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Well, after a first cup of tea finished off by Lucie, we set off for our earlymorning walk to be greeted by a beautiful dawn with the sun not even over the horizon, a little chilly but as yet no ground frost to speak of and wildlife still dozing apart from the odd rabbit and alerted pheasant. When we set off for the evening walk the sky was pretty much …

The emergence of a bird flu infection in cattle in the United States (US) in March 2024 was unprecedented. Until the US event, mass infection of herbivorous mammals with avian influenza had never been described, although there have been occasional infections seen in different mammalian species across the world. For example, infection of farmed carnivores (for example foxes and mink) and mass mortality events in some marine mammals has been …

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. […]

I was back in hospital today. I needed an echocardiogram to check my heart was OK and that my lungs were clear of blood clots. It was, and they are, so all good. This is the account – primarily for future me – of how I ended up there. Read more.

Most of my multi-page designs are typically created in Adobe InDesign, but for simpler layouts, I sometimes opt for Illustrator. While InDesign offers more advanced tools for managing text styles, the key advantage lies in its use of Master Pages. However, Illustrator also supports threaded text, allowing you to link text areas and have the content flow from one frame to another, along with several useful options and features. Create …

This is a rough transcript based on my notes for the sharing session I presented at the online Groove meetup in June. I've shared the slides before, but I think it's worth putting the content in writing. The full slide deck is accessible on GitHub. css-doodle is a project I started many years ago. Initially, it was used to draw some simple graphic patterns, but over time, it evolved into …

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution. Part 1: Contiguous Array You are given an array of binary numbers, @binary. Write a script to return the maximum length of a contiguous subarray with an equal number of 0 and 1. Let’s not concern ourselves with any particular efficiencies and just analyze all the subsets of the given numbers! The main loop …

In past seasons, I've written holiday gift guides focused on what you might buy other people. These are always tricky; you should usually not buy other people clothes, since you probably don't know what fits them or their style as well as they do. I also listed out some good black friday sales, generally, but you might want more specific guidance. But Jake Woolf inspired me. He showed me the …

Thanks to the excellent Why Don’t YouTube, over on Bluesky, I was made aware of another short-lived Noel Edmonds curio. Noel Edmonds' first new series after The Late Late Breakfast Show's enforced cancellation was Whatever Next?, as seen today in 1987, a single series light oddity in which two pairs are challenged to predict the outcomes of street dares, queries and stunts.— Why Don't YouTube? (@whydontyoutube.bsky.social) 2024-11-30T19:00:02.086Z Coming so soon …

(⏱️ ~10 min read) Another month, another collection of shiny objects (stuff I found in the the past month that were valuable/inspiring). See also, previous Signal Boosts for Oct/Sep, Aug/July, June, May 🩸 Kurzgesagt gets to the bottom of a science myth ↪ 😭 Paper: AI poems are now "more human than human" ↪ 🇺🇸 U.S. Election-related analysis ↪ 👄 The Substance ↪ 🩸 Kurzgesagt gets to the bottom of …

I’ve played 186 games of Forest Shuffle this year. I like it a lot. Here are some new games I’ve played during the past few months. Fishing. Friedemann Friese’s latest curious trick-taking game is a lot of fun. This is an evolving game with a lovely ebb and flow to it. The game starts simple. You play a normal game of trick-taking and score a point for every card you …

I’m trying not to borrow grief from the future, as the saying advises, but the terms are so damn attractive.

The American worker divide: Those who sit, and those who stand.

The road to Dirē Dawa is a long one: an eight-hour drive from Addis Ababa, or so we are told. We left Addis Ababa at dawn, our bus rattling through empty streets shadowed by new-build office blocks. As with almost everywhere currently in Ethiopia, the pavements were piled with concrete rubble, the result of Prime … Continue reading "The Road to Dirē Dawa"