published on our website for others to use - these are just some of …

1970 Club, hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, starts on Monday and we will all be reading and writing about books published in that year. It seems to have been another great year for publishing – I have previously read and reviewed six books on my blog and thought I would list them before the week begins. If you haven’t decided what to read yet, maybe …

This movie features a many-headed monstrosity! Starring Cui Erkang, Zhang Ruiyao, Su Suxia, Cheng Qi, Zhang Ying and Yin Shaosheng. Written by Liu Jiahong and Wang Runz. Directed by Ji Zhizhong and Tony Wei. Tencent Penguin Pictures One of the hydra-creature’s toothy heads A dying general transfers the power of the Cyan Dragon into the body of Xiang, a lowly footsoldier, who must learn to harness the energy to defeat …

Calling something knowledge can be a political act, even a radical one 1. — Thenjiwe Nkosi I recently learned more about the Library of Alexandria; more than you do while scrolling through Tumblr at random 2 anyway. It turns out that it survived the famous fire! The library as an institution at least, whether you believe it was primarily a warehouse under their control that burned aside. Other libraries superseded …

Source: Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 55 Text: Still, social mobility is built into women and may be an aspect of their biology. Madge remained refined, though ill-informed, and she dressed elegantly in the bosomless style of the day, going off to her stenography in a cloche hat and with exposed pretty knees. She was well informed only about the cinema, in which she …

As I am between steps in the publication of a book about C.S. Lewis’s thought, I find myself coming back to my bookshelf with a bit of mental space. I have been following Charlie W. Starr’s work for almost as … Continue reading → The post My Unblurbed Blurb of Charlie Starr’s The Lion Country first appeared on A Pilgrim in Narnia.

Some time ago, I presented a few listening tips on the subject of my favourite drink—tea—and tea culture. And in this blog post, I’m going to offer a few suggestions on the topic of the world’s second most popular drink: coffee. From the history of coffee to its health benefits and tips on how to make the perfect cup of coffee… Here you’ll find everything you need to know, and …

The other day I was sent an audio recording of a meeting I had been part of, but no textual transcript was available. With a relatively small amount of hacking it is now very easy to use the OpenAI Whisper model via the transcriptions endpoint to generate high quality text from such a file. This example uses Python, it’s a great language for these sort of ad-hoc tools. Process The …

Susan Ohanian? Thomas Sowell? Anonymous? Tombstone engraved with the word “Unknown” Question for Quote Investigator: Social media is rife with conflict. Comments about sensitive topics produce incendiary responses. I am reminded of this mordant insight: There are only two ways of telling the complete truth—anonymously and posthumously. U.S. economist Thomas Sowell and U.S. teacher Susan Ohanian have received credit for this remark. Would you please help me to find a …

Prince Arutha strategizes to counter the Moredhel threat. This is the first game I've played with "Chapters." It apparently isn't the first in the RPG genre, although unless some console game did it first, it seems to be the first with a western release. In any event, I can't imagine that the authors of Krondor played Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes in Japanese, so I suspect that to them …

The New York Times published this chart to illustrate the extreme ocean heat driving the formation of hurricane Milton (link): The chart expertly shows layers of details. The red line tracks the current year's data on ocean heat content up to yesterday. Meaning is added through the gray line that shows the average trajectory of the past decade. With the addition of this average line, we can readily see how …