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From 'The People' July 24 1960 a report on Beatniks in Liverpool, London and elsewhere, with some choice quotes and turns of phrase:This is Beatnik HellEvery week more and more young people joint the ghastly Beatnik armythis bizarre new cult imported from American is a dangerous menace to our young peopleThis is the Beatnik Horrorthough they don't know it they are on the road to hellThey revel in filththeir unwashed …

Last year I was fortunate enough to attend Tinkerfest at the Chabot Space and Science Center, high in the hills of the East Bay. One of the fun things about it was that I ran into an old friend from HacDC, who is very involved in the amateur radio ballooning community out here. Their specific thing (because everybody seems to have a Thing out here) is launching and tracking pico …

Reading Time: 35 minutes I had something of a new professional nadir this week which I feel it might be cathartic to share. So I was booked to appear on some panel thing by a very corporate company, to talk about AI (I was asked as a result of one of my ‘actual jobs’ – rest assured I wasn’t introduced as ‘Matt Muir, author of a miserably-unpopular newsletter no cnut …

I cheated today! I pulled a photo out of the files that one of our attendees shot of Jack and I clowning around at Nelson Ghost Town! The photo made me smile and reminded me of all the great times Jack and I have had over the last dozen years leading workshops together! The thing I miss the most about running workshops is the great fellowship with our attendees and …

This is a rather startling paper for those of us who remember the earlier days of what are generally called "thermal shift assays". The idea behind these is that proteins have a certain amount of thermal stability, that they can hold something like their normal three-dimensional shape for a while as the temperature is increased. But eventually this gives way to a more "melted" (denatured) form where things start to …

Bloomsbury titles are to go to the Spotify 'Audiobooks in Premium' offering, and to a-la-carte availability for those without subscriptions. The post Bloomsbury Opens an Audiobook Distribution Agreement With Spotify appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.

A reader question:Dear Muffy,May I ask a question pleaseMy wife and I are well travelled globally including several visits to the U.S.A. (we're British) however for all sorts of reasons (not least because we're getting older) our travelling days have come to an end. Somebody did ask me recently though if there was somewhere I wish we had visited but hadn't and my immediate response was "New England" (hence a …

The Nathan Benn show at our local Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York, was a treat. I had only one complaint: there wasn't enough of it. It was well lit and impeccably presented in the classic manner, with a well-designed and well-sequenced array of prints of mostly medium size, but it consisted of only a single, medium-sized room. There were 19 prints in total. I would have been up for …

Jason Snell (tweet, Macworld, podcast): To a kid growing up in the 1980s, the idea that the maker of your computer would actively stop you from using software it didn’t approve of would have seemed beyond the pale. It certainly would’ve been a deal-breaker. And yet so many of today’s computing devices are locked down—for some good reasons, but also a lot of bad ones. What do we want the …

Recently, I was invited to be part of a five member panel at Google to discuss the impact that AI will have on teaching and learning in schools. My fellow panelists were drawn from the technology sector. As a historian of schooling and veteran high school teacher, I was expected to offer a brief perspective about previous technological innovations that had entered classrooms. Here is what I said to the …

Places is collaborating with Columbia’s Historic Preservation Program to co-host the annual Fitch Colloquium. This year’s theme is “Repairing Architecture Schools.” Read on Places Journal

“An animation of three near-infrared images of Uranus captured by the JWST Space Telescope with assigned representative colors. During processing, I aligned the rings separately to reduce the bubbling effect caused by different inclinations, making the planet appear to rotate on an almost flat plane.” —Andrea Luck

Papercutz is producing a new line of "Collector Volume" versions of Asterix. The first one is out now. The good is very good, and the bad is madly annoying to me. The post “Asterix the Gaul”: Collector Volume appeared first on PIPELINE COMICS.

As of yesterday, I am officially retired, and now Professor Emerita at York. The "Emerita" status grants me facilities that will help me continue to do research more readily: I keep my IT account (email, cloud storage, Overleaf, PaperPile, ...), library access, and a form of affiliation with the University. In exchange, they get to claim any publications of mine as associated with them.So what did I do on my …

Black Beauty is a Martian meteorite. Credit: NASA In 2011, a striking black rock about the size of an apple was discovered in the Sahara desert. Its unusual appearance tipped off its finder, and it soon passed into the hands of a meteorite dealer in Morocco. An American collector ended up buying the stone, but pieces of it have since been parceled out to various scientists. And that meteorite, which …