Recently updated blogs

The following is a guest post from Andrew Reiter, a legislative data specialist in the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress. Andrew previously blogged about an Update on the Congress.gov API, Modernizing Congressional Data – Treaty Documents on Congress.gov, and Modernizing Congressional Data – Senate Legislation and Amendments on Congress.gov. In the fifth installment of our series on modernizing the legislative data exchange behind Congress.gov, we look …

The evocatively named Allie Catt is used to rising above her circumstances. Whether it’s her indifferent parents’ absurd choice of name for their only child or the heartbreaking end of her engagement, Allie has grown to be the kind of twenty-something woman who learns from adversity and shapes herself into someone stronger, wiser, and, most…

Zenigata Sunae (coin-shaped sand art) at Kotohiki Park. I had one more day remaining at the guesthouse in Toyohama and Kanonji, my plan was to rest easy. I bought food at a nearby market, The redone kitchen was next … 🐞 Read more about it ➞ ➞ ➞

It’s Thanksgiving, and here at Disney, we’re giving thanks and giving back to families across the country – from Florida to California and beyond. What better way to do this than by donating food directly from our kitchens to communities in need? Walt Disney World Chefs Cook 1,000 Meals for Central Florida Community One of our traditions at Walt Disney World is providing warm Thanksgiving meals to Central Florida residents …

There’s been a lot of stories about benzene contamination in personal care products over the last 4 years. This year, benzene was discovered in benzoyl peroxide, a staple acne treatment. How concerned should we be? Petition and original paper I’ve written about the background behind Valisure’s benzene analyses before, as well as questions about the accuracy of their data and ... Read more Source

I'm thinking about the USA election, and I'm thinking about Ukraine, and I'm remembering how the "Berkut" snipers shot journalists in Kyiv in 2013, and of course I remember Linda Tirado. And here's an article, an interview with her. She's crazy and beautiful. And here's a story she told a couple days ago. I don't know how long she can live like this. Brain's a tricky thing. There's not much …

“Urban forest” is often a misnomer given to patches of trees on empty lots. These areas fail at both being a natural environment and being good urban design. Canada needs an additional 3.5 million housing units by 2030, and that means Canadian cities — as well as many others throughout North America — are facing the challenge of building more housing without wasting natural resources like mature trees. In this …

Andreas: But then PeskyPotato, who I’ve never interacted with before got in touch and mentioned that it should be possible to subscribe to RSS feeds from Youtube with the channel name in the URL as well. Turns out that this is not the case, it was a feature of their RSS reader instead. But here comes the amazing part. Apparently this annoyed them enough so they figured out that you …

In 2010, Coda Hale wrote How To Safely Store A Password which began with the repeated phrase, “Use bcrypt”, where the word bcrypt was linked to a different implementation for various programming languages. This had two effects on the technology blogosphere at the time: It convinced a lot of people that bcrypt was the right answer for storing a password. It created a meme for how technology bloggers recommend specific …

The mission: Provide a dashboard within the WordPress admin area for browsing Google Analytics data for all your blogs. The catch? You’ve got about 900 live blogs, spread across about 25 WordPress multisite instances. Some instances have just one blog, others have as many as 250. In other words, what you need is to compress a data set that normally takes a very long time to compile into a single …

These Boots Are Made For Walking The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits says “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” was a huge hit for Nancy Sinatra. The tune topped the Billboard Hot 100 for one week in 1966, becoming Sinatra’s first and only solo No. 1 single in the United States. So much played on radio and TV and at so many places in 1966, but also in expected …

Symbiotic Sense(s), an exhibition currently on view at the National Library of Latvia in Riga as part of the RIXC Art Science festival (see my notes on the conference), presents the work of artists who challenge the boundaries between self and other, human and other forms of life, natural and artificial. T(n)C (Agnes Varnai and Tina Kult), Retraining Laziness, 2023 Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, My Want of You Partakes …

I have reviewed several of John L. French‘s works here, but one series of his that I have yet to get into is Bianca Jones. Jones is a Baltimore detective who becomes the unofficial “monster hunter” on the force, facing several foes and menaces with only the help of a strange bookstore owner and a […]

If you want to see what’s next in AI, just follow the data. ChatGPT and DALL-E trained on troves of internet data. Generative AI is making inroads in biotechnology and robotics thanks to existing or newly assembled datasets. One way to glance ahead, then, is to ask: What colossal datasets are still ripe for the picking? Recently, a new clue emerged. In a blog post, gaming company Niantic said it’s …

Uri Levine, a cofounder of Waze and the author of 'Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution,' argues that unicorn companies and bestselling books have a lot in common.