Recently updated blogs

Following up on our Warship Wednesday this week, which covered the Great War-era Admiralty Strath-class “battle trawler” HMT William Barnett (3632) and its later life as the French Navy’s auxiliary minesweeper Roche Noire during WWII, how about a great series of related period maritime art? British portrait painter, landscape artist, and printmaker Francis Edgar Dodd, RA, turned 40 as the “lamps are going out all over Europe.” Volunteering to serve …

2015 Australian movie, All About E is a road trip, a comedy, and a love story. E, a beautiful, young Arabic Australian DJ seems to have it all. She is headlining at a top Sydney nightclub, has a home with her gay best-friend Matt and a world of women at her feet, but looks can be deceiving. Something is missing. When she and Matt, her husband of convenience, stumble on …

Taken a week ago on a short hike. This is almost our backyard, and a trail and place we didn’t realize existed until this summer.

Released: 11 October 2024 “Her songwriting hasn’t gone astray, with catchy lines coming thick and fast, alongside the wistful observational writing. The musicality sways in with reverberating, almost shoegaze guitar embellishments and constantly strumming acoustic guitar to ground each song with the brushed drums and light piano accompaniment. – Maverick magazine on Little Lore’s 2023 EP, Seven Stories Part One With three acclaimed EPs of lush Americana, superb songwriting and …

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, …

The reason you haven’t seen much of me posting on the blog, especially in the last 24 hours. This is because I have been completely engrossed in Bentley Robles latest EP release, “Chaotic Erotica,” which dropped yesterday. Readers may have picked this up, my excitement for this release has been building for months. In fact ever since I first heard “High Definition Lover” during the “Tears and Gearz” tour in …

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 …

Stories of immortal bloodsuckers spanned centuries, continents, and cultures long before Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. And while Stoker’s gothic horror novel wasn’t the first to feature vampires, it’s arguably the most famous vampire literary work and defined the modern vampire’s abilities and weaknesses (hopefully you’re stocked up on garlic). More than 100 years later, vampires remain one of the most popular monsters in fiction. And it’s no wonder …

Just popping in for a quick reminder that the 1970 Club is coming on Monday! Hosted by me and Karen (see her post about it), we ask everyone to read one or more books published in 1970 and post a review wherever you post reviews. Any type of book, any language, anything goes! Since I’m doing A Century of Books, I’ll just be reading a handful – but I’m looking …

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 …

In this fascinating new dystopian novella, Rhiannon Lewis expands on a short story from her 2021 collection I am the Mask Maker. When I read that short story, I actually mentioned in my review that it was one I found particularly intriguing and wished was longer, so I was pleased to learn that my wish had come true! The book begins with Aeronwy visiting her brother at his farm on …