Morning comes with fog. 7:00 sail off anchor, light north wind and less fog. A half dozen tacks, gentle sailing, almost ghosting, out of the cove. Rounding the northern tip of Spruce Island, I find Mark out rowing a skiff with his dog. He lives on Spruce Island four months of the year. He points to his Contessa sloop moored nearby, and we talk about sailing the Maine coast. We talk about my slow drift across the water, going fast versus going slow, the trade off between traditional cruising…

After two nights in Hakodate we drove about an hour north towards Lake Onuma. It's in Onuma Quasi-National Park - kind of a funny name, but I suppose it's not quite a "real" national park, whatever that means. One of Onuma's claims to fame is that it is one of the New Three Views of Japan. Basically there was the original set of three, decided in 1643, and then the "new" three was decided via national election in 1915. Considering that Mt Hakodate is considered one of the top three night views,…

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!” Warship Wednesday 23 September 2026:…

I've genuinely haven't had much to write about. There's been some post ideas, but most of 'em have ended up shelved for one reason or another. These past months have been a real creative drought for me. I think I need a shit-post side blog. One where I can kind of write about whatever without worrying about the content or if the posts starts to sound like a journal entry1. I think since this is my first blog, I overthink too much about what I put into it. Speaking of getting too into my head, I…

I’ve grown to adore this little strip of flowers that bursts with color as summer draws to a close. I feel like they’re annuals — lots of zinnias, a favorite — so either someone is consistent with planting, or I’m mistaken. Either way I thank the kind soul that ensures they exist. Currently Listening: Joe's Truck Stop ft. The Resonant Rogues “Wishin' on a Star”Reply via email

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The right place to ask why Oktoberfest starts in September, and how Lo-Fi music snuck into your cookingHi there! On September 19th, Oktoberfest began in Germany, which literally means "October festival." So, naturally, it starts in September.It reminds me of Russia's October Revolution, year 1917, which by our calendar actually happened in November, because the tsars were still running on a different one.Two perfectly mismatched facts to sum up the disorientation…

it's weird that ai got too dangerous to keep advancing right around the time money got more expensive to borrow— dr. rich traditions, JD (@helldude.bsky.social) September 22, 2026 at 11:37 AMAt a time when everybody seems to be criticizing AI and particularly the large frontier LLM base models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, it is helpful to distinguish between the different schools of arguments.The group which initially dominated the coverage but which seems to be losing ground is the…

Work hard, study well, and eat and sleep plenty! That is the Turtle Hermit way! An apt quote from our beloved Master Roshi. If Dragon Ball has taught me anything, besides that screaming your lungs out during strenuous work does in fact make you stronger, it’s that rest is as important to one’s success as the hard work you build around it. Rest of course, is earned. There’s an obvious difference between someone who is bone idle and someone who rests because they’ve worked hard or is feeling…

Mad Max: Fury Road is a great movie. I was thinking of it again today in relation to our current economy.

I returned home from an afternoon swim the other day and saw a juvenile cat literally eating the heart out of a bird’s chest cavity. She growled. Cats will stiff-arm each other over dry cat food, but they growl and viciously defend real meat. The ravenous cat ate her meal on some pine straw under an old holly bush near my front door. I could not identify what species of bird the cat was devouring–an unusual failure for me because I’m very knowledgeable about local wildlife. The bird was white…

This morning while I was doing my morning routine of drinking my coffee. That routine is setting up the weather page for the current day. Sure, I could automate it, but it takes little time to do it by hand, and I’d have to edit the markdown file anyway to put in the summary. I actually do glance at it, and today I glanced at it out of curiosity to see what yesterday’s rain total was. Normally I would have looked at the Ambient app, but I had this page open, so I scrolled down to look. I…

Via Newspapers.comThis account of your basic friendly neighborhood monster appeared in the “Mexico Weekly Ledger,” December 13, 1883:MEXICO, Mo., December 8.--The neighborhood of Hopewell Church, near this city, is much excited over the appearance in the locality of a strange creature, which is thought by the credulous to be a ghost, and which is a puzzle at least to the most skeptical. The apparition is simply that of a lean monster man, between eight and ten feet in height, wearing a long…

I’m not gonna bother with the preamble about how I got to part six in this series1-5. You can read […]

Mexican long-nosed armadillo loping across a field (photo from Wikimedia) 23 September 2026 Three years ago, in April 2023, I wrote that Armadillos Are On Their Way to Pennsylvania. Since arriving in Texas in 1849 they’ve expanded their range north and east in the U.S. nearly ten times faster than the average rate expected for a mammal. In 2023 they were two states away in Indiana. Not anymore! The first documented naturally occurring armadillo was found as roadkill near Oxford, Ohio. video…

1:4 It’s like a curse… on the first matchday after the coach was fired, the guys (finally) scored 2 goals and beat Fortuna Köln at home to nil, only then to concede 3 goals at home against Duisburg within 15 minutes of the first half just 4 days later. OK, MSV is currently at the top of the standings and on a hot streak, but the ease with which they outplayed our defense was shocking. Like a hot knife through butter. Although the 1-3 goal just before halftime and the team’s determination early…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This video Matt Parker posted a couple of days ago really pissed me off: It’s cheating to say that a result arrived at through classical mechanics—in this case, that 12mv2 is the kinetic energy of a particle—is wrong because it’s only an approximation to relativistic physics. Of course that’s the case, and I swore at my phone when the “reveal” came. By the…

By Close ReaderOriental Mandarin LegendOSELevels 1-2 In order to thank the PC for killing the monsters in his territory, the Boold[sic] Baron invited the players to come to the bright Red castle he built on the Wild Eagle Mountain. This 28 page adventure presents seven-ish rooms in a scripted human sacrifice ceremony dungeon/scene/event. It has both EASL issues and is overly scripted. Disclaimer: I think this is a difficult review to write. I suspect strongly, based on the chinese characters in…

Lucky 13th Sept! A great day out. Maybe another last good day of Summer, although I think we must be into Autumn by now. I decided to visit Saltoun Big Wood again. This time I thought I'd risk the 113 bus and jogged up to Abbeyhill (rather than Carlton Terrace stop) because there is an electronic sign that says when the next bus will be along. (Yes I know there is an app but the built in redundancy of my iPhone can't download it.) Anyway the sign was temporarily fritzed and of no help. However…

This is a very though-provoking that applies much wider than just AI. In fact, its origins go back to long before AI was even around. It is applicable to whenever automation is involved with humans. The problem with humans is they get lazy, and they lose muscle memory over time, and it is even worse if they never gained the muscle memory in the first place. Examples given are a nuclear power station where, despite the possibility of fully automated processes, humans are deliberately kept in the…

Fuck it, stop speaker immediately so his annoying voice does not overwrite your 15 second buffer in you watches. If you are lucky and fast, you get like last 10 seconds of it, including your stoping request and his annoying answer to it. You read what he just said. Then you can command him to continue. It's recommended to clean your watch display with Apple polishing cloth. And obviously, charge the battery before attempting any space where there's a high risk of somebody talking. But what he…

Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines: As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens. Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside. You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph.…

I met with a friend yesterday and the conversation got to what the next hype might be after the current bubble pops. We live at the height of the “AI”-hype and bubble, the hype that took over from the short Metaverse hype which in turn came after the crypto bubble. And the main actors are often the same. The same folks who told us crypto was the future now tell us that “AI” is. Tech these days is built less around actual products but hype, less around building actually functional solutions but…

Hi, baby. I'm 18 weeks pregnant today. 16 weeks ago, you were a single cell with two nuclei, about to mix it together and make a new human. Look at you now: a tiny baby curled up in a foetal position. Sometimes it feels unreal. I can't grasp how lucky I am to have you in my belly. I think it will be easier when I'll really feel you move. For now, I'm always afraid that you might disappear, even though I feel my uterus stretching to give you room to grow. How does it feel? Are you comfortable?…

John Ottman is one of those filmmakers whose résumé is almost ridiculously varied. As a composer, he’s probably best known for movies like The Usual Suspects, X2: X-Men United, Superman Returns, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Nice Guys, and Valkyrie. Horror fans will also recognize his work from Apt Pupil, Lake Placid, Eight Legged Freaks, Gothika, Hide and Seek, and Orphan. He even directed Urban Legends: Final Cut. In 2019, Ottman won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on…

From 2020, a random photo I took of a 1931 garage on Lafayette Street: In case you’re wondering, it looked much the same in 1940, although better maintained: Garages, in general, are not great works of architecture. Most of them in Manhattan are very plain and built in the mid-1900s. Some have nice brick facades, and those tend to be converted stables built before 1910. This one is something slightly different: a garage that has a facade that isn’t just a featureless box but was never anything…

Don’t deny real risks, but don’t accept the AI industry’s mythology as the starting point for discussing risks. The useful question is what currant AI’s actually do, who controls them, and what infrastructure and power relationships we are building around them. AI is useful technology wrapped in a massive social, political and financial mythology. The #OMN is less interested in the usual argument between “AI will save humanity” and “AI will destroy humanity”. as both become noise in the current…

Online warriors feel righteous while exploiting the planet. They attack individuals like the guy vibe coding Arch Linux distribution from his laptop or random nobody for his presence on social platform X. That fight costs them nothing. It's a digital witch hunt that doesn't interrupt their Amazon deliveries or Netflix binges. Confronting the actual meat grinder, like the global war machine and the kids dying in African mines to build their Intel chips, would require them to stop consuming. To…

I am a better person without my phone. In fact, I would go so far as saying there is a negative correlation between the amount of time I spend on my phone and the likelihood you would want to be around me. Last Saturday it was hot outside. I was bored and in a state of malaise. So, I picked up my phone. I used my browser to check a few news sites. Then I "surfed" over to X to see how "people" felt about current events. As if I couldn't predict. I spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling.…

Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new? Has to be rock music based but with a twist. Well, that makes it easy then. “Renegades of Funk” by Rage Against the Machine Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Listen to Gordon McLean's Apple Music playlist View original post on Crucial Tracks Thanks for reading and keeping RSS alive. Visit my site for more.

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. Everything Flows: The Koln Concert — I can play the piano, badly, with a lot of practice. So when I hear talent like this I am utterly captivated. Great post, with the back story almost as good as the performance. Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) | Open Culture — Aware of this but not of the detail. Fascinating if scary. Prepare your “no” and…