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…

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…

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.

Erwin M. Schmidt reached out to point me to a new study of the survival rates of on-screen geologists in movies titled “Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel”.Four geologists at the University of Gothenburg spent more than a decade keeping a list of every film they could find that featured a geologist. Across the 141 movies they tracked, the on-screen geologist died 34% of the time. Usually quite early, and often moments after explaining that the volcano is about to go off. Erwin asked…

Daily Drawing 904

📍 ANA LOUNGE As is tradition. BRB, going to Aus Location: Tokyo, Tokyo Prefecture, JapanComment by email

I have had a hardware project in the making for a while now. It's been moving along slowly; I only need to finish the programming part, but I rarely feel like doing it. Because of that, I'm extremely susceptible to distractions. So I saw a mechanical counter in a video. It's not much more than four digits and a button you can use to increment the number. And a knob to zero the whole thing out. A bit later, I ran into a cute little LCD panel. It can show three digits and, given its dimensions,…

Security is ultimately a political problem that may have technical solutions. It's because we can always risk it and hope for the best. Observe a climber, solving the technical problem of ascending after a political decision of taking this route.

Some things are looking up for me. I can see my toes again when I look straight down. Over 1/2 of the swelling and fluid build up is gone. I still think the fluid build up is what is causing my pain when coughing. As my chest expands to cough the fluid is putting pressure on my chest cavity. The swelling and fluid build up I had with my hip operation was mostly gone within 7-9 days. It ain't happening as quick north of that.still squareThere is a wee bit of gap at the front but I'm not going to…

Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath. Blackout is a 15 page module for Mothership by Martin Orchard with art by Zach Hazard. In it you venture deep into an industrial colony to restore its power supply; but you’re not the first team to…

Keep an eye on Move Tab to Another Window – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US) as I just submitted this extension which... moves tabs to other windows! Works well with Window Titler #projects #firefox

Anyone who’s ever shopped at Aldi is well familiar with what those of us in Australia refer to as the isle of shame, where the weekly specials are placed. You’d expect a supermarket to stock food, sundries, or maybe even kitchen accessories, but Aldi regularly places everything there from toys and linen, to power tools and entire washing machines. You’ll go to buy some simple ingredients for a salad, and leave with two beach towels, a light-water reactor, and a Commodore 64. What is it with…

Huge milestone. We have finished getting the acres of wood on the walls of the main house. Although we still have the front porch to do it’s not water tight yet so we may leave it until later. So that frees D up from months of wax on wax off to start decorating outside. She’s starting on the cabin and is painting the first coat of the chassis in matt black.

You can’t make this up! I was checking out a documentary called The Lynchpin of Bensonhurst.[1] It’s a long story why, but I was brought up in that neighborhood. It was the story of Dominick Santamaria aka Dominick Montiglio, an important member of the Gambino crime family who was brought up by his uncle Nino Gaggi. Nino was arguably the most notorious capo of the Gambino family. I only needed to check out something in the first few minutes, but something caught my eye and that impelled me to…

A tower crane reaches into the sky in Downtown Celina, Texas. The post Under the Towering Crane appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of Custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the Miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be Miraculous. [...] Am I to view the Stupendous with stupid indifference, because I have seen it twice, or two hundred, or two million times? Some notes on Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle's "Satirical Extravaganza on Things in General:"1 I loved it and eagerly recommend it to anyone who might be on the fence. I…

I’m convinced that AI will not destroy our need for personal connection, humanity, stories, and expression. The reason I’m so convinced of that is because of one word. Culture. When people talk about AI, they underestimate the power of culture. As in common values and thinking. The slow, invisible force that decides what actually sticks in our lives and what doesn’t. Here’s what most people miss. When something new arrives, it has to pass through culture before it changes anything. And culture…

Yesterday I found out about a site called intheweights.com , which reveals which people are “stored” in the weights of large language models. Those “weights” are billions of numerical values by which these AI models encode their knowledge. If you show up in them, the model considered you relevant enough during training to recall without tools such as web search. The site queries several models to figure out who a specific person is, combines the results, and assigns a strength score. According…

Monday 7 September 2026 6.30pm Crazy Coqs, Brasserie Zedel Comparing Notes brings stars of the West End and Broadway to Crazy Coqs, Live at Zedel. In a lively and informal mix of performance and conversation host Edward Seckerson will be getting up close and personal with these musical theatre luminaries and emerging stars, exploring the stories behind the songs and the personalities behind the artistry. French-born performer Lily Kerhoas is recognised as one of contemporary musical theatre’s…

"Wonder Woman" by John Legend Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song would you use to describe your current relationship? - Wonder Woman by John Legend As if there was another possibility, LOL. View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

After reading Flamed’s post, I took James’ quiz too about your character as a member of the blogging community. Here are my results: You are a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. You are also a Culture maker You love to help push the blogging community forward by starting discussions, encouraging thought, and sharing what's on your mind. Other archetypes Explorer To you, the…

I’ve been a GrapheneOS user for years now. Back in 2022 I switched away from /e/OS on a Samsung Galaxy S10 to a Google Pixel 6a that I had bought, because at the time it happened to be one of the cheapest devices on the short list of officially supported Pixels. However, my history with Google phones goes way past the 6a and ever since I got my first Nexus, every single piece of Google (branded and manufactured) hardware that has passed through my hands has eventually broken on a hardware…

I’ve been moving our CI off GitHub-hosted runners onto our own arm64 hardware. The plan was straightforward: a pool of ephemeral runners on a dedicated CI box, and each test shard spins up its own MySQL, Redis, and ClickHouse as service containers, all under rootless Docker.

Nice backpack! Yesterday we saw an ad for a free spot in a shared living community. It was a spot for a tiny house in a big land shared with 10 other families. We applied right away but unfortunately they already had found someone. I lived in a tiny house village once in the past and I miss it deeply. I loved being able to connect with my neighbors at the shared kitchen. This lost opportunity made my heart sink. I'm unemployed and somehow disabled at the moment, I'm feeling a bit lonely. I…

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 151-153: Up to that point, developments resembled those of previous Cossack uprisings, but Khmelnytsky changed the familiar pattern. Before marching northward, capturing towns, and confronting the commonwealth army, he went south in search of allies. In a dramatic reversal of established steppe politics, he offered the Crimean khan his friendship and an opportunity. The cautious khan allowed his…

There were two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT…to argue against itself. – Rob Freund My friend Chester Brown, the well-known comic book artist, plays Merlin in this video from Sook-Yin Lee‘s new album. The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker and Dan Savage; IncarcerNation; The Onion; Mike Masnick; Ryan Marino; and IncarcerNation again (x2). R.I.P. Joe Negri and Gene Shalit. “Never” really does mean “never”. The best satire cleaves close to the truth. Another great…

Percy Montgomery "Monte" Barrett was an American author, newspaperman and cartoon writer from Mitchell, Indiana, who co-created with artist Frank Ellis the original "spunky girl reporter" character, Jane Arden – cited as the prototype for similar characters like Lois Lane. More importantly than having co-created an internationally syndicated daily comic strip, Barrett had a brief stint as a mystery novelist during the early 1930s.Barrett wrote three novels, The Pelham Murder Case (1930), Murder…

Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. The Ford Motor Company releases a slick whitepaper making the alarming claim that they’re concerned their popular F-150 pickup trucks might soon spontaneously burst into flames. The report features a fancy animated graphic depicting a line of vehicles catching on fire, one after another, and concludes by acknowledging that this “possible future” would be bad, but that there’s nothing they can do about the issue so long as “less cautious” automobile…

Rajasaurus narmadensisIn the humid, fern-thick forests of Late Cretaceous India — about 67 million years ago — a flash of red moves between the tree trunks.Think oxidized iron and dried blood — deep crimson-orange broken by pale white striping and bold black bands along the flanks and tail. In dappled forest light, those stripes would fracture the animal’s outline, a trick modern tigers use