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This story also appears in the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. George Washington was 11 when his father, a prominent landowner, died. The future founder of the country inherited several things – an imposing physical frame, a sense of civic duty, several parcels of land, 11 enslaved people and an endless, entrepreneurial interest in acquiring ever more land. Augustine Washington also left behind some surveying tools, which …

Found Photo Is it perhaps a big hair competition between a younger and an older woman? If so, the younger woman won with the biggest beehive. As perhaps suits their ages, though, the older woman’s smooth updo looks refined compared the other’s concoction, with its fluffy high curls. According the blog Glamour Daze, the beehive hairdo was first featured in a hair style magazine in early 1960. For many, it …

A Nice Quiet Local On a bright November morning, Sekforde Street is London as Richard Curtis imagines it. A steady stream of City University students amble northwards, past the Georgian terraces of Sekforde Street and under the boughs of a slim silver birch that grows at the triangle-shaped intersection with Woodbridge Street.

In December, the California Supreme Court declined to review a decision by the Commission on Judicial Performance to remove a judge for misconduct that took the CJP 114 pages to explain. This might be worth a full article, but right now I can only give you the lowlights. While the judge was being investigated for asking parties about their “churchgoing habits” (already not good), he ran a counter-investigation to find …

I would never want to say a number first -- what if they had a much larger number in mind?!If it is an odd situation -- like, say, it's a smaller/niche publisher and we know they don't have a huge budget (and they KNOW we know they don't have a huge budget), they might ASK first, just to set expectations. "What kind of offer are you looking for" or "what …

As I’ve attributed a large fraction of human behaviors to signaling incentives, I feel I should address a key signaling question, about which I was recently reminded.All else equal, we prefer others to think that we are smarter, healthier, and richer. And we take many concrete actions to promote such impressions. But most all of these actions only indirectly signal such desirable features. Which tends to induce wasteful signaling efforts, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Enjoying a vacation on a Caribbean porch, and just had a couple hours to kill with good internet access. For some reason I spent part of them listening to the summary panel discussions at Strings 2025, which just ended today. Honestly, this was just completely pathetic. The whole thing was run by David Gross, who at 83 is entering his fifth decade of hyping string theory. Besides the usual claims …

In my days with mountain rescue we would often do a bothy trip a trip we enjoyed was to Culra over the 4 Munroes and then. To Ossian ( Thos is a Youth Hostel Tom rig would hide a key and coal) sadly Tom died many Years ago. He as such a character kind and a great host. Culra One great route was Dalwhinnie to Laggan taking in the hills …

People sometimes say there is a crisis of trust in science. In controversial subjects, from ecology to health, increasingly many people are rejecting not only mainstream ideas, but the scientists behind them. I think part of the problem is media literacy, but not in the way you’d think. When we teach media literacy, we talk about biased sources. If a study on cigarettes is funded by the tobacco industry or …

I wore my Olukai Mahana slippers all day every day for 3 years. They finally got beat up enough that when my family asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I said that I’d welcome a new pair of slippers. Christmas morning arrived and I opened my gift from my wife and daughter containing…a brand new pair of my exact same slippers. I was elated. This in my opinion is …