Recently updated blogs

AfterEven though I'm deep into surfacing the mountain and casting rocks I still spend time just staring at the thing from different angles.I began to think the portion of the mountain on the parking lot lobe that partially obscures the track going to the inspiration point stub needed to be taller. If I left it as it was it was going to be the same height as the granite gate, …

In this third and final part of a three-part series, we’re taking a more streamlined approach to an application that supports vision-language (VLM) and text-to-speech (TTS). This time, we’ll use different models that are designed for all three modalities — images or videos, text, and audio (including speech-to-text) — in one model. These “any-to-any” models make things easier by allowing us to avoid switching between models. Specifically, we’ll focus on …

October Autumn Greetings! We so enjoyed hosting three classes of 2nd Graders from Harrison School. They walked up to the Farm from the school and then toured around the farm and greenhouses, before settling into a project of exploring the flower seed crop field and drawing different kinds of insects they saw in the flowers. While they were in the greenhouse, they searched for plants on the benches, looking for …

While attending the 2024 CST Conference: Sustainability and Television, which ran from 24th June to the 4th of July, the question of representation of British Asians in relation to equality and diversity arose. Equality and diversity are further elements of the UN’s sustainable development goals. The conference promoted the theme of equality and diversity in striving for wider and less… Source

This blogpost is about Central curves on noncommutative surfaces. If you just want mathematics and not some of the backstory, you can click the link to immediately get to the preprint. Background Almost to the day 4 years ago, I wrote a blogpost about how to (possibly) interpret a type of noncommutative curve using the geometry of orders on varieties. I did so, because I was initially confused by some …

It's that time of year when the Penstemon are still going strong, and we all love Penstemon, which are going from strength to strength these days:- more variety of colour, longer-lasting, and often truly perennial. They have trumpet-shaped flowers, often with a splash of white inside them, and they flower for a long time, through summer and right into autumn.But at this time of year, the weeds are also springing …

Submitted by Lachlan, who says: Brisbane dropped a new transit map and it is EXTREMELY pretty. I’m a big fan. Definitely the best-designed official transit map in Australia in my opinion. It even acknowledges the rapid bus routes and the G-Link light rail! I wish it could have acknowledged the existence of the ferries but that would probably require that the city centre become even more distorted… … and also …

Evan Roth is the guest of the sixth episode of the podcast series I did with artists who 1. are among my absolute cultural heroes and 2. have exhibited at Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. Evan Roth, Strand 47, 2022 For the past 19 years, Evan Roth has been making work in art institutions, in public spaces and on the internet, resulting in paintings, installations, videos and websites. …

Previously: Part 3 This phase of the course is all about building up the basic apparatus. We’ve stated our axioms, and it might seem like they’re not very powerful. It’s our job now to show that, in fact, they’re powerful enough to do just about everything with sets that mathematicians ever want. We began that job this week, with a chapter on subsets. For example, in the axioms, we only …

It has been another busy week mainly still working on the [redacted] project which meant a trip to London on the 0700 from Bristol Parkway Monday morning. This train and the Tube were unnervingly quiet – I guess in the post-Covid, hybrid working world people don’t ‘do’ Mondays! The [redacted] project remains challenging but some of the fog is starting to lift and I have to say the work of …

A conversation about election mathematics inspired by a ballot. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett, with special guest Sam Hansen. For more from Sam and the Carry the Two podcast check out this episode about Mathematics and Voting.

Air travel is bad for us. Yes, yes, I know we need planes to take us long distances, but look at the downside: not only the carbon footprint, but also the anxiety. I used to feel pretty relaxed about flying, then — one day on a short European flight — there was a spot of turbulence and I glimpsed the faces of the cabin crew. And they were certainly not …

A new edition of my book, The Business of Being a Writer, releases in April 2025. To mark the occasion, I’m offering a free, email-based course. Every Friday until my book releases, I’ll send you a key idea and exercise from the second edition on earning a living as a writer today. Here is part of what I have in store for you: A look at common misconceptions about earning …

Rez Ball (2024) • View trailerFour stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, teen drug/alcohol use, occasional profanity and crude referencesAvailable via: NetflixBy Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.13.24This continues to be a terrific year for inspirational sports sagas, and director Sydney Freeland’s heartfelt drama is another winner. Coaches Heather and Benny (Jessica Matten and Ernest Tsosie III, far right) watch thegame action, along with …

Garden centres and DIY stores used to be relatively straightforward affairs with demarcation between the rough-edged trade-only propositions and the softer consumer-focused retailers. They also operated predominantly from physical stores and maybe had a paper-based catalogue on the side but it was the same product assortment. Over the years things have become increasingly blurred between these two camps and almost all the players in the market have converged to target …