Recently updated blogs

Ridgeline subscribers — A new year, a new city. My pick for New York Times’ “52 Places to Go 2025” is Toyama City of Toyama Prefecture. It is placed at 30 on this year’s list (not that the list is a “ranking”!) and Osaka — with its forthcoming Expo — is placed at 38. I think that’s quite the interesting contrast of Japanese cities to highlight. Times picks aren’t entirely …

A list of BBC Sounds things I have listened to over the festive break. It's quite a long list.

I decided to go cold turkey on micro-blogging. I’ve had a Twitter account since November 2006 and at some point owned 12 different accounts. I stopped last month. I don’t know for how long but I’ve gone back to ‘big writing’, ie. working on the second edition of Smarter Homes which I owe myself (and my publisher Apress). Sometimes, you just have to spend your January nights writing about 1920s …

Happy New Year to all! This first post of 2025 marks the beginning of a fresh year of cycling-related content. For January, I’ll publish on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays, returning to my usual schedule of the 1st and 3rd …

Twenty twenty-four was not a typical harvest (and, is there even such of a thing?). ¶ But it wasn't a bad harvest either, and in any case illustrates the rhythms, the rise and fall, of agriculture (as expressed at my local markets). ¶ All of the apples for sale, by date, from July to the end of the outdoor markets in November of last year. It's from this spreadsheet. Last …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]I am on location in downtown San Antonio, Texas, where crews have just finished setting up this massive 650-ton crane. The counterweights are on. The outriggers are down. And the jib, an extension for the crane's telescoping boom, is being rigged up. This is the famous San Antonio River Walk, a city park below street level that winds around …

The piranha problem is both a metaphor and a set of theorems coming out of Andrew Gelman’s research group. The metaphor is of large intervention effects as piranhas that can’t be kept together in the same tank since they’d eat each other. The theorems show that a large set of intervention effects that must add up to a large total of explained variability unless they are highly correlated with each …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]I am on location in downtown San Antonio, Texas, where crews have just finished setting up this massive 650-ton crane. The counterweights are on. The outriggers are down. And the jib, an extension for the crane's telescoping boom, is being rigged up. This is the famous San Antonio River Walk, a city park below street level that winds around …

2024-2025 Cruise Our first stop in 2025 on the leisurely tour of SIST is Excursion 4 Tour I which you can read here. I hope that this will give you the chutzpah to push back in 2025, if you hear that objectivity in science is just a myth. This leisurely tour may be a bit more leisurely than I intended, but this is philosophy, so slow blogging is best. (Plus, …

Photo by Eva Rinaldi | https://flickr.com/photos/evarinaldiphotography 2024 was a notable year for the Research Whisperers, in good ways for a change! As a result, we are looking forward to 2025. Jonathan completed and passed his PhD so that’s Dr O’Donnell to you now. We both started new roles at the same university. While we’ve worked together on Research Whisperer for over 13 years and were in similar roles at one …

kata4a:mumblesplash:scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon saving this for my files on emoji as gesture linguistics

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could find more time yet: trillions of …

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 …