Recently updated blogs

Sales of Australian author Charlotte Wood’s latest novel Stone Yard Devotional have enjoyed a boost, as a result of being both long and short listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The phenomena is sometimes called the Booker bump: Her publisher says that since winning the Stella Prize in 2016 for The Natural Way of Things, her blistering feminist critique of the patriarchy, “Charlotte’s books have been bestsellers — and Stone …

Baldur Bjarnason shared an article in a recent edition of his newsletter about AI in education. As a parent of an 8-year-old, this is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like most other parents I’ve encountered, I find the idea that teachers can be “replaced” by AI so preposterous that I’d imagine no one who’s ever had a child, met a child, or even been a child …

As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammarly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded …

Submitted by Bushland Maps, who say: Ferries are a bit of a forgotten mode of transport in Melbourne. With no integration into the fare system or journey planners, and with overarching public transport body PTV only “overseeing” three of the routes (which doesn’t have any practical effect on the service), they are mostly either seen as a tourist attraction (which fairly some are) or not seen at all. Since there …

I was on the New Models podcast recently and stated: Worlds are the first emergent medium of the 21st century. This statement is the hot take that drives all my professional work across various domains, and serves as the main thesis behind all the essays at worldrunning.guide. Worlds as a Medium Meadowlark The Challenges of World-Running Worlds Need Running Where Do We Go from Here? Reality Coordination A New Discipline …

To a visitor from lands afar (me) who sees this part of the world in little two-week periods twice a year, Jeune & Jolie feels like it did all the work of establishing itself as one of the best restaurants in California in a metaphorical blink of an eye, a few short months between opening, winning its Michelin star and becoming the last word in sophisticated Cali-French dining. Of course, …

Account of a trip round England by the Czech writer who introduced the word “robot” to the world.

It’s been a while since the last update, summer, holidays, birthdays, etc have all taken precedent over the last few months but there been progress! We’ve laid a lot of sleepers! I did make full use of child labour too! Abbie’s made a decent job of the sleepers she’s laid, probably between a third and a half of this board. My wife Kerry was helping me thread chairs as some …

Top stuff from English jazzman John Surman. View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize A lovely album with a mix of avant-garde/free/spiritual/post bop. A majority is on the free side though. It’s bombastic and chaotic at times and slower paced and more melodic in parts. There are plenty of different interesting passages throughout. It keeps …

Specifically in this case a Tenor Baritone guitar? I mean, I already have a tenor guitar (more than one), and I have a baritone guitar too. Why would I need a tenor baritone? That’s just silly. And yet. Here is one anyway. A mystery, it is. Anyway, hi. How are you? — JS

The Arabian Heritage Collection by Areej Le Doré is a deliberately minimalist collection, focused on the three materials that are not only critical to Arabian or mukhallat style perfumery but happen to be the recurring motifs of each Areej Le Doré collection – ambergris (Al Ambar), oud (Al Oud) and sandalwood (Al Sandal). As always, when I smell an Areej Le Doré collection, I try to evaluate what I am …

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own. I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before. In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is …

I joined my Silver Lining for Learning (SLL) co-hosts – Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, and Lydia Cao (with Yong Zhao unable to attend due to travel) – to deliver a keynote at the Global Learning for an Open World Conference. SLL has been a labor of love over the past five years, with more than […]

Back in the summer, I decided to get more serious about controlling my Type 2 diabetes, and I enrolled in a program that I found through my insurance company. Overall, things have gone quite well: my blood glucose is down, my weight is down, and I’ve been able to cut my medications to about a third of what I was taking before. But nothing is perfect, and the iPhone app …

The narrator of Sharon Bolton’s new novel is the very definition of a nosy neighbour. Living in the middle of three adjoining cottages with very thin walls makes it easy to hear the people on either side: the narrator knows what music they listen to and what they watch on television, who they speak to on the telephone and what time they get out of bed in the morning. In …