Recently updated blogs

Fuck you Facebook. That was the first thought I had when I woke up this morning. Followed by: What ministry is Mark Zuckerberg volunteering to manage for the dictators of the world? All I could think of is how Orwell’s Ministry of Love is about hate. So what are we creating here? The Ministry of Empowerment to ensure the oppression of the most vulnerable? Lovely. But maybe you, dear reader, …

We still have iced snow here, with - 9°C expected tonight, and even colder temperatures tomorrow. Several hundred feet below...

Back in 2023, I belatedly jumped on the bandwagon of people posting their CSS wish lists for the coming year. This year I’m doing all that again, less belatedly! (I didn’t do it last year because I couldn’t even. Get it?) I started this post by looking at what I wished for a couple of years ago, and a small handful of my wishes came true: Subgrid support Nested selectors …

How to quickly get code syntax highlighting in Keynote without having to select each bit of code and changing the colour manually. Read more.

I have news! On Saturday 11th January I will be performing at Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom in Norwich. I will be playing a 20 minute set of original songs and poems, raising funds for PAL Humanity and PCRF. I will be joined by kirakira, Billy Lubach, The Mink, and Damp Matches. I will be selling poetry books, photography books and maybe other things, with all funds split between the two organisations …

Recently I realized I was yet to see the sunrise in Taiwan.In my first year, summer temperatures pushed my daily walks further into the night. Then, by the time winter returned, my late starts had become habitual.And suddenly, I’ve been here two years already. Time passes me by, like sunrises in my sleep.So today, on my two-year anniversary in Kaohsiung, I set my alarm for 5:30am—an unfamiliar time of day …

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, …