Recently updated blogs

JFI’s Financing the Energy Transition team has published a new series, including an interactive map and report, on the global distribution of minerals critical to the green transition, and on the potential for the countries that produce those natural resources to capture their value. View the series here, or go directly to our interactive version of the report. The post New series: Mineral Wealth and Electrification appeared first on Jain …

This December there are more than six dozen calls for submissions. All of these are paying markets, and none charge submission fees. As always, every genre, style, and form is wanted, from short stories to poetry to essays.I post upcoming calls for submissions shortly before the first day of every month. But as I am collecting them, I post them on my page, Calls for Submissions. You can get a …

For Aftermath, Luke Plunkett praised Ajax’s new logo change, going from the well-known minimalist version to a more traditional and ornate style: […] This has been a great and rare triumph in modern football branding, and is something that other fields–I’m looking at you, fashion, with your endemic “blanding”–might do well to remember as well. Modernising and simplifying a logo might sound like a great idea across a boardroom table, …

Spin ices are magnetic materials in which geometrically frustrated magnetic interactions between the spins prevent long-range magnetic order and lead to a residual entropy similar to in ice (solid water).Spin ices provide a beautiful example of many aspects of emergence, including how surprising new entities can emerge at the mesoscale. I think the combined experimental and theoretical work on spin ice was one of the major achievements of condensed matter …

Favourite stage direction: “The Three Flats, Bow, East London. Canary Wharf and the financial buildings of the City are visible in the distance yet out of reach, like another country on another shore.” (Beru Tessema’s Wolves on Road) The post Wolves on Road appeared first on Aleks Sierz.

I watched another episode of The Sea of Faith last night – number four (not yet on the BBC iPlayer but available, with blurry visuals, on YouTube). This one focused on two very different thinkers – Marx and Kierkegaard: 'compare and contrast' indeed. As with Freud, I wondered if Marx would be quite so prominent if the series were made today: back in 1984 I guess it was still possible …

Two nights ago I went with my two brothers to hear a reading of Louis MacNeice’s great poem Autumn Journal. It was read beautifully by the Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who had clearly memorised many of the 3000 lines. The poem was written between August and December 1938, a fraught time in Britain when people despised the government but passionately supported the appeasement of Hitler—because they remembered well the slaughter …

I hope the first thing you say is not, "Look how sharp that heron is! You nailed focus right on that heron's eye!" (click to enlarge)It is my sense that if you watch a lot of photography related videos and listen carefully to what photographers say ‘first’ about their own images as well as what they most often say ‘first’ about other photographers’ images, you might be surprised. When I …

It’s been an unusual autumn so far. A very notable lack of sun from the end of October into November was followed by an early cold snap before Storm Bert brought flooding chaos to parts of south Wales, the West Country and elsewhere. Just before the beginning of every winter I have a crack at predicting what winter will be like; the results often being very mixed. However, on looking …

Thanksgiving Drawing from a Scrapbook circa 1940 Collection Jim Linderman

By: Luke StrangeFor those that have followed us for a while, you may have seen our Council Homepage Website Emissions tracker. Every few weeks, we update the data on the site to see how council websites are performing. We measure the size of the web page in bytes, and we use Website Carbon Calculator to estimate the amount of CO2 that loading each page produces. We get in touch with …

Photo by FlyD on Unsplash “At the 83rd UN General Assembly, UN Special Envoy on Future Generations Celebrates Four Years of Global Transformation.” This paper was developed in October 2024 by the School of International Futures, to lay out a vision for a successful implementation of the Declaration on Future Generations up to the next review. The paper is set in 2028, as a Keynote Speech from the 1st Special …

As one who has felt strongly about this for many years this was welly before I was diagnosed with my Terminal liver disease added to my respiratory problems after living with it for several months. My health changes day to day most mornings I feel sick, my back aches most of the day despite pain killers I get dizzy spells, I hardly sleep at the most 2 hours plus the …

This post is an adapted extract from my book Boost Your Django DX, available now with a 50% discount for Black Friday 2024. Python’s breakpoint() function opens its debugger, pdb, which pauses the program and allows you to inspect and modify things. Let’s look at an example of using it within a Django view, from a sample project included in Boost Your Django DX. Here’s what the project looks like: …

In central Brixton, near the library and facing the Town Hall, there is a huge ghostsign advertising Bovril*, a beef extract product that is still available today. Bovril was created by John Lawston Johnson in 1897 – its popularity and success enabled him move into and adapt a house that can be found a few stops along the railway line from Brixton, at Kingswood House, Sydenham Hill. Indeed the house …