Recently updated blogs

I wanted to share some notes on how I run remote retrospectives. These are not incident retrospectives, which I tend to run differently. But these are for project retrospectives, or for regular check-ins with a group of people to ask ourselves what we can do better. Why use this format? This retro style is more effective than other formats I’ve used. It has these advantages: You get almost universal participation. …

official-linguistics-post:saja-star:One of my favorite things about learning about traditional textiles is the little ghosts they left in the language. Of course the ghosts are there, now that I know to look for them. Once upon a time, half the population spent a majority of their day making textiles. Spinning, at the very least, has been a part of humanity since the Neanderthals. That kind of knowledge doesn’t just disappear. A …

Walk down St John’s Lane in Clerkenwell and at the end of the street you will see a impressive gatehouse. Incongruous to its surroundings, it looks almost as if it has been transported out of a medieval world. This was once the Southern entranceway to the Clerkenwell Priory, the English Headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller. […] The post The History Of The Order Of St John In Clerkenwell appeared first …

Welcome to this Fall's CMBA Blogathon with the captivating theme of the afterlife in film. A realm where past and present are woven together and the echoes of lost souls connect us. But this exploration can also extend well beyond the supernatural. It invites us to reflect on the haunting nature of being tormented by the memories of trauma, abandonment, or unattainable love, the relentless pursuit of a dream just …

Over the past couple of months, I've written a number of posts about the multitude of reasons I believe that President-elect Trump is a spectacularly bad choice to lead the United States for the next four years. The fact that he was elected last week does not lessen my concerns.What follows is a hodge-podge of thoughts and quotes... a virtual download of my fears and frustrations. I'm still trying to …

Kaisa Matomäki, Maksym Radziwill, Fernando Xuancheng Shao, Joni Teräväinen, and myself have (finally) uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Higher uniformity of arithmetic functions in short intervals II. Almost all intervals“. This is a sequel to our previous paper from 2022. In that paper, discorrelation estimates such as were established, where is the von Mangoldt function, was some suitable approximant to that function, was a nilsequence, and was a reasonably …

Last week, I found it very hard to get down to the work I was supposed to be doing. Writing about music felt trivial, absurd. That feeling has passed - for now at least. Not because the trauma and dread has receded. But protecting the mental space to be excited and obsessed and amused by music, ideas, art, etc - life's essential inessentials - feels like something worth doing. Allowing

A little while ago I wrote about managing my reading list using a JSON file. Then I decided that was too easy, so I starting using an SQLite database instead. Moving my reading list to JSON was a mistake, to be frank. Data is spread across three tables, and there’s no easy way to reference the schema while I’m adding new entries, as I mostly do it via the slqite3 …

Sitting at the bar in my local pub, the Great Northern Railway Tavern, earlier in the year, I noticed the regular guest lager produced by the brewery I co-owned, Bohem Brewery, had been replaced by a specially-brewed lager for the pub by Gipsy Hill Brewery. The deal had just been struck and the sales guy…

I’m writing an adventure. I might even get round to publishing it one day! The adventure at the moment has quite a lot of NPC-NPC relationships going on, and I thought it might (initially) be tricky to follow these relationships as a GM running the game.So, I wondered if providing some sort of relationship ‘mind map’ would be helpful.I started the ‘mind-map’ with this webpage: csacademy This app is nice …

Continuing on with some of the topics that Handmade PHD is attempting to make sense of through exploration...Side seam length and shape. Length- the front and back side seams in her sample trouser pattern should be the same length. In most trouser patterns they are. Is there a time when the lengths could be different? Yes, if it is an intentional design feature, or sometimes for shaping. (

[The figure above is from HM Government (2021) ‘Climate Change and Net Zero: Public awareness and perceptions’ study here ] “While most people recognise that climate change is occurring, only half of people (51%) recognise that human activity is the primary driver of climate change and only a quarter correctly identify the rate at which global temperatures have changed within recent decades…There are also strong trends towards minimising the perceived …

SQLite, a lightweight, self-contained SQL database engine, is a popular choice for embedded applications due to its simplicity and minimal setup requirements. In Go, working directly with SQLite’s C API offers low-level control and can be ideal for those who need efficient, fine-grained database handling. In this post, we’ll explore how to integrate SQLite with Go using the C API, focusing on key operations like opening and closing the database, …

Some good news: Caltrain is working on a level boarding plan, as documents requested under the Public Records Act attest. Their "Level Boarding Roadmap: Technical Task Force Platform Report" dated April 2024 is a reasonably well-written document that discusses how the system might be converted to level boarding using the European 550 mm platform standard. After reading it, three questions arise:Why are 48" level boarding platforms never discussed? The roadmap …