Recently updated blogs

How the African Risk Capacity (ARC) helps protect African countries following extreme weather events. This year marks the 10th anniversary of ARC Group, a specialised agency of the African Union. It provides technical assistance and rapid prearranged finance following an extreme weather event, such as drought, tropical cyclone and soon fluvial flood, to various African countries through its regional risk insurance pool. It provides both sovereign insurance to African governments …

I like to think she was looking for better reception by the window. There were so many tourists in Florence — including me — that I was consciously looking for photos without any people in them. This one seemed right to me though, a single person living their life in a city that felt overwhelmed with people. Photograph tags: europe, florence, colour, travel, italy, x100t, architecture

The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another Dead tune that I loved as a kid without knowing why, and then didn’t think …

Stories of Crime & Detection, vol. 7: Death Croons the Blues (2024) is, as of this writing, one of the recent additions to the ambitious, ongoing project to restore James Ronald's crime, detective and pulp fiction to print – scheduled to conclude next year with vol. 14. The headline novel of this collection is the second of three novels about the morally flexible, ace crime reporter of the London-based Morning …

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. …

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.