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Is this the year that you learn to graft? Would you like to grow a new variety of fig, peach, dragon fruit, avocado, plum, mulberry, or cherry? Then these events are for you. Winter is the season for the California Rare Fruit Growers “scion exchanges,” where growers cut sticks (scions) off their backyard trees and […] The post 2025 Scion Exchanges (of the California Rare Fruit Growers) appeared first on …

Since ZBrush for iPad release last year, I was willing to dig into ZBrush again. I learned some basic ZBrush back in 2022/23 but never actually take it seriously. Until now.So, over the past week or two, I've been learning ZBrush via Rafa Souza course.I still have a long journey ahead, but I just finished the first project, that was to sculpt an alien character based on a concept from …

One of my more innovative new year pledges is to actually talk about the work I do. So here goes.I’m working with the RSPCA at the moment, kickstarting a responsible AI initiative. I’ve been reviewing a new AI-driven project for ethical risks and opportunities, and helping define the artefacts and mentalities the organisation needs to adopt to embed responsibility in its future tech work. As part of this, we ran …

Happy New Year! We’re heading into 02025. Week #726 was our first full week back at the office, but that doesn’t mean the last 4 weeks weren’t busy! Publishing Schedule At the end of 02024, we decided to pause the ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter in 02025 and instead focus on writing here. We’ll see how things go, maybe the pendulum will swing back. Our ◍ Quarter notes newsletter is still …

Allow me to revisit an anecdote I published in a piece for Time magazine last year. "Do you think people will ever fall in love with machines?" I asked the 12-year-old son of one of my friends. "Yes!" he said, instantly and with conviction. He and his sister had recently visited the Las Vegas Sphere and its newly installed Aura robot -- an AI system with an expressive face, advanced …

My fiddle player friend Darin sent me this documentary about GB Grayson, which I enjoyed: The documentary talks about how very few people even recognize the name despite all of recorded tunes essentially becoming standards in today’s folk/bluegrass/old-time world and having been covered by extraordinarily huge artists. That’s true for me! I absolutely had never heard of him before this. Gilliam Banmon Grayson (1887-1930) was a blind fiddler from one …

Pavement - The Marquee, London, England, August 26, 1992We checked out the Faces at the Marquee in 1970 this week … how about Pavement at the Marquee in 1992?! Why not, they were another one of John Peel’s favorite bands. Of course, it’s not exactly the same club — I think the Marquee changed addresses several times during the course of its lifetime. But we don’t need an excuse! This …

Vanessa Blakeslee’s story “Patient X” opens questions about death, care, and our sense of reality. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:“It's always difficult to pick just one thing to discuss about how a certain fiction came to be, but without hesitation, the most mysterious aspect of this tale--the orbs--are rooted in true accounts. When I was about 12, I awoke in the middle of the night in …

Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a press conference to announce that he would resign as Prime Minister once a new Liberal leader was selected. He also revealed that he had advised the Governor General to prorogue Parliament and that she had granted the request, with Parliament set to return on March 24. The announcement ended months of speculation about Trudeau’s future. Until September 2024, the Liberal …

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The first mini-heap of 2025… You “may be wondering how I’m going to wiggle out of the seeming exhaustion of logical space presented by ‘either it is the case that qualia exist or it is not the case that qualia exist.’ Just watch me now.” — Pete Mandik’s qualia quietism “The core elements of community—relationships, service, and purpose—also define the triad of fulfillment. When combined with the core virtue of …

We know the names of very few Roman centurions and legionaries, mostly those found on inscriptions and commemorative steles, along with a few mentioned in written sources. However, there are two whose names are so well-known that they even appear as characters in several television series and historical novels about ancient Rome. Their names were […]

On Christmas Eve, I walked to my local pub at lunchtime for a couple of pints. It wasn’t packed, but there was a decent scattering of people in. It was, as they say “nicely ticking over”. But something that struck me was that, in the rear lounge, there were a couple of giant TV screens showing the darts, with the sound turned up. Nobody was watching, and everyone was just …

This one goes out to Will, without whom I would not know any X-Men facts."Lore" is one of my favorite terms to graduate from cheeky internet slang to grown-up conversational staple. Lore is simply legend, often of the unverifiable kind, that accompanies a particular dogma, trait, or decision. The turn of the year is a great time to spin some lore about oneself or one's colleagues, wrapping up accomplishments in …