Recently updated blogs

May 2024 This was the first day of what was planned to be my last trip to walk the coast of mainland Britain (and turned out to be so), so I was starting the day at home. I took a couple of trains to Gatwick Airport where I was booked an Easyjet flight to Glasgow. This trip was a little over a week long, so I had to take checked …

I realize it represents critical malpractice at this point, but I still haven’t tried Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala’s Seven Wonders Duel. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing, since I’m effectively immune to any questions about how much The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth shakes up the format. Check out Sauron’s sick tower in the Shire. Exactly as J.R.R. Tolkien intended, this war for Middle-earth is all …

Bhaji is a word in several Indian languages–Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi at least–meaning vegetables or greens. Culinarily, the term describes 2 different vegetable preparations of which I’m aware. The first is a type of fritter made with chopped vegetables, often onions, suspended in a batter of chickpea flour and deep-fried, similar to a pakora. The second is as part of my own personal favorite vegetarian Indian dish, a spicy vegetable …

This parody popped into my head this morning, glad someone else already did it.

I know lately I’ve been in commercial mode, pointing you toward various projects of mine that you can support by giving me money. And I promise I’ll get back to less commercial musings as time goes on. But for now, I also want to alert you to a way you can give other people money, one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. For many years, I’ve had a …

We’re raising money to take an ecological artwork to Venice. Support us here. In 2022, my partner and I co-founded the artist’s collective Vessel on the island of Aegina to explore creative approaches to ecology, climate change, and the needs of our community. We’ve taught students how to build collectively and ecologically, painted murals in local playgrounds, and invited people to explore the lost springs of the island. Now, we’ve …

THE WORK OF Dave King, the artist, graphic designer, photographer and publisher who created what became the ‘Crass logo’, is being celebrated in a new exhibition in San Francisco and a new book. The exhibition, at the San Francisco Center for the Book, documents King’s work in the sphere of zines, short-run books and the huge breadth of other printed materials that he produced between 1977 and his untimely death …

Auriferous Flame: The Insurrectionists and the CaretakersOut 8th November on True Cult Records/Stellar Auditorium Productions “The album explores the theme of revolution and delves deep into the complexities of resistance and change, offering listeners an intense and thought provoking experience.” Given the eagerness to share the complex subject matter that inspired this album, one might have expected a clearer vision expressed through the music itself. But true to form, as …

Ready to geek out? In this episode of Podcast Awesome's Nerd Show and Tell, Matt sits down with none other than Zach Leatherman, the tech dynamo and creator behind Eleventy — the static site generator that’s got web devs buzzing. Zach’s tech-world experience is a wild ride of innovation, grit, and love for the open web. With a little help from our team here at Font Awesome, Zach’s pushing to …

Back in 1939, Winston Churchill famously said in a radio broadcast: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma …” One might say something similar today about the state of Russia’s economy. Since Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, international economic sanctions have increased. However, Russia’s economic growth appears robust, according to IMF figures, because of enormous …

MARISKA BAARS, NIKI JANSEN, RUTGER ZUYDERVELT - HARDANGER You can trust Rutger 'Machinefabriek' Zuydervelt to always come up with surprises again and again - even with approximately 103 albums as Machinefabriek and another 43 under his own name. This time, it's a new collaboration with Mariska Baars - known for her work as soccer Committee but also for various other collaborations, Piiptsjilling and Fean among them. And with Niki Jansen, …

This is an addendum to our previous post. Newspaper archives can also be a valuable source for medical and legal precedents as they relate to the Arbuckle case. We found one source that is worth noting. It further supports the hypothesis that the fatal injury that Virginia Rappe suffered had to involve violence or, at least, physical mistreatment approximating the same. And this nineteenth-century case is one that so far …

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 …