Bubbles
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In 1981, the Soviet mathematician V. I. Arnold wrote a little book attempting to explain catastrophe theory to a general audience. It was translated into English by R. K. Thomas and published with the title Catastrophe Theory by Springer...
I have invented a new rule for swimming at the beach: When swimming at the beach, you can never be the furthest from the shore. Frequently asked questions (probably): Q: What if I’m swimming with a friend?A: Worry about yourself! Q: What...
The sun is dying, being feasted on by tiny lifeforms based on Venus. The phenomenon, the "astrophage," is not unique: every star within dozens of light-years of Sol is suffering the same malaise...except one: Tau Ceti. With Earth's...
Kevin Powell tries out Prop For That, makin it look so slick and easy 🫶 Watch on YouTube
In order to make something—anything!—you need to be able to experiment. And most experiments probably won’t work. If you don’t want them to reflect poorly on your body of work, call them what they are: experiments. Or, practice. They’re...
I drew the illustration above on the back of an actual envelope (one of my new “things” these days). It’s either the most or the least appropriate medium for a diagram about attack surface. Your call. It’s here because my colleague Mark...
One of the cult youtube channels of machinists is the channel of Dan Gelbart. Youtube’s suggestion algorithm found him for me, and it made me nostalgic for all the talented machinists (often with similarly funny accents) I used to run...
Why does no one ever read the end of the story? Or if they do, why don’t they pay attention? Ever since Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein, laying out a moral of a story proving that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, there...
RomM is the best thing to happen to my game library, and I think it is a preview of how personal media should work generally. Point it at a collection and it scans the files, identifies their systems, enriches them with metadata and...
Earlier this year I mentioned that Slay the Spire 2 had reached the status of needing to be deleted from my computer, on the grounds that it was proving too big of a distraction. More recently, a second game has reached that same ignoble...
## A Website Is More Than a Collection of Pages For a long time, I thought of my website as a place where I published things. That was true, but it was not the whole truth. The site had also become a record of my life: what I had...
Article from Dan Mercer that’s an obvious must-link from this blog. His opener sets the stage: In her book Attention Span, UC Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark describes a study in which her team shut off email for a group of...
This week is the end of the Yoseka Stationery Fest in Brooklyn and, for many of us, counting down the hours and days until the two largest pen shows in the US — the DC Supershow and the SF Pen Show. As we prepare for the upcoming shows,...
There were a wide variety of orchid enthusiasts at the Hilo Orchid Show!
The US unemployment rate was 4.2% in June, which is low by historical levels. Nonetheless, lot of workers, and perhaps expecially young workers right out of college, are experiencing the US economy as a situation where it’s hard to get a...