Entropy Arbitrage Next Today marks the anniversary of the end of the Battle of Cap-Français, where (oversimplifying) the French occupiers, trying to stop the Haitian Revolution, made the mistake of fighting each other and recruiting slaves for the front lines with the predictable results of giving everybody the opportunity to rise up against the government. Over in Europe, Croatia celebrates Anti-Fascist Day, celebrating their World War II uprising against the Axis occupiers. And with that, on…

McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June – Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour…

In Saint-Omer in France there was a Benedictine abbey called the Abbey of St. Bertin, founded in 638 and existing right up to the late 18th century. It was closed during the French Revolution, ordered demolished in 1830 (except for the tower), and then damaged due to World War II.A record of several decades was found in the abbey. It is not assumed that it was written in the abbey. The current hypothesis is that the record was made in the court of Louis the Pious and continued during the reign…

(All references in this blog post can be found in the main article the post is about which is here.)Recall that \(R(a,b)\) is the least \(n\) so that, for all 2-colorings of the edges of \(K_n\), there is either a RED \(a\)-clique or a BLUE \(b\)-clique.\(R(k,k)\) has been well studied and is often called \(R(k)\).However, today we are concerned with \(R(a,k)\) \(a\) is fixed and \(k\) goes to infinity.1) In 1995 Jeong Han Kim showed \(R(3,k)\) is asy \(\Theta(\frac{k^2}{\log k})\). At the…

× On May 21, Paul Krugman wrapped up a long argument that the European continent isn’t really in economic decline. With one exception: Europe, he writes, “can’t be sure that it will always have access to new technologies developed and produced in the other superpowers,” and “the risk of being cut off from strategically important technologies, once minimal, is now very real.” Twenty-two days later a US directive switched off a frontier AI model for every non-American (well technically -…

Thank you to my local paper, the Lexington News-Gazette, for inviting me to write a monthly guest column this summer. My first commentary appeared last Wednesday and focused on Juneteenth. My small town hosted another wonderful celebration on Friday. I can’t wait for next year’s — and what I hope is a massively better political landscape. More on that below: June 19 is Juneteenth National Independence Day, America’s federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery. Though the Emancipation…

"Owensboro Messenger," January 29, 1911, via Newspapers.comEarly in 1910, American newspapers breathlessly carried the story of what appeared to be a particularly shocking double homicide. This account comes from the "Republican News Item" for January 6:The mystery of the death of Miss Grace Elosser, of Cumberland, Md., and Charles E. Twigg, of Keyser, W. Va. her fiance, appears as deep as it did shortly after the bodies of the couple were found on the settee in the parlor of the Elosser…

Over the years, I've worked for organisations with various levels of risk tolerance for business travellers. Some have been (rightly) paranoid and others have been (wrongly) placid about the threats their employees face. The fact is, individuals are often targeted for espionage, blackmail, or other state-sponsored attacks. Here's a list of some of the different advice I've received, roughly sorted into levels of suitability. Start at the top and work your way down until you reach a suitable…

The Apollo 14 Lunar Module, with its 7° tilt apparent in the picture. The onboard astronauts looked out the module’s window often to ensure it was not tipping over. Image: NASA / David HarlandFor NASA to safely land 12 astronauts on the Moon with the Apollo missions, a lot had to go right. But before it could even attempt Apollo, the agency needed to know what our Moon is like up close. Worrying about the basic nature of the lunar surface and soil may sound mundane now but it was a big unknown…

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, I’m going to take a detour from the normal football fare, to talk about former MLB Centre Fielder Glenn Burke.If you know why I’ve come to talk about Glenn Burke today, then you know, but please keep that information to yourself for the next little while, not to ruin it for everybody else.Writing this article took a lot out of me. Thank you for being here!There are several disclaimers that I would like to give before we begin, both…

The Kate Rays is Kim Floyd’s current project. You can find the music she makes with Tony Chance on bass and Mark Hubbard on drums on Bandcamp. I recommend it. But I discovered some tracks on Soundcloud that predate The Kate Rays and that got me curious. Kim who usually sings and plays guitar is now based in Jacksonville, Florida. I believe at some point she was in New York City. I wonder where she was in 1997. The tracks from her project Tintern Abby date from that year. There are three songs…

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend;’ it may have started as a means to annoy Margaret Thatcher, the tabloid press and conservative society by banding together with a group equally reviled by the British Establishment, but the LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) assistance and fundraising society formed a genuine bond with the Welsh […]

In most big stories, there are one or two pieces of absolutely essential context that get reported in major outlets but which no one seems to pay much attention to.David Goldman reporting for CNN: Today, neighboring Cushing is the hub of America’s energy market. It literally provides the oil plumbing for the United States. It’s where America’s benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is priced and warehoused. From there, it’s piped to refineries around the country. In normal times, Cushing stores…

Via my parents. Found in my suit pocket after resting there for nine years.

Rain starts at first light. A soggy dawn chorus soon subsides, leaving only the new Carolina wren with his exotic accent and enthusiasm. As the rain thickens, he too falls silent.

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Intelligent Life, 6/22/26 Everything I’ve learned about all the characters in Intelligent Life has been against my will. I wasn’t thrilled when I realized I instantly recognized this blond guy as “Barry,” the stereotypical jock used as a punching bag by the nerd characters in…

Normally on Fathers Day, dad and I would have met up on the riverbank somewhere before sun rise and then spent the morning fishing and chatting together. Catching a fish was never important, just being there together. Obviously this year that wasn't to be, he definitely wouldn't have wanted me to sit around moping though, he would have wanted me to go and get after those tench again, so that's what I did. I made sure to spend some time reminiscing about the good times we spent together and even…

Note: I am, of course, going to include my books in this. I skipped a few I don't have suggestions for. Character smells like fresh cut grass Song Lyrics: Oh hello, both I Belong to You and Presented with Love would work for this. I Hate Everyone But You: Zomromcom by Olivia Dade National Park: Hello again, I Belong to You fits here as well, with Rock Creek Park. Of Kings and Queens also mentions the Mall. Heatwave: Hot Earl Summer by Erica Ridley Dual Timeline: Cosmic Love at the Multiverse…

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to see beyond our biases — if we can keep open minds. Yet I’ve grown to understand that not all knowledge worth possessing can come from a book, an experiment or a Google search. Science is…

We paid for our very overgrown hedges to be cut back and shaped. It's not cheap, but the garden instantly looks smarter. It also means I can drive onto the street without risking scratches from bush talons. I then found a pigeon chick in the back garden, just out of reach of next door's little dogs that were barking and scrambling furiously through the chain-link fence. I moved it to safety on the other side of the garden. A nest must have been disturbed by the trimming and the chick fell out.…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

Sometimes, all we have are bad and worse options. The only way is through.

Frozen food company Amy’s Kitchen issued a public statement this week clarifying that the cooking instructions printed on the back of its popular bean and cheese burritos are completely accurate, putting an end to years of consumer speculation.“We get a lot of emails asking if there was a printing error on the packaging,” said Amy’s quality assurance director Beau Rito. “So let me be clear right here. It is 60 seconds in a microwave, then flip, then another 60 seconds. In a toaster oven, it…

In this week’s issue of The Savvy Diabetic: Want to Participate in Hill Day from Home? Here’s how! GLP-1s/Semaglutide Benefits 17 June 2026 Diabetes Patients on Semaglutide Had Fewer Fractures Semaglutide tied to quality of life improvements vs. placebo in type 2 diabetes, CKD Lower Risk Of Death, Clots Among Autoimmune Patients Taking GLP-1 Drugs GLP-1s may nearly halve risk for hepatic complications in MASLD, type 2 diabetes Why fermented foods are so good for your gut, and 5 ways to eat more…

A centenary conversation celebrating a great conductor and an outstanding Mahlerian The conductor Klaus Tennstedt was born on June 6, 1926. After his arrival from East Germany to the West, he held chief conductor posts with the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg (1979-81), and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1983-87), with whom he recorded extensively, including a Mahler symphony cycle (of which No 8 won a Gramophone Award back in 1987). To mark the anniversary Warner Classics has issued…

Sometimes, very old buildings gain glamor as they age. Another of our pre-Revolution projects with John G. Waite Associates, Architects is the Roslyn Grist Mill, an industrial building from the early eighteenth century that has somehow become glamorous over time. 1919 A grist mill grinds grain, and needs a source of power to turn its wheels. At the town of Roslyn, on Long Island, there’s a stream- and spring-fed pond south of the mill (and south of the original line of the road that used to be…

Note: Commentary on Nebel, A., Kling, A., Willamowski, R., & Schell, T. (2024). Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 28, 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13442 What the World3 recalibration proves, and the one thing it cannot Nebel, Kling, Willamowski and Schell did something the Limits to Growth literature had talked about for fifty years but never quite carried out: they let a computer search the parameter space. Where Turner and…

A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence. From one perspective, this is correct. Trained on all human language, the LLMs distilled billions of word sequences so that they can imitate authentic-sounding strings of words that have never been said before. These sentences sound plausible because, based on training on millions of average human texts, the models were predicting what an average human might say next.…

How did Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding (1951)? Discover the rotating room, strapped cameraman, and brilliant engineering behind one of Hollywood's greatest illusions.

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