Recently updated blogs

Here’s a round-up of some news stories from the last two months of 2024, (mostly) not otherwise covered here on the Aperiodical. Maths Research At the start of December, John Carlos Baez shared on Mathstodon that the moving sofa problem may have been solved – the question of the largest possible shape you can fit around a 2D corner. For many years, a shape called Gerver’s sofa has been thought …

Receiver Coffee opened a new treehouse location, a labyrinth of levels set into the branches of a banyan forest located, oddly, in central Charlottetown.One afternoon, Tim Chaisson and I were sharing a coffee at the highest level of the forest-café when we both leaned back over the railing too far and fell over the edge.“Grab the vines, Tim, GRAB THE VINES!”, I yelled.We grabbed the vines, and we survived, unscathed.Safe …

Album of the Week, January 11, 2025 In the 1980s, before streaming services and the Internet, if you were a fan of an artist you often traded cassettes of that artist’s rarities—b-sides, bootleg recordings from live concerts, and maybe obscure appearances the artist made on other peoples’ albums. Today’s album falls solidly in the last category. I first heard the seriously off-kilter songs on today’s album thanks to a compilation …

Dear Diary, I’ve been taking it very, very easy for 11 days. I’ve been playing video games for the first time since 1996, reading unedifying literature, gently strolling along, sleeping late. Today I took a very cheap bus to Edinburgh to mooch around some free art galleries, and then to stay up late watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a friend’s comfortable sofa. It’s like the the 1990s are back. …

Tim Carmody wrote a piece earlier in the week about why HTML is a programming language: Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training machine-learning models. But underestimating HTML …

Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu) Kristin here: This surprisingly popular series started with what we assumed to be a one-off entry. In 2007 David and I saluted the birth of the Classical Hollywood Cinema in 1917 as a full-fledged new set of norms that would last until the present day and influence filmmakers around the world. Introducing the list of ten films from ninety years earlier (for the list, …

Friends of Trees and a whole bunch of volunteers planted Ponderosa pines, oaks, and others behind the library this morning. 🌲 We’re turning this empty field into a climate-tolerant forest for our community to enjoy for generations to come!

In Laravel, you can use the intended method on the redirect response to redirect the user back to the intended URL after they’ve been authenticated. This is usually used when the user is not authenticated and they’re trying to access a protected route. However, sometimes you might want to manually set the intended URL for a route. For instance, the user is on some page and you want your user …

I was just enjoying Simon Willison’s predictions and, heck, why not. 1: The web becomes adversarial to AI The history of search engines is sort of an arms race between websites and search engines. Back in the early 2000s, juicing your ranking on search engines was pretty easy - you could put a bunch of junk in your meta description tags or put some text with lots of keywords on …

The peasants in Anton Chekhov’s novella Peasants published in 1897 live unremittingly grim lives. Impoverished, they sleep on the floor in huts and are hungry, cold, and illiterate. The men drink heavily, increasing their poverty, and beat their wives mercilessly. They are dishonest, unbelieving, and conniving. They think that live was better before “freedom,” when they were serfs. Chekhov wrote the novella after five years of living in a village …

Gidget Grows Up has been playing a number of times on the Cinevault channel on Roku over the past few months and I always happened to catch little bits of it but never had time to sit and watch it all the way through... until today, that is. Like many women, I grew up with the Gidget film series and have seen them all many times over. A lot of …

My first trip out of the new year, in which I spent a cold afternoon out and about in Manchester. Not surprisingly a few pubs were involved, including one that has only recently opened....If I have a spare few hours, fancy a trip out, but have nowhere specific to go in mind, I will tend to take myself over to Manchester. It's 40 minutes or so on the train from …

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” and its resonance with our AI age (The Mirror Cracked: AI, Poetry, and the Illusion of Depth). In that post I explored how our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by technology, AI just being one (and the latest) variation. […]

Basically this is my version of a D&D fantasy setting, generic enough so I can slot in other peoples’ dungeons without much modification but weird enough to be interesting. Big sources of inspiration are the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories (Ziragzar is just Lankhmar), seventeenth-century India and America, and Ghibli fantasy. THE SUNDER is a continent which holds forests as old as the world and magic from the Outer Spheres. …

To no-one’s surprise 2024 was the warmest year on record – and by quite a clear margin. Another year, another data point. Unlike the previous year, 2024 was anticipated to be a record breaker even before it began (I predicted a record – despite the huge anomaly in 2023 – with a 55% probability). It did fall at the higher end of the prediction, so maybe we are seeing the …