Recently updated blogs

by Siobhan Carroll Professor Siobhan Carroll recounts her disappointment watching the contentious Star Trek: Voyager character Chakotay, and describes how the missed opportunity he represents helped inspire “In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind,” her story from our [January/February issue, on sale now!] The roots of “In the Splinterlands…” can be traced to my youthful hobby of Getting Mad at TV Shows. Specifically, it can be traced to 1995, and …

More films. Sub-zero temperatures, icy lanes. Back to PT. Panda Prop progress. Spare Bedroom / Office revamp in progress. Good walks. Yellow garden furniture. Family treat at The Angel, Abergavenny. With hindsight, quite a busy week. GVWC: Ewyas Harold – Abbey Dore – Dulas Court Circular On Tuesday morning it was down to the gym for my first PT session for yonks. Good to be back at it. The sleet …

Slide in Lev Reyzin's JMM talk "Problems in AI and ML for Mathematicians" Reyzin is paraphrasing Telgarsky. Posted with permission.Last week I attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle with a theme ofWe Decide Our Future: Mathematics in the Age of AIWith little computational complexity in the conference, I attended many of the AI talks. You could divide them into Math for AI and AI for Math. Mathematics of course …

"Being Alive Is Hard," 2025, by Connie Sun. Ink & watercolor on paper.Life can be unimaginably difficult. Whatever is hard for you at the moment, I wish you strength and solace. May the days ahead be kind. - Connie--Since relaunching my cartoon blog, I'm back on Ko-fi, Instagram, and you can sign up to hear from me directly. Thanks for reading.

Casio brings PAC-MAN to your wrist with four new digital watches. The collection marks 45 years of the iconic arcade game through designs that blend gaming elements with Casio’s classic digital watch styles. Two models, the A168WEPC ($79.95) and F-91WPC ($59.95), feature PAC-MAN and all four GHOSTS – Blinky, Inky, Clyde, and Pinky – on their faces. These watches use bright neon colors that pop against the display. The A168WEPC …

I run some lightweight privacy-respecting self-hosted analytics for my blog, so I know what my most popular posts were in 2024. It's hardly surprising that many of these were also published last year, but they include one from 2013 and another from 2018. Having a quick peek at my stats reminded me that the blog content that is most appreciated, shared and read is often not what you might think …

Chris Armstrong, advocating for a digital garden over a blog structure: A blog structure places the highest emphasis on ‘what’s new’… but what’s new has had the least scrutiny and little authority. Robin Rendle linked to Armstrong’s post recently and reading it reminded me of my 2011 post The blog format is ready for disruption. In that post, which is now nearly 14 years old, I argue that the structure …

Two years ago, Ian Scott created the picoGUS card that uses ISA sound card emulation using the RaspPi’s Pico’s microcontroller. My July 2023 post was the first post to mention the card and I’ve had it on my radar ever since. Last summer I received my own copy and tried assembling it into the trusty 80486—except that that didn’t work out well because the card was… too small? After fixing …

it is 2025 and i can’t tell you what I’ve really been watching on youtube recently because you will think I’ve lost the plot, so instead, here are the things I can tell you about: knitting with paint knitting with yarn music, not knitting and a laugh to end the post

The set up for the weekly staff meeting at the Alaska Humanities Forum offices in Anchorage. We spent the day yesterday with our colleagues at the Alaska Humanities Forum (AKHF) preparing for the Art of Hosting that begins this morning. AKHF is an organization that has long embraced the Art of Hosting as a way of operating both their internal organizational functions and their relationship and gatherings with their partners …

I was reminded of this book while reading the short story The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, by Neil Gaiman, which was reprinted in Trigger Warning. I realized I’ve read very little of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, and I thought I should fill this void a bit. Given the crazy amount of stuff he wrote, I would have been troubled to choose. Likely, this one has …

This year we got a new Solar Pons collection from Belanger Books that finally takes him to the United States: The American Adventures of Solar Pons. Edited by David Marcum the collection features a dozen stories by various authors. I’ve posted on Solar Pons before, recently doing a re-reading of both the original stories by […]

Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville Kate Grenville tells her grandmother’s story; family history and historical research enriched with a storyteller’s gloss. I loved it. Author’s page: Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville

I had been lacking books from the Snoopy Museum in Tokyo, so when I saw one one for sale on eBay, I chunked up some money and ordered it. It was a bit more than I like to spend on one book… which is why I was so happy when it turned out to be two! It isn’t a boxed set per se, because what they were in was open …

DMFT is significantly less perplexing than HMRC Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy. This week, I’ve made another contribution to the OEIS (currently in review) about the excellent puzzle #23 from Scroggsvent that Matt has written up here. I’ve also written a blog post I’m unusually pleased about: when Michelle Kwan skated last at the 1995 Figure Skating Worlds, …