Recently updated blogs

Today I learned how to use shell scripting to activate my virtual environment automatically when I change directories. Automatically activating virtual environments Since I can remember, whenever I cd into a directory that contains a virtual environment folder .venv, I always want to activate that virtual environment. I typed source .venv/bin/activate so often that I even created an alias so that typing activate was enough. Today, I wondered if there …

What’s the best way to write your next paper – or, to ask a simpler question, the best way to construct your title, write the opening sentence of your Introduction, or plot the pivotal data set? The bad news is that there isn’t a best way. The good news is exactly the same. When I […]

Wow! This is magical: a map of the Reddit. Each dot represents a subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits. Created by Andrei Kashcha.

Sophie mourned the loss of Poli. I can’t remember her exact words but it went something along the lines of why-should-she-ever-go-back-Kings-Heath-again-when-the-only-thing-she-ever-loved-is-gone. Or something like that. It’s me, I’m likely hyperbolising. The point was she was distraught, in mourning in an all-black attire usually reserved for those who say they are emo when really they’ve been turned away from Berghain for smiling. They should have witnessed the fall of the Poli …

Before I had the habit of writing a blogpost discussing a new preprint, Shinnosuke Okawa, Andrea Ricolfi, and I (together with Wendy Lowen for the appendix) uploaded Moduli spaces of semiorthogonal decompositions in families. Shortly afterwards, the pandemic started, and we neglected to do anything with the paper. At some point we also discovered that there was an issue with the proof of the result in Subsection 8.3.3 (of v1), …

From the Daily Mail: Viral social media rumours claiming that Sir Keir Starmer represented the father of Southport suspect Axel Rudakubana in an asylum case are untrue, Downing Street said today. The claims were yesterday circulated widely on X, formerly known as Twitter, by users who were citing them as evidence of an alleged cover-up over the true circumstances of the Southport stabbings in which three girls aged six to …

Thanks so much to Julian, Phil and Aggi for the interview! I had written about The Kennedy Pill many years ago. Suddenly about a month or so Julian got in touch, and I was quite surprised! I had to know more about this Leeds band that released just the one record on Native and whose sound was really great. I wanted to learn more details, what happened to them. Happily …

Horsegirl's Phonetics On and On is coming in February 2025 on Matador... Continue reading…

If you were to wander into one of Cincinnati’s tonier watering holes some evening in the 1890s, you would surely not be surprised to find beer on tap and a few bottles of rectified whiskey gracing the backbar shelves. A selection of fruit cordials and liqueurs might not raise an eyebrow. But absinthe?It’s true. Cincinnati had its devotees of “La Fee Verte,” the “Green Fairy” so beloved of habitués of …

The next Starship test flight will be very similar to the previous one last month. But, as Jeff Foust reports, it is taking place in a changed political environment that could see the next administration lean heavily on that vehicle for the Moon and perhaps Mars.

♫ Kurt Vile, Come Again

By Dr Ross Mahoney Editorial note: This post was originally posted on my website and has been cross-posted here to generate further discussion. Minor editorial changes have been made to the post. Ok, this post stems from a question I asked on BlueSky: ‘Who is the most significant air power historian of our generation? Discuss … Continue reading #ResearchNote – Top 10 Air Power History Books of this Generation →

Settling back into Life At Home. First full day back home on Tuesday, and I spent most of it catching up on admin. We did a quick trip to Tesco’s. This is the life! Wednesday started foggy, dew sparkling on the lawn. To the gym then home for (hopefully) the last mow of the year. A lot of mowing…. and some raking up of leaves on the paths to/from Mower …

One popular term encountered in generative AI practice is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Reasons for using RAG are clear: large language models (LLMs), which are effectively syntax engines, tend to “hallucinate” by inventing answers from pieces of their training data. The haphazard results may be entertaining, although not quite based in fact. RAG provides a way to “ground” answers within a selected set of content. Also, in place of expensive retraining …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]In June of 2000, the power shut off across much of the San Francisco Bay area. There simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event since World War II. It was just one of the many rolling blackouts that hit the state in the early 2000s. …