Recently updated blogs

Vjeko Kovac and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “On several irrationality problems for Ahmes series“. This paper resolves (or at least makes partial progress on) some open questions of Erdős and others on the irrationality of Ahmes series, which are infinite series of the form for some increasing sequence of natural numbers. Of course, since most real numbers are irrational, one expects such series to “generically” …

It’s hard to imagine Katharine Hepburn as anything but a Hollywood icon, but director George Cukor’s dreamy, gender-fluid comedy, Sylvia Scarlett (1935), derailed her career for years. Host Rico Gagliano tells the story of a movie with sexual politics way ahead of its time—and which paid for it dearly at the box office. Guests include movie star and Hepburn devotee Rebecca Hall (The Prestige, 2006), film scholar Elyce Rae Helford, …

Call it aspiration, call it a coping strategy, but this SMBC spoke to where my head and heart are at this morning: Perhaps my desire to see myself as obdurate in the face of what can feel like the relentless reordering of everything around me is connected to yesterday having marked the end of the absurdly prolonged process of having my apartment’s bathroom renovated. To be able return things to …

GTW Highlight No.2: Also in December, we made a hugely important discovery from the disks of the late Archer Maclean. The origins of Dropzone were recovered in the form of Defender and Stargate conversions on the Atari 800: Defender and … Continue reading →

The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors. Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. …

My wife’s flower patch:

Travels last session (yellow) and this session (blue). Well, that was unpleasant. Sorry for the long silence. I'll resist the temptation to let it delay my progress with some kind of "special topics" entry and just get right back into Betrayal at Krondor. As the session starts, the party is in Tyr-Sog contemplating roads to the north and east. The northern route makes a greater loop and takes us through …

A life-affirming film about one transgender woman in conservative Texas, Our Dad, Danielle tells the story of Danielle Joy “DJ” Healey, who make the transition from father, husband and high powered male patent lawyer to middle-aged woman in her forties. Healey is no stranger to the camera in terms of stories being told, as her... The post Film review: Our Dad, Danielle appeared first on LouReviews.

We know that time is limited... In this episode, I talk about what it feels like to know that time is finite.

Experimental Critter from 2020 — HB TysonVia https://bsky.app/profile/hbtyson.bsky.social/post/3k3zgqcdurn2a

إِنَّكَ مَيِّتٌ وَإِنَّهُم مَيِّتونَ You will indeed die, and they [too] will die indeed. Surat az-Zumar 30 On the first of January in the year 15XX, I, Domingo el Monje, translator and scribe, was ordered to the Office of the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition in Toledo by the Lord Inquisitor Don Francisco de Pinar, then in the second year of his office, having succeeded to it from Valencia by …

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, …

Possibly my favourite animal if I had to choose one, and while there won't be a tree up for a fifth year, it hasn't stopped me looking for additions for the tree, and one of the themes became, not that many years ago, hedgehogs or hedgepigs, which used to be called urchins in medieval times, giving rise to sea-urchins, because they looked like land urchins! This one came in a …

So it’s the end of another year already… that one went fast didn’t it? In July 2025, Thesis Whisperer will be 15 years old. Does this mean I am now a bratty teenager instead of a menopausal woman?! I feel there’s life in the old girl yet, so I’ll still fire up the blog monthly, never fear. As is tradition, the end of year post should contain some reflections on …

To be frank, 90% of the perfumes I smell are disappointing, if not downright awful. Which is why I’m starting a series dedicated to reviewing (or should that be ‘roasting’) the duds. Sogni (Meo Fusciuni) Sogni is quite possibly the worst thing I have smelled in a long while. I can usually find something positive to talk about in any perfume – and I am inclined to give indies like …