Recently updated blogs

I love work. It drives me. It’s exciting. Everything about building things with folks is a pure thrill. Like when I crack open a hard design problem and learn something! Or when a test passes on a big refactor! Or when I watch a designer reveal something new about human cognition, about typography, about language, about a silly little bug in SVG! Despite my love for work you’ll never catch …

Advent of Code is an annual advent calendar full of fun festive themed programming puzzles. Over my winter break I had a great time solving all puzzles for AoC 2024.This was my first year participating in AoC. It was such a fun experience I’ve gone back to previous events and started solving from 2015 onwards. I’ve got 11 months to catch up on the previous 10 years. I want all …

Video: Peter Doherty – “Felt Better Alive” Directed by Rose Bosch. From Felt Better Alive, out May 16 on Strap Originals. If you had asked me twenty years ago if Pete Doherty would still be alive in 2025, I wouldn’t have been very confident. The fact that he’s not only survived jail, heroin, crack and other terrible decisions, but has become something of an elder statesman of a certain strain …

Some people I’ve worked with have lost hope that engineering strategy actually exists within any engineering organizations. I imagine that they, reading through the steps to build engineering strategy, or the strategy for navigating private equity ownership, are not impressed. Instead, these ideas probably come across as theoretical at best. In less polite company, they might describe these ideas as fake constructs. Let’s talk about it! Because they’re right. In …

The sixth installment of our adventures in sign painting craft, community, and culture is out now. Inside, you'll find work and contributions from 18 countries spanning five continents, so read on for an appetiser...BLAG 06 contains 80 pages packed with our latest adventures in sign painting from around the world. GIF and all magazine photography: Edgar Gonzalez.The magazine's 80 pages are once again completely free of advertising, thanks to members …

Democracy in America is not well, but what ails it? According to one diagnosis, the country is suffering from multiple strains of one-man rule—tyranny, fascism, authoritarianism. Variants of the virus originate in the people and their passions. Citizens vote the tyrant into power. Racism, misogyny, or some other affliction of cruelty and fear, fuels their votes. Democracy is not just threatened by disease. It is the disease. This idea, of …

Reading time, 2 minutes: Can artificial intelligence help teachers unlock the secrets of how the brain learns? Neuroeducation, powered by AI, offers personalised learning strategies grounded in neuroscience, making classrooms more inclusive, engaging, and effective. This systematic review, Artificial Intelligence in Neuroeducation (Shiwlani et al., 2024), explores how AI tools such as adaptive learning platforms, neurofeedback systems, and gamified […]

History can be pretty murky sometimes – and paradoxically, recent history even more so. You’d think that having eyewitnesses to an event on hand to give their testimonies would clear things up, but sometimes those eyewitnesses can be unreliable, or have motivations or perspectives that don’t fit neatly into the story the rest of the world wants to tell. And sometimes those perspectives can get misremembered or forgotten as time …

ABUL MOGARD & RAFAEL ANTON IRISARRI - LIVE AT LE GUESS WHO Le Guess Who is a Dutch yearly festival presenting a broad spectrum of music, 'promoting sounds that are often overlooked, and to platform fresh perspectives on what is possible in music'. Over the years, it has grown into one of the greatest and most important festivals for adventurous music in Europe - attracting visitors from over 60 different …

Here's a really interesting paper from the Baker lab at Washington and co-workers on a very real-world problem where machine learning looks to be able to help. Now, I realize that statement might make a few readers raise their eyebrows, because over the last few years I have developed a reputation as an AI/ML skeptic. And I'd say that's true, although given the hype that envelopes the field, almost anyone …

Nice article about content design and designing content first. It still blows my mind that this is news. But it is, to a lot of people/designers.

After more than 20 years blogging for NewsHounds, it is time for me to move on. There is more to this post than good-bye, however.

Sometimes I wonder if doing these recap posts at this point are masturbatory. Fun for me but probably of little interest or at most, an awkward glance by passersby. It’s nice to have a record but if I need to journal, I have one of those. But here we go anyway… As I predicted a year ago, 2024 was a year of progress. Turned 50 The big milestone for 2024 …

We're neck deep in unit conversions in chemistry and we've come to that bridge, yet again, where we have to wrestle with stoichiometry. Converting between units has gone better this year because I introduced with some models using common units like dozens, grosses, scores, and others. They counted beans, did their multiples and partials, and were able to get to the mol (I'll always leave the "e" off) without too …

I first became aware of Talk Talk in 1990 when the re-release of ‘It’s My Life’, a single from their 1984 LP of the same name broke into the UK Top 20. This became my song of that summer and I bought the accompanying best of compilation album, ‘Natural History (The Very Best Of Talk Talk)’ as soon as I could afford it. Slowly but surely, I bought all of …