Recently updated blogs

We used to say witches lived there. Probably everyone did something like that when they were a kid. A whole family of witches in our case, living in big old house set way back from the sidewalk that was most likely apartments but we didn’t realize that. We’d see old people shuffle in and out and thought they were all witches and dared each other to make eye contact with …

I'm giving a talk at LSU on murmurations in number theory, and to a lesser extent about machine learning in number theory. The slides for my talk are here. I do some relatively fancy (for me) slide shennanigans, so there is no handout form available. This is closely related to My paper BBLLD23 on murmurations of modular forms of fixed level and increasing weight. My paper BLLDSHZ24 on murmurations of …

The Young Voices Council (YVC) is breaking new ground in futures literacy and youth leadership, proving that young people are not just participants in the future—they are its architects. Since the Council’s first meeting, the YVC has grown into a global force for change, advancing Teach the Future’s mission to embed futures literacy into education systems worldwide. In partnership with Dr. Peter Bishop, the council is collaborating on the Teach …

Recently, we overhauled our shared ESLint config, and while testing, I needed to release an alpha version. I knew this was possible, but I had no idea how to do it. Thankfully, it turns out to be straightforward, once you know how to do it. Creating the prerelease version Normally, when we bump the version number of an npm package, we use the npm version command. This automatically increases the …

Jonathan Schneider This is a an excerpt from Megan Fitzpatrick’s new book “Dutch Tool Chests.” I have been looking forward to its release for some time now and have finally had a chance to read through it. It is incredibly beautiful, which may not always be an applicable word for an instructional book, and clearly written. I appreciate this as one who is not a regular woodworker. I will include …

I like iguanian lizards…. who doesn’t? But among this enormous group are a great many lineages and species that you hardly ever hear anything about. In my continuing efforts to rescue material from the Tet Zoo archives and republish it here, at ver 4, let’s look today at the leiosaurids. This article was previously published at ver 3 (a wayback machine version is here)… Caption: leiosaurid species observed in the …

We recently had the pleasure of interviewing acclaimed British illustrator, Cliff Wright, whose designs for J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and the Prisoner of Azkaban captured the imaginations of millions. This Christmas, we embarked on a project with Cliff to create a bag that embodies the spirit of the festive season. In this interview, he discusses his creative process, where he finds inspiration, and how …

We have spent years curating the best cycling routes in Italy to give you the chance to ride these roads. But our passion for cycling goes beyond the bikes and scenery —although that’s a big part of it! La entrada The best cycling routes in Italy se publicó primero en Eat Sleep Cycle.

After only 20+ years in the making, FreeCAD hit the 1.0 mark today. The latest development cycle wasn’t easy, a lot of things happened along the way. Let’s talk about major changes in this release and then discuss how the community has been evolving. What’s new in 1.0 Toponaming FreeCAD used to have a whole bunch of topological naming issues that are mostly gone now. So if you reference geometry …

The days are shorter and you have to wrap up warm but nothing beats a crisp, bright walk surrounded by Autumn leaves. Add in some fascinating historic sights along the route and you have a winning combination! Below are six of my favourite Autumn London walks, giving you a bit of historic context and recommendations to visit along each route. You can view them all on a map here. Let …

Warning: This post contains themes of grief and loss. While searching through my Notes app yesterday, I came across a poem that I’d written 6ish years ago. I was in two minds of posting this, but I think it’s important to share the rawness of grief. It was written shortly after the passing of my brother and the birth of my first child. My world was a blur, and I …

shmup (n): Shortened form of “shoot-em-up;” a genre of 2D video games based on shooting down waves of enemies while dodging waves of projectiles. (Usually in an aircraft, usually scrolling in one direction, but not necessarily either.) Japanese synonym: STG (short for "shooting game"). Shmups are one of the most fundamental forms of action game; most of what I used to play on the Atari 2600 as a kid qualified …

James Gilchrist Swan was a remarkable individual. Born in 1818 he spend most of his life in the Pacific North West, now part of Washington state in the US. Having travelled widely before arrival there, he took on a number of roles for the US government and other interests, becoming an Indian Agent, a temporary representative of a railroad company, and other such frontier roles. He was also a

I’ve been following the US election results to do some calculations on the final numbers, and frustratingly they’re still not there yet; the latest figures show only 98.3% reported two weeks after polling day. Even a week after the election, though, it was clear that the result was much closer than most of the early indications had suggested, when it seemed that Harris was 3 to 4 points behind and …

I had planned to do this next part much earlier, but I had to travel to Prague again for work in late September and much of October. As an aside I did see an interesting train bbq on a walk to a local castle called Karlstejn on a weekend I had off while there - and what a cool idea for a train! I want it in the backyard of …