Bubbles
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A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error — naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I’m not sure that would ruin the book for...
Calculus professors with no experience in numerical computing will tell students that computers calculate trig functions with power series. They don’t. I worked on the implementation of trig functions in hardware, and I can assure you we...
After a week of ghosting round the house by myself, my wife and children and back. Let me share some emotional slop (as opposed to AI slop) about what a privilege it is to have them around. This morning I got woken up early (6:15am) and...
Our only aim now is to get home, and it seems that we have a Eurostar ticket that allows us to change it up to an hour before the train departs. Consequently around 7am I walk to Gare du Nord to try and change our tickets. The station is...
Ian Dunt captures a predicament I often find myself facing:Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same...
The masses are often overruled. How often do they act against the interests of the people they represent? Clear majorities want a decent minimum wage of $17/hour. Majorities support a host of other downright leftist policies. Most...
Tomorrow is International Cat Day. If you know me, everyday is Cat Day so let’s celebrate our favorite feline couch potatoes. Trying to narrow down our combined love for stationery and cats was such a challenge. Van Dieman’s has a...
A week of Blaugust, a honkaku mystery, some music for Bandcamp Friday, Traitors NZ, and more Zelda. We are a week into Blaugust and I have managed a post a day so far. However next Monday I'm back to work for a full seven days so will...
I saw this Spotted Eagle Ray last weekend and it might be the biggest one I’ve ever seen. The head was huge. Compare it with a photo I posted last month (below) of a juvenile Eagle Ray.
A worker at a US government lab got bitten by a monkey carrying a deadly virus, and it turned out nobody knew what to do about it. Around the same time, someone from the same lab tried to smuggle outbreak samples into the country. All of...
It is of course impossible to predict the effects of new AI technologies on total economic growth in a precise way, but there are strong reasons to believe that the effect will be modest for a decade or two, anyway. Charles Jones Jones...
Two classic string boards are connected by red string in Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022). ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief...
Loads of anglers have been a great help to me over the years. I always try and help others when I can as it's always good to give something back to the community. It's also nice when someone tells me that they enjoy reading my fishing...
Last month, I visited Lawers Dam in the Grampian Mountians with my mate Nick, for a day stomping around a boggy hillside hunting for mountain ringlet, a species of butterfly that's only found high up above an altitude of 350m in the...
The results to the State of CSS 2026 survey are now available. Here's my summary from the parts of the survey that are most relevant to my work on the web platform. My findings are almost entirely based on the free form comments which...