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Memorial Bridge – Nashville, TN – Fujifilm X-T50 – Fujicolor PRO 160C WarmAn inverted U curve is a graph that shows a relationship between two variables where one positively affects the other until it reaches a peak, then flattens out before it begins to have a negative effect (looks like an upside-down U). It’s a good way to quantify and visualize the concept of diminishing returns. It’s the saying too …

Two years since becoming that much-elegized category of expat—the American in Paris—I’m starting to come off an early obsession: the near-constant comparison of my new cultural environment to my former one. It started benignly enough, as in my manic hunt for a Paris coffee shop channeling Brooklyn circa 2013, but soon my comparative mindset had alighted on an arena that involves much more risk for gross generalization and even grosser …

After the unsettling experience of reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975), I decided to start my Christmas mystery reading early. I went with the title that my book group is discussing next month. Elizabeth Anthony was the penname for Barbara Frances Rubien née Courlander (1906-1996). She only wrote one other crime novel, Made for Murder (1950) and one short story for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, ‘Seventh …

Alex Chan on using static websites for tiny archives. Ooh, I really like this idea. I’m now planning to do this with my personal apps (to do list, journals, notes, etc.), having them regularly export static site archives. (I already archive the database files, but an HTML export is a lot more usable and would work without the app needing to run and without the user needing to know how …

Figure 1. Intelligent, but closed-minded. Not entirely flattering. According to the Pew Research Center, confidence in scientists has ticked up slightly, though it remains lower than it was before the pandemic. That is one of the conclusions of a report, Public Trust in Scientists and Views on Their Role in Policymaking, by Alec Tyson and Brian Kennedy. Pew surveyed nearly 10,000 US adults in October and discovered that Americans (mostly) …

It's that time of year again, when I need to conduct many annual performance reviews over the coming weeks.

If you grow up in England, you know about rain. You know about heavy rain, light rain, drizzle, mizzle, and mist. You know about the kind of rain that slaps you in the face, the kind of rain that comes at you sideways, and the kind of rain that is invisible and still makes you wet. You know about the rain that makes you hot, the rain that makes you …

Thanksgiving is late this year, but it still crept up on us. We sometimes get so involved in house projects or getting back into a schedule, we forget the holidays are upon us in a snap of a finger. When we were kids, we felt the holidays would never come. Now they swoop right in and we’re always in catch-up mode. We managed to scavenge for all the feastly fixins …

My latest Western RoundUp column is now up at Classic Movie Hub.This month I return to a favorite topic: Books on Western movies!Titles discussed include everything from a 1976 book on Tim, Jack, and Jennifer Holt to a brand-new book on John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy.Please click over to Classic Movie Hub for this column, and thanks very much for reading!Previous Classic Movie Hub Western RoundUp Column Links: June 2018; July …

For over 20 years, Nancy Wilson was a mainstay of the Capitol Records label. Deftly blending jazz, pop, soul, and rhythm and blues, the late chanteuse's distinctive tone anchored collaborations with the illustrious likes of Billy May, George Shearing, Cannonball Adderley, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, Thom Bell, Eugene McDaniels, and numerous others. A sprawling […]

Western Film Book Library – Part 9 It’s time for another survey of books on Western movies! This month’s column is prompted in large part by the publication of an important new book, The Cavalry Trilogy: John Ford, John Wayne, and … Continue reading →

More than a decade ago, I wrote about how one game I’d love to see remade was overhead driving title Tranz Am, which required you to survive a barren wasteland. And while it might look a lot more hectic, I’m definitely intrigued by the top-down survival car combat game Driveloop due in 2025 for the […] Top-Down Survival Car Combat Game Driveloop Due In 2025 OnlineRaceDriver - Sim Racing News, …

The diary has had a leaf fall theme lately. The high winds of Storm Bert have more or less bought that chapter to a close. Only the Oaks are stubbornly clinging on their leaves; they are usually among the last to drop. And another chapter is underway. Leaf litter has a dynamic ecology/biology of its own as fungi, bacteria and invertebrates go to work decomposing all that organic matter thereby …

*We’re fond of manifestos here on the Artmaker blog. https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace Dario Amodei Machines of Loving Grace 1 How AI Could Transform the World for the Better October 2024 I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce theserisks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or …

Last week, Jaguar announced a major rebranding. I think it’s stupid, and not just because I don’t like it. (I don’t, but I’m neither a branding expert nor the target audience.) Instead, it’s stupid because of how it discards the brand’s past. It’s a common error: faced with a suboptimal system (e.g., declining car sales,) its stewards call for scrapping it altogether and starting anew. You see the tendency everywhere: …