Recently updated blogs

When you know strong data visualization is crucial to your team's success but you have a boss stuck in Windows 95, you need to manage up. You need sneaky ways to launch a data viz revolution at work. The post Launch a Data Viz Revolution appeared first on Evergreen Data.

I’m reading Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. I’m a big fan of Walter Isaacson, but I was going to skip this new book because I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. Then I saw the 92NY YouTube interview, between Michael Lewis and Walter Isaacson, and decided I should read it after all. Even though Musk has a repellant personality, and expresses political ideas I dislike, he is achieving many ambitions …

I I’ve mentioned before that I take a few walks a day; I have two dogs, one of which is a fairly high energy beast. Normally, we head up to the river in the morning, crossing the French Quarter. At the start of the year, some asshole plowed into a crowd and killed people, and as a result, parts of the French Quarter were blocked off. It was largely re-opened …

Aviation Book Reviews Vought F7U-3 Cutlass Hardcover –2024, Crecy Tommy H Thomason and Alfred C Casby FIVE STARS When this popped up on a Facebook page (I think it was The Aviation Enthusiast Book Club), the aviation writer Bill Sweetman wryly replied that 384 pages devoted to the Cutlass were rather too generous a treatment and […]

Last night we spontaneously decided to go see A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, and ended up at a cinema-plex in the Montreal suburb of Cote-St-Luc. The parking lot was empty, the shops in the dimly lit mall already shuttered; fake plants, vibrating recliners and plastic carnival horses on springs had been pushed into the center of the atrium to accommodate the brooms and mops of the late …

Book review by George S: Death at the Opera is Gladys Mitchell’s fifth novel featuring Mrs Bradley, her ferocious reptilian detective. It was first published by Grayson in 1934, and appeared as Penguin number 217 in 1939 (price 6d.) Cover of the first edition, 1934 The title might seem misleading, since the setting is not an opera house but a school, and the key event is the murder of an …

This film was completed in the late 60’s, a few short years after the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. Mick Jagger’s casting here lead the studio to believe they would be getting a similarly light-hearted romp through Bohemian London – but Performance‘s much seedier tone caused the studio to panic and shelve the film for a full two years. Jagger’s role is more of a slight supporting role anyway. …

Braised eggs with noodles is a dish that you won’t necessarily find anywhere else. It’s more of a concept than a dish! You braise scrambled eggs in a sauce with vegetables and aromatics, and the savory mixture gets served over noodles. It’s a low-cost breakfast, lunch, or dinner option that has your protein, veggies, and ... View Post

For some reason, Mythic Odysseys of Theros’s inclusion of “cerberi” as a genus of monstrosities hits me as being particularly goofy, as if Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft had included a listing for “draculas.” The post Cerberus Tactics appeared first on The Monsters Know What They’re Doing.

I tried reading this with an open mind, but then I came across this: This is a very easy fix. If I paste the error back into the LLM it will correct it. Though in this case, as I’m reading the code, it’s quite clear to me that I can just delete the line myself, so I do. Via Lobsters, How I program with LLMs My initial reaction to this …

Songs about bees, or from the perspective of a beeIt's wonderful to be aliveTo be a bee in this beehiveIt's tough as nails, it's smooth as silkIt's milk and honey, without milkI work with flowers, it's my workFrom this, there's no way that I can shirkNo-no-no-no-no, there is no complex philosophyIt's just because I'm a beeUnlike the skunk, I do not smellBut I have a thing and it stings like …

new theory

When I last wrote about AI on this blog three years ago, I spoke of it being a tool with the potential to transform scientific discovery, but the application I described was primarily theoretical. For AI to be a meaningful tool in R&D, I argued, we needed better sources of “truth” – better data sets that AI tools could query and learn from over time – and technology capable of …

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a …

Normally I don't write book reviews, because I do not have much to add to the thousands of reviews already out there, and would rather spend my time in the next book than typing words about what I just read. Still. Recently I finally was able to break my dry spell of reading and enjoyed a collection of books that have some themes in common yet are very different in …