The world is large and the writer is small. We become large when we write the truth. The world is large and the photographer is small.We become large when we photograph the truth. Often, I don’t know what I’m sayin’.Yet, often I know what I’m feelin’. Our African youth will be large one day. Asé Peace, Blessings & Governance,"Guided by the Ancestors" Reply by email

This post will show how a graphic programmer’s hack could lead to a rigorous definition of the projective plane. As mentioned in the previous post, we start by adding some “points at infinity” to Euclidean plane to take care of exceptional situations. For example, instead of saying most pairs of lines intersect at a single point but some don’t intersect at all, you could say all pairs of lines intersect at a point, but for some pairs of lines, namely parallel lines, that intersection point is…

It’s interesting that #mainstreaming tech makes it easy to use you, while alternative tech makes it hard to use freedom. One is built for control – and works very well at it. The other is built for freedom – but often works badly at delivering it. That’s the real #techshit problem we face, we need to make freedom easier to use than control. The latest #fashionista panic about AI scraping is exposing a real problem with how we understand and defend the #openweb. Faced with aggressive commercial…

Milestone: this week I called a freeze on new Hanami work. From here we’re focused on cutting down our outstanding items and then switching to release prep. I cut down a few items myself: three little pigs things to finish our Hanami CLI changes for compatibility with Dry CLI. This CLI is just right. After some great feedback from Michael, I made a few adjustments to Dry Logger’s expanded log filtering (like making Regexp filters case insensitive by default, for consistency with string…

The internet can swamp the best of intentions. When you want to know how to do something, there’s nothing like 274 million Google hits to make you think that you’re never going to find the time. And now AI has ‘entered the chat’. This technology is the most powerful frontend to the library of everything there is to know about anything that we’ve ever seen. The only snag is the librarian can’t entirely be trusted, and they never seem to stop talking… However you try to drink from it, this fire…

Be More Ambitious I am one of the laziest people I know. I don’t really want much in life. I would be so much happier just rotting on the couch and watching TV all day. Okay, I am joking about that (I think). I am lazy, and I don’t really wake up wanting anything, but looking back I have almost always been up to some shenanigans. Again, not because I want anything in particular or because I want to execute and achieve my grand vision, but because doing something is better than doing nothing. A…

I'm not gonna go into why Spotify is bad. I assume if you're reading this you are vaguely aware that Spotify is bad and feel a bit guilty for using it anyway. It's convenient. It's what you're used to. It's nice to have whatever music you wanna listen to just there, across all your devices. (ok ok, let's have a sidebar on why they're bad. They bad because you pay them money or listen to ads, and then they take that money and they pay it to their founder (who is evil), or to the other…

Administrators at Wichita State University (WSU) in Kansas have decided that students at the university should no longer be able to major in philosophy. Despite critical and creative thinking and other distinctly humanistic skills remaining as important as ever, despite Forbes finding that “Grads who majored in the social sciences and humanities are proving to be resilient in today’s job market because they gained skills that can be used across multiple industries,” and despite The New York…

After finally planning a trip to London, everything booked, an itinerary planned, and new gear bought, it was time to make the trip a reality. On Tuesday night, I drove down to family in Warwickshire, dropping off Jeff and Betty in their care, while a neighbour fed Rodger. The next morning, we headed to the station in Leamington Spa to catch the train to London Marylebone. The platform was packed, and so too was the train – standing room only. Day One The Chiltern Railways train arrived in…

What song makes you feel braggadocious? Well I had to look it up but there was one song that instantly popped into mind. Braggadocious makes me think of swagger, of that simian stroll (thanks Guy Garvey), of a slightly cocky attitude that says, yeah, this is who I am, what of it? I won’t change for you, and you can’t make me but feel free to try. And what band arrived, with a debut album that set out a new wave of rock music, and the word swagger sums up this track for me. I can’t help but get…

Cars (test driving, buying and selling). Gearing up for the upstairs revamp (carpets, bedroom furniture). Mice in the loft (now minus 3). Everest Trek Get Together No. 24 in Pembrokeshire (Glorious). St Brides Bay & Pen-y-Cwm Beach, Pembrokeshire Coast Path, Solva to Newgale To Gravells at Grafton on Tuesday morning to test drive a Renault 5 E-Tech. Although we both love love love the look of the car from the outside, the price (second hand are only a couple of grand cheaper than brand new) and…

As we listened to Tom Rush interpreting Jackson Browne’s “These Days” on Sunday night, it was impossible not to reflect that here was an 85-year-old man singing a song written in 1964 by 16-year-old. All time is eternally present, as the poet wrote. Rush recorded “These Days” in 1970. He wasn’t the first, but Browne was among the songwriters whose work he promoted by placing their songs on his albums when they were still little-known. Others were James Taylor, who saw him as a mentor, and Joni…

Daily Drawing 1038

ANAKIN SKYWALKER & Asajj Ventress The Vintage Collection 2026 SDCC / Hasbro Pulse Exclusive Item No.: No. G2768 Manufacturer: Hasbro Number: n/a Includes: Hand, lightsaber, hilt, and Asajj's stuff Action Feature: Swappable hand Retail: $51.99 Availability: July 2026 Appearances: Clone Wars Bio: Through the caves of Yavin 4, Padawan Anakin Skywalker takes on Sith assassin Asajj Ventress - and his rage leads him closer to the dark side. (Taken from the box packaging.) Image: Adam's photo lab.…

My birthday got quieter and smaller after Grace died, and quieter still after Yellowbird’s recent passing. But Chekhov still insisted on getting me a cake and a gift, and he and Jae and I had pizza and watched Bela Lugosi movies, and he stayed in his cottage overnight. Though I understand what he’s going through to some degree, he has it worse because in my case, Grace lived in my house and I could simply avoid dealing with her things; they’re still in her room or on her desk, and I don’t touch…

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is a fun one: “One-Word Reviews for the Last Ten Books I Read”. Let’s see if I can keep it that succinct! It won’t be quite the last ten books I read exactly because I’m writing this a couple of days in advance… Devil Inside, by Clay McLeod Chapman. “Transgressive.” Paper Girls, vol 1, by Brian K. Vaughan et al. “Confusing.” Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse. “Electrifying.” (Yes, I am pleased with myself, why do you ask?) The Nightmare Before…

3rd November 2026 Recording a constitutional and political moment * Today in the United States are the mid-term elections. Nobody can predict the results of these elections with any certainty, and the ‘margin-of-error’ of the polls mean that a wide range of results are possible. But by tomorrow, and so on, as the results become more clear, many people will take the results to affirm whatever political views they already have. * This post sets out some thoughts on the eve of the results, just to…

I got around in October, traveling around Indiana and even to central Florida. I feature a car here when it is/could be more than 20 model years old and I found it parked on the street or in a lot. Here now, the cars. 1961-64 Studebaker Champ. I found this truck parked within a block of the Studebaker Museum in South Bend, which probably makes you somewhat less surprised to see it here. If you think it’s weird that the box doesn’t line up with the cab, it’s because Studebaker couldn’t afford to…

In this post I look at the various thread-safety modes available for the venerable Lazy<T> type. This type has been around for a long time, but I recently saw some people (understandably) confused about the interactions between LazyThreadSafetyMode and exceptions, so this post aims to demonstrate how they work. What is Lazy<T> For? The Lazy<T> type has been around since .NET Framework 4.0 (and .NET Core 1.0). It provides is a way to describe how an object should be created, while deferring the…

1985 C&M Enterprises Platforms: Commodore 64, VIC-20, Apple II, Atari, Coleco ADAM, IBM PC, TI-99/4A A rather obscure adventure game now, which was recently highlighted on Reddit after an advert was discovered in the June 1985 issue of Boys’ Life magazine.Netozelius: The Forbidden Outpost was advertised by C&M Enterprises of Philadelphia as an advanced adventure game for enthusiasts, priced at just $4.00 plus 50 cents postage. Interestingly, the game was advertised for a huge range of machines,…

Here’s a round-up of mathematical news from this month we didn’t otherwise cover on the site. Owing to a spam email we got which included the sentence “Given your recent roundup on AI and mathematical proof, I thought this might be of interest”, followed by some AI generated maths we don’t care about, we probably won’t post about AI in the news as much; rest assured though, it’s probably still going on. The IMA Gold Medal 2026 has been awarded to Celia Hoyles and Chris Budd – or, more…

The best way to avoid AI mistakes is to run research the old-fashioned way; get out there and run research in the field and complete your own analysis of the findings. It may take a little longer, but truly valuable research is worth the effort. adactio.com/links/22825

I loved Rachel Burton’s The Strawberry House, which I read earlier this year, so I was looking forward to reading her new book, Nightingale Hall. Like the previous novel, this one features a house at the heart of the story. The book begins in 1969 with a party being held at Nightingale Hall, home of the baronet Sir Charles Nightingale, to celebrate the moon landing. During the evening, Sir Charles unveils a special painting, Moonlight on Nightingale, which he had commissioned from the artist…

While a few things about “Haven Social” have been promised to be better than your typical proprietary social media app (like the revocable discovery that, even better, you can and should turn off entirely), it is still a silo site. It’s a proprietary and commercial web forum. I think joining up is a bad idea. I didn’t like Cohost either but this does a lot of things even worse than Cohost did when it comes to governance. I’ve said before that I think this kind of product should be illegal—while…

1958 SF/horror, dir. Kurt Neumann, Al (David) Hedison, Patricia Owens: IMDb. Hélène loved her husband. So why did she kill him in a hydraulic press?

It seems astonishing to me now that only a fortnight has passed since I climbed to the roof of Maps Mania Tower and proclaimed to the world that the Age of the Pixel Map had begun. And yet here I stand before you today, bearing the sad news of its demise and announcing, with no little ceremony, that The Era of the Voxel Map Has Arrived.Two weeks ago, I observed that "One notable limitation shared by most of these pixelated maps is their single, fixed perspective." My proposed solution was to…

In which there may or may not be a bit of subterfuge… Photo from the Author’s personal archives, details to follow. Click here to read this story from the beginning… Tupper Ware hit a button on her phone and slipped it into one of her designer, gin-scented pockets, then turned to her friend, Plexi Glass, and her lover, Tinted Glass. “Okay, here’s the deal. Apparently, the only way we can get a software update for Tinted’s undead status is to go find some woman named Granny Mae in Gravy Bucket,…

Quick update: There’s a new report out that I co-wrote alongside Leonie Dorn, Adriana Groh, Amanda Kraley, Paul Sharratt and Powen Shiah: Sovereign Tech Agency: From Feasibility to Implementation. Strengthening Open Digital Infrastructure for Security, Innovation, and Digital Sovereignty. It’s a look back at the work the Sovereign Tech Agency has achieved over the last 5 years, key insights, as well as an outlook for the near future. You can get it in English here:Sovereign Tech Agency: From…

This is the story of three women, each of whom claimed the title of Countess von Blücher. You will need a scorecard to keep track of the three women, so just remember this simple mnemonic:Countess von Blücher #1 had a legitimate claim to the title.Countess von Blücher #2 apparently had no claim to anything, but that wasn’t her fault.Countess von Blücher #3 was a poseur, a procurer and a pestilence in Cincinnati.Our story begins with a real and authentic German general, one Gebhard Leberecht von…

AI has made it much easier to get an interface on screen. I can ask for a component, a prototype or a handful of directions, and have something tangible to react to before I would have finished setting up a file a few years ago. I like that. It removes plenty of tedious work, and it gives us more chances to explore an idea before committing to it. It also makes me pay more attention to the judgement around the work. I still need to understand the problem, decide whether an idea fits the product…