Recently updated blogs

You are asking, “Where are you? Are you okay? Are you still blogging?” In TikTok parlance, “Great questions. Let me tell you.” First, this standard TikTok pattern is one I find really interesting. It fills in he politeness / nicety gap that has become common in the last decade or two, where people jump into answering questions. This nod to thanking the person asking encourages questions and puts people at …

[vaccines] The Impact of Vaccines … Astonishing infographic showing the effectiveness of vaccines against common diseases across time.

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…

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 …

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 […]

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.

It may be almost December but I’ve got no intentions of wrapping up the year just yet. There are still plenty more albums to hit the review block and the latest finds perennial RSTB favorite Lee Baggett back at it once again. The West Coast songwriter has long lingered in the crumpled and creviced end of the Cosmic American canon and he shows no signs of digging out now. Waves …

The streets of London were crawling with tractors recently, protesting the changes to inheritance tax on farms. (Previously farms were exempt from inheritance tax; now farms worth over £1m will be subject to it.) My initial response was to buy the line that this would only affect a tiny minority of farms, and that it was shutting a pretty egregious tax loophole exploited by the likes of James Dyson and …

Happy Thanksgiving! At the Plimoth Patuxet open air museum, this path leads to the English village. However, due to recent archeaological digs in downtown Plymouth at the site of the original fort, historians have learned that the native Wampanoag people lived very close to the palisade. Previously they were believed to live nearby, but not this close. The museum is re-interpreting the palisade and the Wampanoag dwellings. A grant from …

It’s one of those things everyone’s heard of, but few truly understand. It sits quietly in the corner of the bathroom (or as an attachment to the toilet itself), radiating mystery and a slight sense of intimidation. Ask someone about it, and you’ll usually get a shrug or a vague explanation that trails off into awkward silence. Why?