Recently updated blogs

by Zahid Fayyaz Former winner of Taskmaster and Celebrity Mastermind, and following regular appearances on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order and The Last Leg, Sophie Duker tours her new show to London this month. This is the sequel to her award-nominated 2019 debut, But Daddy I Loved Her, a play on the trademark phrase from Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, is a loud, brash and electric show from Duker. …

I stumbled across this old film footage of the Grasse River Railroad, the owners of the Rolliam (the inspiration for E. L. Moore's Spumoni Club Coach), while looking for pictures of the vehicle that might help in modelling a motorized version of Mr. Moore's creation. It's fascinating to watch even though there are no up close and personal shots of the Rolliam. However, there are a few places in the …

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 …

Since appearing at the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest in Lisbon, Portugal, singer and former professional model Mikolas Josef, is one among a few Eurovision stars to remain on my radar. Namely, after his stint in the competition, he continued recording and releasing a series of catchy pop tracks which eventually culminated in the release of a debut album, “ONE,” earlier this year. Although, with some of these songs, now a …

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, …