Recently updated blogs

Forbes recently published the Forbes 400 List for 2024, listing the 400 richest people in the United States. This inspired me to make a histogram to show the distribution of wealth in the United States. It turns out that if you put Elon Musk on the graph, almost the entire US population is crammed into a vertical bar, one pixel wide. Each pixel is $500 million wide, illustrating that $500 …

Largely hidden from view, enclosed behind a brick wall in Chelsea is a beautiful and historic site. The Chelsea Physic Garden is a four acre botanic garden, established in 1673. Chelsea Physic Garden is both a beautiful, relaxing place to visit but one that is also packed with history and stories to tell. Chelsea In […] The post The Chelsea Physic Garden: London’s Oldest Botanic Garden appeared first on Living …

Poached from Lydia Lunch's official Instagram page. Photo by Marcel Jas Lydia Lunch, Effenaar, Eindhoven 1988. You may be cool, but you'll never be Lydia-Lunch-in-a-Slayer-shirt cool.

This is the fourth in a series of posts on the reasons I will not be voting to return the former president to the White House. My focus here is not to support his opponent but instead to explain why I believe that Donald Trump is manifestly unqualified for the role.The Wikipedia article entitled "False or misleading statements by Donald Trump" starts with this editing note:This article may be too …

The title translates as “madness for two” and appropriately most reviews I’ve seen fall on one of two sides- this is either `utter rubbish` or its a work of `genius`. As ever the truth sits somewhere else though its fair to say this is not the film you might be expecting if you saw the first one. Spoilers beyond this point It opens with an animated short before shifting to …

A couple of weird dreams. 1 Some generic hair metal rocker with jet black hair while still in his prime was driving me around in his convertible around country roads. It could be Tommy Lee or Richie Sambora. Whomever it was, we were just riding around, flirting with each other, having the time of our lives while speeding down these two-lane roads in the middle of nowhere. We park at …

In the fall, I write a jobs post predicting the upcoming CS faculty job market and giving suggestions and links. In the spring I used to crowdsource a list of where everyone got jobs but have since outsourced the crowdsource to Grigory Yaroslavtsev. Let's start with a few announcements.FOCS in Chicago will have a Graduating Bits on Sunday, October 27 from 12-2 PM. If you have job openings for postdocs …

In the past article Mindscapes: Thinking Environments in Your Way of Living we looked at thinking environments in your life in general. One of these thinking environments is the Zettelkasten. Cal Newport sees the Zettelkasten Method as one of the many ways of managing knowledge.1 In doing so, he overlooks a very special characteristic of the Zettelkasten: the Zettelkasten is a very special thinking environment: it is integrated. What does …

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 …

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 …