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Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned. “For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”. Joshua Blu Buhs recounts Fort’s early life, unfinished manuscripts (“X”, “Y”), and the philosophical monism that informed his research.

Nominations, I will remind you, don't open until the second week of January - but that is DEFINITELY not going to stop Bill from talking about the by-election every chance he gets, now that he's announced himself as a candidate (for mayor, one would assume, given his campaign promises, which we will get to in a moment). Starting Monday night, presumably, at their meeting! Which is happening as I write …

Buy the book! Sheidlower, Jesse. The F-Word, 4th edition. Oxford University Press, 2024. 449 pages. US$22.99. Back when I was a teen, c. 1980, some friends and I were cruising the streets of Seaside Heights, New Jersey on an off-season night. With us was a friend-of-a-friend, someone I did not know. He got into a verbal altercation with some other teens we had met on the street, and afterward as …

I recently had the pleasure of participating in Digital Promise‘s inaugural AI Education Exchange “Ask Me Anything” series, hosted by Kelly McNeil. This was my first LinkedIn AMA and was great fun, in large part due to the team that helped set it up and the broader community that raised a wide array of critical […]

Ownership and control of social media platforms is a first-order concern for both domestic politics and international conflict. The most important battleground in the Russia-Ukraine war is elections in NATO member states. And there, Russia is clearly winning. Trump, obviously, but yesterday saw the stunning success of formerly fringe right-wing candidate C?lin Georgescu. In an unimaginably large polling error, CG won 22% of the first-round vote (and thus made it …

A few years ago, I went to an exhibition of art by Karla Knight, but for some reason have never gotten around to posting about it til now. Her work is very interesting, full of strange symbols and spacey-looking shapes. But of course I was especially intrigued since some of the exhibition included notebooks! I … Continue reading Karla Knight’s Notebooks →

In the fall of 2021, Malors Espinosa set out to devise a special type of math problem. As with any good research question, it would have to be thought-provoking, its solution nontrivial — something others would want to study. But an additional constraint stumped him. Malors, then a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Toronto, wanted high school students to be able to prove it. Source

If you look at Jason Dyer’s blog, he’s been at 1982 for three years with no signs of finishing it yet, and he seems to show no signs of reaching 1983. — MorpheusKitami in a comment on The Adventure Gamer blog Believe it or not, we are getting close to the end of 1982. This is my final list. If any games show up after this point they can go …

It was once a ubiquitous cliché in your own home or on your favorite TV sitcom: Beleaguered Dad, in the middle of a pile of bills, yells, “You’re sending me to the poorhouse!”Do fathers still yell that? Does anyone even remember poorhouses? It is long forgotten now, but Cincinnati maintained a poorhouse for more than a century out in Hartwell where today stands the UC Health Daniel Drake Center for …

This year, I am thankful for all of my supportive friends and followers. Whether I am squirreling from one idea to the next and the next, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of research, or I am slipped into a depressive mud hole, you are there. Sometimes, you even squirrel or rabbit hole with me. […]

A Circumzenithal Arc We have all met – or have been – someone who is very quiet and seemingly withdrawn in a social situation. It can be easy to dismiss, forget, or ignore these quiet people. But I’ve found that some of the quietest people I know have the strongest opinions, observations, and forces of will. Judith is such a person. She’s easily misunderstood and cast as unaware, boring, and …

Amazing. Here’s how it’s made.

Space enthusiasts of a certain age, like myself, grew up learning about the trio of NASA’s unmanned programs which provided scientists and engineers with vital information about the Moon before the Apollo landings: Ranger which took TV images of the lunar surface before they were purposely crashed into the Moon; Lunar Orbiter which acquired high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface to scout out potential Apollo landing sites; and Surveyor which …

The Manga Classics line has announced their first color volume: Manga Classics: Sherlock Holmes, telling the story of A Study in Scarlet.

I love AI. I love how magical LLMs are. Just by predicting what word comes next, they can impersonate a real person. They have more personality than the computer in Star Trek. They also make more mistakes. I'm frustrated with AI. I try to use them for programming, and end up going down a rabbit hole based on a hallucination. The confidence of an LLM becomes my over-confidence. I get …