Recently updated blogs

As I want to use my blog as my central web identity, I now updated my blogroll to also show all the microblogs I follow, whether these are real blogs, Fediverse or Bluesky profiles. Aren’t starter packs also just a new form of blogrolls? To follow all the blogs in my list, all you need to do is import the OPML file into a feed reader. Interactions & Comments

The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own. I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before. In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is …

Here’s the final weekly topic for this year’s Nonfiction November: Week 5 (11/25-11/29) New To My TBR: It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book! (Deb) ~ The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson (Lisa at Hopewell’s Public Library of Life) The story of the period from 1918-1920, …

My recap of Survivor 47 episode 11, on which Sue's epic vendetta against Kyle continued, Rachel played a dangerous game on the water, and Andy did bad math.

Today, I learn, is Bedfordshire Day. Who knew there was such a thing? Radio 3 was making the most of it this morning, with various Bedfordshire-linked musicians and, of course, settings of Bedford's own John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I've visited Bedford several times over the years, on one occasion to visit what is surely one of the strangest museums in England – or at least one telling the strangest story. …

Is watching glue dry the same as watching and waiting for paint to dry; both have a way of postponing progress, when both, in their own way, are actually the progressing action of moving things forward. The inference in the common saying, “It’s like watching paint dry.” is, of course, that waiting for something you... Source

November is fast drawing to a close, but there’s just enough time for one more #GermanLitMonth book to round the month off, and an interesting one it is, too. It’s a novel that’s been sitting on my shelves for over a decade now, by a writer whose work found a second lease of life over half a century after his debut. Back to the inter-war period we go, to meet …

When I first became really interested in the history of science back before the second ice age,[1] the discipline consisted largely of the study of “real science” produced by “real scientists,” without either of these concepts ever really being clearly defined; one just knew! European, semi-popular presentations of the history of science had two main focus areas, Ancient Greece, after all the ancient Greeks had invented science, and the so-called …

This holiday penny postcard was sent to my husband's uncle in Cleveland, Ohio in 1913. The eight-year-old recipient might not have been able to read the greeting written in cursive. The sender, living in Chicago, says she has "company just now and will write a longer letter very soon."I'm not sure about the turkey's unique coloring but I do appreciate how my husband's ancestors stayed in touch for every holiday …

In 1999, researchers sent sweet potato cuttings into space to discover whether they would grow in microgravity, and feed future astronauts.

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. …