I came to Stanford University in 1981. After being at Stanford for five years, a new Dean of the Graduate School of Education (GSE) asked me to serve as his Associate Dean. Having been a superintendent for seven years prior to coming to Stanford and tasting the privileged life of a full professor, I had no inclination to return to being an administrator whose influence on tenured colleagues, was at best, limited, and at worst, non-existent. The Dean, however, wanted me bad enough that he and I…

Okay, this one is a bit hard to explain to people who aren't from Germany. Long story short: There was a beached whale, people somehow thought it could be saved even though experts said there was no point, and the poor animal was going to die anyway. This went on for weeks, with one rescue mission after another, and at some point the whale was freed, only to be found dead a couple of days later. All of this was accompanied by people on social media talking about how they could spiritually…

This photo was taken on the same evening as yesterday’s post, looking in the opposite direction, where a fullish moon had risen.

I’m not a horror person.But I enjoyed Sunday afternoon Godzilla flicks as childhood revenge fantasies. Little boy wrecks fat man’s city. No clue it was other people’s psychodrama.My favorite was “All Monsters Attack.” That’s the one where a latchkey kid and his Mini-daikaiju-Me battle bullies and low-effort parenting. Wait … a mysterious island … a toy-dangling neighbor … suspiciously timed narcolepsy^[We’re talking Ged from Earthsea levels.]… were those masks in the Epstein files‽ That kid…

And we're home. Smashed my root canal tooth eating ice-cream, of all things.68 words · 1 image

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.ChatGPT Is Building Detailed Psychological Profiles of Its UsersIt probably shouldn’t be a surprise that chatbots like ChatGPT are profiling their users. Still, there are some surprising numbers here:“A staggering 96 percent of memories were created unilaterally by the chatbot, according to the study, meaning that the users had…

From Mr. Shearsmith's new book, Things I Took From the Dark: As a child, there were a few horror books that become staples for me, and, as it turns out, so many of the people who became my friends in later life also had them. In case you want to seek them out and turn into me, they were (in no particular order): A Pictorial History of Horror Movies by Denis Gifford Usbourne's The World of the Unknown: Ghosts by Christopher Maynard Horror Films by Alan Frank Usbourne Guide to the Supernatural…

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from “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day” I was just floored by 9 words from a 90 year old poem. I’ve yet to be struck equivalently by machine-generated words. The post “…that time is the fire in which we all burn” – Delmore Schwartz appeared first on Garrick van Buren.

MuGlobe “Explore World Music on an Interactive Globe” Site description: Discover music by place. Explore genres, artists and musical traditions on MuGlobe’s interactive world map, listen to recordings and read their stories. From the site's creator, Ed Brakus: You move around the globe and wherever you land it creates a virtual radio station for that place and streams local music. It uses a map of musical genres and musical regions. Click on the (i) info buttons to see detailed wiki articles…

I bought the book Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, ages ago when I was still living in Cardiff, around 2010, but somehow I never got around to reading it until now. It’s an intriguing book, written by an Irishman about a Dutchman who spends his life between London and New York, and who loves cricket. I don’t know why I put off reading it for so long, but I definitely recommend it. It’s full of vivid descriptions of places and acutely observed people. The jacket blurb for this novel does give the…

By J.E. Anckorn / October 30, 2026 A Cold Night’s Death Directed by Jerrold Freedman ABC (1973) When their predecessor Dr. Vogel is found frozen to death in an unlocked room of the Tower Mountain research station, scientists Robert Jones (Robert Culp) and Frank Enari (Eli Wallach) are dispatched to take over the research. Oh, and they have a chimp with them. This will become increasingly important in what is a movie of two deliciously bizarre halves. We start off with an air of brooding…

At this point, I should just rename the blog The Plague Diaries and bitch incessantly about how shitty I feel. An urgent care visit confirmed Influenza A for the men of the house. The woman remains pristine and unaffected. She says it’s because of her pure Persian blood. We mutts are more susceptible to these pedestrian degradations. I’m ignoring work today. Everyone knows I’m unwell, so I think I can get away with it. I’ve downloaded a few movies. Subtitles on so we can know what’s going on…

I started this sometime yesterday evening and I think we're over fifteen hours at this point. I suspect I chose too many iterations, given the limited number of colors. (15 - technically 16 but the two grays are identical.) It's at the point where it's kind of hard to tell if it's done. I've forgotten if it beeps or something, and I might not hear it anyway. So I take a picture with my phone and then compare it with what's on the screen when I check back later. We're getting close. ✍️ Reply by…

If I shared this post with you, I am not asking you to be vegan. There are uncountable injustices in the world, and it is impossible to care about all of them. A lot of what people believe in is based on feelings and socialisation rather than reasoning. Eating meat and consuming other animal products is quite common and a huge part of life for many people, so it never becomes necessary for anyone to scrutinise it. My personal morality is based around the principles of fairness and avoiding…

If I shared this post with you, I am not asking you to be vegan. There are uncountable injustices in the world, and it is impossible to care about all of them. A lot of what people believe in is based on feelings and socialisation rather than reasoning. Eating meat and consuming other animal products is quite common and a huge part of life for many people, so it never becomes necessary for anyone to scrutinise it. My personal morality is based around the principles of fairness and avoiding…

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Back in August I wrote that Apple's privacy is priced, not principled. The argument was that how hard Apple fights a government depends on how much that government's market is worth. China gets the full treatment: new legal entities, new key custody, a whole restructure. That's because China brought in $20.5 billion in a single quarter this year. Smaller markets don't get that. Well. Here's a smaller market. Not smaller on the map, obviously.…

This post almost killed me.I said, "I know how to make the Stone Isles setting fun to read! I'll make Dark Souls-esque armor sets." That's how you share lore without homework, after all.I wrote one or two. Easy, I thought. Then I sketched the outline of what I wanted to cover, and the rest were like pulling teeth. Ah well! I learned a lot about different types of hats.The gimmick here is that in certain towns or on certain isles, you can purchase different pieces of fine raiment. If you collect…

Margin: my own Markdown editor | Matthew Lang Dozens of Markdown editors could serve my purpose. Then I thought, “What if I tried to build my own?” Building something for yourself, that might be useful to others. What we believe in.

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Boundary Break is a YouTube channel whose creator often explores games the way they are not meant to be seen – by detaching the camera and freely moving it around. There are 250+ videos and I haven’t seen many of them, but those I have seen are interesting. Here’s one for Grand Theft Auto IV: Here’s one for Portal 2: And here’s a really fun one – game console startup animations, a lot of which are in true…

I never liked racing "sims" like Gran Turismo. So realistic! You can bounce off the guardrails like in a pinball. Grid on the other hand was a fantastic "arcade" racer with a brilliant damage model where mistakes were punished. And the camera work! And music. Boy, that was such a treat! Nostalgia stroke me fiercely and I needed to play that game in some form. Among a sea of weird remakes, there simply wasn't a platform you could play the proper original Racedriver: Grid on, other than…

Not that any of you will ever need to know this, but when you're working with a vendor on a technical support issue, you must keep all correspondence in the same thread. I'm inclined to just dash off a quick email with a question, and the humans have no context window to work with. Both ends get frustrated. ✍️ Reply by email Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:23 Friday, 30 October 2026

As blogged by Unsung, an unnerving glitch in the PS1 Japanese-only game Boku No Natsuyasumi allowed players to progress beyond the limited time period scope of the “peaceful, month-long vacation gameplay”, and… That had consequences that are not hard to imagine in a game written in a 1990s programming environment: both game data and visual assets were now being interpreted from places in memory that were not prepared for this use. Good write-up capturing the allure of the game’s unlock-able,…

tch-tch - HOT OFF THE PRESS - tkt-tch-tch ⁂ A new dispatch from the Studio: From late summer to the weather turning to autumn, we've been busy these last couple of weeks and have not one, but two new projects. ototoi — the day before yesterday in Japanese — is an open-source, self-hosted checkin and lifelogging web app. We've been testing it for the last two months here at the studio, and have thoroughly enjoyed the nostalgia of early 2010s checkin apps like Foursquare or Gowalla. Given ototoi…

I just stumbled across cozywww.com which lets you build a cute little house. I have no idea how it all works but so far it’s fun.

I read about Sir Patrick Stewart's passing around 730am. This is actually the first celebrity death that I tear up. I normally do not pay any attention to celebrity. My all-time favourite TV series is Star Trek: TNG. I have the privilege to complete the series when I was studying in Australia. I absolutely love how he played Captain Jean-Luc Picard. He is a leader who cares and articulate himself well. He gave me hope that in a world filled with deceit and cruelty, we can still hold-on to our…

It‘s tempting to instinctively reach for databases, proprietary apps or complex SaaS tools when starting new projects, but it‘s worth remembering that there is an incredibly flexible set of tools baked right into the OS. What's more is that they have been tried and tested over many years. That's not to say that they should be used for everything, but they are a great foundation to start building, and often compliment other more complex tools. They are a great way to bootstrap your own custom…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 199-202: Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime…

My mother took a few courses at the University of Delaware when I was eight. I have one clear memory of it. She is sitting on the floor of our living room with books open around her, filling a spiral-bound notebook with writing. I don’t remember our conversation word for word. But I have always remembered the core of what she told me, which is that writing down what you are learning makes it stick. At the time, this made all the sense in the world to me. You can read something and remember some…

“You’re lucky if your life is like a story, because then you can just watch movies or read books and find out how to live.” Beneath a blurry photograph of some spindly trees and tall grass, the story begins. “A picture lit up in my mind’s eye.Years ago, so many that it felt like someone else’s life, I stood in the yard behind my parent’s house, looking at the sky. At the air itself, I think. Its invisible currents, its white glare.” This is Samuel Emmer, the narrator, main character, and…