Recently updated blogs

Thank you for a fascinating website.I have been researching the Wood family who lived in the area for many generations and in doing so have been looking at thousands of pages of parish records for around 1700-1800. One of the roads mentioned appears to be Crops Field Lane. Do you or your viewers have any information where this was located?Philip Jacquet

A quick project update that has been somewhat overdue: Openness has been a core building block and underlying philosophy of the web since its earliest days. However, the concept — and to an even larger degree, the term itself — have come under a lot of pressure. Largely that is because it carries many positive associations. In other words, Openness has become a victim of its own success. So where …

Our second panto of the season saw us tick off a new venue, with a trip to Catford’s Broadway Theatre. Panto legend, Susie McKenna returns to write and direct the festive production for a second year, with a feminist retelling of Sleeping Beauty. A classic panto with a modern twist, it’s a fantastic production with a distinctly Lewisham vibe. Our story begins (as is traditional) with the birth of a …

You may see a lot of tools, both good and bad, on the used market. But you will rarely if ever see a finishing brush on the used market. They simply wear out. These days brushes are considered largely a utility item in the woodworking world. Artists are known to be picky when it comes to brushes, and artist brushes can be quite expensive. But in the woodworking realm, finishing …

Thank god there’s only a week left of this bullshit. I am truly sick of somehow everyone deciding that “Christmas” means “all of December”. Just fuck off. All of it.

“All entities are shy retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadows”. Timothy Morton (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 3-4. The Christmas lights tumble out of their battered box, expanding like an uncaged octopus. In reverse they will assume the un-packability of a fully splayed kitten: legs and arms extended to deny …

This past year, I’ve been working with Marco Zero, an investigative news agency in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, and Nest, an exhibition space in The Hague, to bring you a collection of 100 short, location-based podcasts, on the history of the Dutch colonisation efforts in northeastern Brazil. This project was funded through a grant by the Dutch Stimuleringsfonds, as a response to an Open Call which asked to …

In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.This article has many interactive demonstrations which are best seen …

Recollections / December 17, 2024 ROBERTS: I can’t believe I let you guys talk me into this, but I suppose it has to be done. A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It’s my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15. I think it’s winter: you can see a couple of LPs on the bed—Mad Parade’s A …

My favorite end-of-year recap is back! All this has done is make me miss baseball.

That Doctorow Story 2024-12-16T00:00:00+00:00, by Emma Humphries, from Infinite Wishes 🏳️‍⚧️🚀 I’ll preface this by doubling down on my belief that healthcare, along with shelter, food, and education are basic human rights. These are some of the table stakes that the US fails at by design. Our systems make ghouls of executives and rewards them for it. Also, I hope that Cory Doctorow was not accosted, questioned, or harassed by …

Snapshot Isolation vs Serializability Getting into some fundamentals. In my re:Invent talk on the internals of Aurora DSQL I mentioned that I think snapshot isolation is a sweet spot in the database isolation spectrum for most kinds of applications. Today, I want to dive in a little deeper into why I think that, and some of the trade-offs of going stronger and weaker. This post is going to be a …

Back when I started working in Filipino NLP, my standard approach in training models is to encode linguistics knowledge via meticulous data annotation, feature engineering, and extensive testing. Take calamanCy for example: we spent countless hours annotating named-entity recognition (NER) datasets and validating dependency parsing treebanks to train statistical models using frameworks like spaCy. Back then, these components typically power larger systems that handle tasks like information extraction and question …

We’ve recently returned from Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, a mountain habitat of the world’s oldest living trees. Time feels different up there at 11,000 feet, nestled among these ancient organisms that have borne witness to centuries of comings and goings.It was an ideal place to reflect on the founding of The Long Now Foundation as a community where memory, imagination, and the long view could be fostered over millennia. …

When iterating through lists or other iterables in Python, there are often situations where you need not only the value of each item but also its index. Enter the enumerate() function—a powerful, built-in feature of Python that simplifies this task and makes your loops both cleaner and more Pythonic. What Is enumerate()? The enumerate() function lets you iterate through an iterable (like a list, tuple, or string) while keeping track …