Recently updated blogs

It’s October 2024 and I’m sitting here in my creative maker studio, wearing a bright t-shirt that excitedly bellows “MQTT 25”! To my left is a top-end Bambu Lab X1C 3D printer, that uses MQTT internally for communication. On my wall are a variety of connected gadgets that display data or that light up in response to MQTT notifications. Node-RED is sitting quietly on a Raspberry Pi in the corner, …

As our world continues to advance in its application of AI, it is important to educate our students and teachers on the potential of generative AI. One of the best ways to do this is to provide hands-on opportunities in a safe and structured environment. I recently discovered Mundo, an AI tool that allows students and teachers to explore the capabilities of generative AI without needing to provide personally identifiable …

Paladin - second only to Picador as a publisher's name to set the arty-intellectual bibliophile's heart a flutter... Radical, countercultural, polemical, esoteric, transgressive, avant-garde, youth culture ... a feast for the hungry young mind, portions selling at a reasonable paperback price. Eye-catching design.I have seven of the above Paladins - and five of the seven have the same covers as shown.Not all of them were bought at the time, though. …

Over the last few weeks, my much-missed dad has been on my mind more than usual, which has been largely as a result of a number of less-than-typical happenings in the natural world. The first of these was the BBC’s weather app going somewhat haywire, seeing it predict hurricane-force winds of up to 16,543 knots – strictly speaking not an unusual happening in the natural world but as a man …

Watches. Watches never change us. # If you’ve just joined us, welcome to my series: Wristwatch Roulette, where I furnish my forearm with two fancy finds a fortnight, from fan-favourite Ali Express, market of choice for my 2023 series Shenzhen Safari, and 2024 series Shenzhen Sojourn. Ghoulish Behaviour # Remember when games were good? Ahahaha. No. Things keep getting better. The possibilities of what can be accomplished are built on …

Most of the émigré Angeleno poets whose work I’ve shared here over the years wrote in Russian, though some of them had roots in Ukraine and even identified as Ukrainian. Today I bring you a poem originally written in Ukrainian by Abram Katsnelson (1914-2003), who, like Peter Vegin (1939-2007), came to California in the 1990s, on the same wave that carried my family to these shores. By that time Katsnelson …

Within the story, Jack’s problem, which becomes the reader’s, and must have been to some extent the writer’s, too, is that Roy has a theory, and the theory is just too much. For the Redux newsletter of the Paris Review, I ask whether the demons of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe were inspired by a 1982 short story by Norman Rush. Click here to read! And click here to sign …

Graham Hancock was again a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience on October 17th, presumably in support of the release of season two (The Americas) of his Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse on October 16th. The opening move Hancock and Rogan begin by complaining that they were duped by archaeologist Flint Dibble (who was just given a well-deserved Ockham Award) on the widely viewed and commented debate episode about Hancock’s claims, …

Pain conceals itself in the stone, the petrifying pain that delivers itself into the keeping of the impenetrable rock in whose appearance there shines forth its ancient origin out of the silent glow of the first dawn­ the earliest dawn which, as the prior beginning, is coming toward everything that is becoming, and brings to it the ad­ vent, never to be overtaken, of its essential being.from Language in the …

The 2024 election is fast approaching and once again, there's a lot to vote on. Most of your choices will have a (D) or an (R) next to…

I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on. So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js tool in a “faster” language like Rust, Zig, Go, etc. Don’t get me wrong – these languages …

LifeSpan Under Desk Treadmill TR12000-DT3 GlowUp Walking Pad As a software developer, I spend the majority of my time sitting at a desk. In the past, I worked in an office but still managed to get some physical activity through my daily commute. I had occasional back pain, but it was infrequent. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We shifted to remote work, and my physical activity decreased significantly. My daily …

Moshe Vardi wrote a short interesting essay “What is theoretical computer science?” (It followed by interesting posts on Facebook.) Moshe argues that Thinking of theoretical computer science (TCS) as a branch of mathematics is harmful to the discipline. I personally do not regard TCS as part of mathematics and I also don’t think that thinking of TCS as part of mathematics is harmful. Certainly there are parts of TCS that …

After I posted the last two parts of this series (which I thought wrapped it up…) I received an email asking about whether there’s a similar thing happening if you remove the reconstruction (low-pass) filter in the digital-to-analogue part of the signal path. The answer to this question turned out to be more interesting than I expected… So I wound up turning it into a “Part 3” in the series. …

The readers of this blog know know that I stay away from non-math related discussions. It’s not that I don’t have any political opinions, I just don’t think they are especially valuable or original. I do however get triggered by a clear anti-Semitism, discrimination of Jews by the universities, and by personal disrespect. The story below is a strange mixture of these. As I was visiting the IAS in Princeton, …