Recently updated blogs

The arrival of winter always brings a desire to slow down, to cosy up, to hibernate a little. Winter storms have rolled in bringing cold winds, lashing rain and grey skies but here inside it is quiet, and still, and warm, and there is comfort and peace in the simple pleasures of reading a book or knitting a pair of socks. I'm up early each day to catch the sunrise, …

In March 2023, we shared the initial release of a set of global basemaps we designed for Amazon Location Service. In 2024, we undertook a design refresh to improve upon the original release, adding more detail and contrast to the suite of maps Amazon provides. To celebrate the release, we are excited to walk you through updates to the new styles, which are available now in Standard, Monochrome, and Hybrid. …

Moonbound update; media theorizing. Read here.

You can’t have the good without the bad — and I’ve always made an effort to talk about the bad times that happen while traveling! The top thing that people tell me is “You’re so honest,” and I make sure to tell the truth. Because yes — travel is fun and transformative and life-affirming. But it can also be uncomfortable, stressful, smelly, and expensive. It’s good to remember that, and …

# Wednesday, December 18, 2024 # notes on the garmin instinct 2 solar tl;dr: These are incomplete notes on the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar, after a year and a half of regular wear. The Instinct 2 is a smartwatch, first released in 2022, that focuses on activity tracking and fitness. It has 5 buttons and a monochrome non-touch display. In many ways it feels like one of the digital watches …

Hamilton’s quaternion number system is a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers, consisting of numbers of the form where are real numbers, and are anti-commuting square roots of with , , . While they are non-commutative, they do keep many other properties of the complex numbers: Being non-commutative, the quaternions do not form a field. However, they are still a skew field (or division ring): multiplication is associative, and every …

Hayden Beverage Corp. 2910 East Amity Rd. Boise, ID 83716 12.17.24 Dear Mr. Hayden, Three years ago I wrote you from the Idaho Maximum Security Institution to thank you for personally sponsoring an entire Boise State University humanities class at the Idaho State Correctional Institution. Today I write you as a student who recently completed … Continue reading "Many thanks to Dodds Hayden, Vice Chair for the Idaho Board of …

Roger Spitz, President of Techistential and Chair of the Disruptive Futures Institute, joined SOIF’s community event last October to inspire actionable thinking on navigating uncertainty. Author of the bestselling “Disrupt with Impact”, he shared insights into reframing disruption as a driver for systemic change. His book provides tools to help decision-makers navigate and respond effectively in an increasingly ‘UN-VICE’ world—Unknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex and Exponential. Systemic change has diminished the …

Earlier this year, I prepared lectures on path tracing for master students at TU Delft. We decided to make recorded versions of these lectures available to the general public. I also wrote a simple Vulkan path tracer for illustrations in the lectures, which is open source now. You can watch the lectures on YouTube (113 minutes) to learn about basic principles of path tracing and all the importance sampling strategies …

Tracey’s project will focus on the Sanctuary Movement, and the entangled histories of immigration, colonization, and religion along the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Read on Places Journal

Can men really love each other – without the sex? Or, to put it another way, how many different forms of male love can you name? These questions loiter around the edges of Tom Stoppard’s dense history play, which jumps from 1936 to the High Victorian age of the 1870s and 1880s, and is now revived by the Hampstead Theatre starring Simon Russell Beale. First staged in 1997 at the …

Liberty magazine ad for its serial of The Woman Accused (and the associated Paramount movie) I should start with an apology — two of them, actually. First, I apologize for not posting here for the last two months. I recently submitted the manuscript of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, to the University of Nebraska Press, and that left me little time and energy for Neglected Books. …

I hate going to the gym, am terrible with routines, and don't notice time passing.Realized that getting a "buy a 10 visit bundle" membership to a gym was counterproductive because it made each visit feel too precious. I didn't want to go if I wasn't going to go do a "proper" session.However, I've learned recently that consistency is more important than exercising a ton in one go.Clearly a monthly membership …

All they want to do is get out of their wet clothes but the key doesn’t work. As Hannah struggles, Joe stands behind her sniffing the warm, musty air of the corridor. ‘Stinks of mice.’ Hannah tries pulling the key out a little as she turns it. She tries pulling up on the door handle. She tries pushing the key harder into the door. ‘Let me try,’ says Joe. He …