Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) Today, October 16th, is Hamilton day! It was on this day 183 years ago, in 1843, that William Rowan Hamilton first wrote down the fundamental result of quaternions. Apparently he was walking from his residence at Dunsink Observatory into Dublin when he had a sudden flash of inspiration, and wrote the result down on the spot, now marked by a plaque: Picture Credit: Brian Dolan This event is commemorated by an annual Hamilton Walk. Broombridge railway…

I've been thinking over the summer about the nature of this blog. It's called the Beachburg Sub, named after a Canadian National subdivision that once stretched from central Ottawa into the city's distant northwest hinterland, all the way up to Fitzroy Harbour, into the Pontiac Region in Quebec and beyond. The tracks are all gone past Nepean Junction.You know the story. Canadian National, since taking over the Ottawa Central Railway's operations years ago, has gradually shrunk its footprint in…

While on holiday, I had a chat with the tour bus driver. We were going to some place far and the driver had to take a break. As we were waiting for the passengers to get on the bus, we had a small chat. He is younger than me, single and had been a tour bus driver for nearly 3 years. Through the conversation, I can sense he has a lot of grievance. His struggle, frustrations and pain are real and I feel for him. As I get back to seat, I think about my own issues. Our struggles are different but…

I went to a funeral yesterday. My sister-in-law’s dad died fairly unexpectedly a week or so ago, and I drove back to Chesterfield to represent my bit of the family. I hadn’t known Les for long, but had of course seen him at all the kind of family gatherings where you tend to overlap with people. I’d sat next to him on the top table at my brother’s wedding (with both of us giving speeches), and met him at Christmas parties and family BBQs. I wasn’t quite a peripheral figure at the funeral, but I…

Sadly, I must go outside anyway.

World Food Day flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says Today is World Food Day The UN have a challenge for people aged 5-19. We might not be, ahem, quite that young, but we can still participate here: Create a poster that shows what “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” means to you. Show us how innovation – big or small, old or new – can help feed the world, protect the planet, and build a better future for everyone. Mine’s at…

✏️ Catching up on #inktober, with a bit of backlog due to busy days. This was day 10. Working at the pool while the boys had swimming lessons. #inktober2026

Christmas and candlelight go together like mince pies and an entirely unnecessary second mince pie. And candlelight pictures do a lot of the selling at Christmas. A dark church? Check. Rows of little flames? Check. Musicians in the glow? Check. It’s easy to book on the photo alone. Many of those photos come from one brand. If you’ve searched for candlelit concerts in London, you’ve almost certainly come across Candlelight, a concert series run by the ticketing company Fever in cities around the…

I randomly selected an image to illustrate this post. As soon as I saw this photograph, instantlyI remember making it on Deal Island, Maryland. It's a photograph that I've always liked and when I saw this scene, I knew I had to make a photograph of it. Just as I was composing the photo, the deadrise oyster fishing boat motored by. Lucky, I guess, as it added a nice element to the image. The photo was made in December, 2012. (click to enlarge)Very seldom do I write anything personal in this…

The fact that I have to explain what this is would have astonished New Yorkers of the late nineteenth century. The picture is taken in a stairwell – you can see the sloped wainscoting along the stair on the left. And this thing is the base of a gas lamp. It’s missing the enclosure, which would likely have been a small glass cylinder (or something similar) on the far left end/ The thing that looks like a pipe is a pipe, which was filled with coal gas, and the bottom-most projection is the…

Every holiday season, I get nostalgic for ’90s television. I blame the marketing gurus who programmed all those themed holiday blocks back in the day because they clearly got their hooks into me. Even now, it just doesn’t feel like Halloween unless I spend at least a little time watching old sitcoms from the ’90s. My recaps are pretty simple. I’ll provide a spoiler-free synopsis, talk about how well the episode actually uses Halloween or spooky themes, and then grade it based on two things: the…

micropoetry cold snap’s on the way“beasts of burden’s” ready to attacksweater weather–at my door

A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk! Have at those stickers! is what Dracula would say when encountering my now completely screwed up laptop. In fact, his image—including the iconic quip—is placed prominently in the middle. What started with just four stickers, mostly Emacs (Lisp) related quickly spiralled out of control after the arrival of my Redbubble order. I’m sorry, I tried neatly arranging them, I really did. But the end result is, as my wife called it, chaotic1. But in…

When we met, my wife had one non-negotiable: the beach. I had one too: Estonia. She followed me there that first time the way you follow a friend into a restaurant with no English menu: trusting yet aware of the exit. Now, she may love Estonia more than I do. Our travel system is simple. Estonia every year, plus a new country every two or three. This year the new country was Ireland, which had sat atop both our lists since our honeymoon. We'd see the west of it by campervan, for the first time,…

A frost first thing but nice later. Gave moped a clean and adjusted clutch cable. Little Jane came in the morning and stayed until five. Went to pub.

On this day in 2025, my best good girl left this world. This post I wrote to commemorate her ran here a few weeks before, on Sept. 24, and is also live today at Terra Affirma. I miss her every damn day. The post She began to dream again appeared first on The Last Word On Nothing.

I have ME/CFS. I’m in remission now, which still feels strange to write, but for years pacing was the whole game: working out how much I could do before the crash came, and doing a bit less than that. What helped most wasn’t clever. It was paper. An hour-by-hour diary. Writing down what I did and how I felt, on a simple 0 to 4 scale, showed patterns I couldn’t see from memory. The crash often came a day or two after the thing that caused it, which is exactly why it’s so hard to spot. A crash…

8715/21634I am trying to get myself into some kind of routine so that I don't waste my remaining day/days (somewhere between 1 and 10,000) and I nailed this morning. I did my daily puzzles whilst making breakfasts for the kids and me and then got on with making lunch (all before 8am), then took the boy to school, came back finished off preparing my lunchtime pie, wrote my blog, prepped for my podcast, realised I had half an hour to slot in a Newsround and then interviewed the incredible Matt…

In the last few years AI image generation has gone from something very rudimentary and nigh-on unusable for commercial purposes to the go-to option for small businesses' signs and menus from SF to Rome—this sucks. Somehow, as the models have gotten better, they've left something behind. I find myself thinking more and more wistfully of DALL·E 2, an image generation model from 2022 that conceptually shouldn't hold a candle to the current state of the art. So why do I miss it?

Now there are few things in life more reassuring than meeting up with your identical twin brother, Chris, because you know you’re in the company of someone who shares your genes, your facial features and, presumably, the same questionable manufacturing process. We are, quite literally, two peas from the same pod, although one of us has clearly been stored in a slightly more questionable environment than the other.Chris escaped Coventry some eight years ago and established himself in North…

I just scanned two dozen slides, and there were some really nice randos mixed in. Here are two for your Friday.Let's begin with this beautiful October 1972 shot looking toward the entrance to Tomorrowland as seen from the middle of the Plaza (aka the "Hub"). The cerulean blue sky really compliments the whites and yellows (and even the reds!). This is truly a "postcard-worthy" view, it's got the rockets up in the air, several colorful Peoplemover trains, Rolly Crump's flowers (not purple and…

I remember playing this back when it was new, although all I can truly recall about that experience is it being a real pain in the arse to run and not having a good time with it. Thankfully my personal tech’s and personality’s moved on a long way since 2006, so I thought it was about time I revisited a fully patched up (official patches only) Neverwinter Nights 2 with a better PC and fresh eyes. Or not. Within seconds I’m staring in disbelief at the dialogue before me, wondering if perhaps I…

This is so well put and ever since having kids, I have described it exactly the same: Your heart now lives outside your body. The hardest part of being a parent is that you have to trust these awkward, gangly, brave, but ultimately reckless little humans with keeping your heart safe, while also letting them be awkward, gangly, brave, and ultimately reckless. Because that is how growing up happens. It’s stupid. Mike Monteiro’s Good News

Okay, so, on Tuesday evening I was with a group of Ukraine writers and ended up recounting two or three times that I had felt so vulnerable in writing that I made poor decisions or I was led the wrong way. That suddenly sounds so much more dramatic than it really was. Nobody has led me into a dark life of crime and scandal, although there may yet be hope. What I meant was, for example, the way that my school careers teacher laughed at me for wanting to write and how that sent me off down the…

Welcome to Friday and another update on things here in North Wales in my little workshop that despite the autumnal weather remains comfortable at present. Get yourself comfortable, and let me give you a guided tour...It's rather lovely to be testing the 16mm rails in the garden! This build has been something of a slow burn, but very much on the home straight now with most of the paintwork and assembly fitted. The final stage is to add some weathering to breathe a little life into this cute…

There is one event I've kept out of the record for a year, and I kept it out because of a word. The word is Christ. It splits a room faster than greys do, and where I live it lands on a reflex before it lands on a mind. I've stopped caring who flinches.

Who lives here? What kind of life do they live? That’s what I wonder. The post Everybody Needs a Place to Spend Winter first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.

Last Friday for the first time in + a year, we went into our post-town for the Friday artisanal market: it is small but perfickly formed: Peter the veg; Cormac the cheese; scones, pies & cakes; fresh fish. We came away with a cheese selection; spuds and fractal brocolli. Food fit for comp'ny - a bit too expensive for everyday. Then we repaired across the street to the pub-undertaker for coffee and viennoiserie from Seamus the Plúr, who was previously up the way when Fərmεntary was a thing. The…

journey into night

Everyone posts lists ranking random items in the hope of fanning enough controversy that their bad opinions become viral (see: TasteAtlas). Yet, even though I am mostly immune to bad culinary hot takes (see again: TasteAtlas), I could not help … Continue reading →