Lions, leopards, hyenas and rhinoceroses once roamed the European landscape with ancient humans, and deep in a limestone cave, artists painted these animals with exquisite detail and beauty. On my recent visit to safari camps in South Africa, I saw these same animals in their bush environment, and it is fascinating to know that tens of thousands of years ago, they also wandered over lands that are now far to the north. A Window on the Past Inset into a limestone cliff in southeastern France,…

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo is such an interesting book. It's book two in a trilogy, and it feels like a book two, like an Empire Strikes Back where the heroes are on the back foot and learning and growing in their own power. The main character, Alex, faces a lot of setbacks and roadblocks while attempting to achieve this book's goal, and she suffers a lot of self-doubt and personal despair; she still fights through it all, never truly giving up. It was especially interesting to read because it…

The Milwaukee Brewers have done it, they have won the World Series! The trophy comes home to Milwaukee for the first time in the teams history. ✉️ Reply by Email

Night Maps is an exhibition “exploring the visual and intellectual history and the real-world consequences of mapping the night sky” at the Warburg Institute in London. Many of these objects are on public display for… More

29 Tusk | INDEX | 31 Flex Self-imposed constraint: Use the letters of the prompt word inside a 2-inch square to illustrate its meaning. Hongdian Black Forest fountain pen, EF, black ink on 120 gsm paper.

I read a post this morning: Leaving BearBlog | Yunzi's Blog This isn't the first such post I've read before. There have been a few. But the shared points are usually these: They feel attacked by meta reply posts They think their blog has been shadow banned (or it has been) And therefore they are upset with censorship on the platform I've definitely seen some of the back-and-forth posts that sometimes get heated, but I don't feel that anybody has piled onto someone else. I can't speak to the…

And the Dukes of Chaos raised up the least among their servants and they were the most plentiful of their servants and the formless among many and riven of all nature. This scroll describes, in brief, the Elder Brood – a myriad horde of “creatures born of chaos” who are the “least among the servitors of the Galchutt”. Names like akop, bulugon, nyogoth, obaan, and the like are listed. But the scroll then settles into a particular subset of lore describing one creature from amongst the Elder…

Cat about to catch a rodent. (Photo by Alexa from Pixabay) Introduction One of the most common things that we hear these days is that we shouldn’t be concerned about AI because it is “just a tool”. My initial reaction to that statement is: it doesn’t fit what I think of as a tool, especially the concept of a tool as defined in the Unix paradigm. But still, I am thinking, maybe there is something to the concept of AI being a tool, so let’s look more closely. What is a Tool? Merriam-Webster…

It’s just a trash can, with trash around you can put back inside the trash can.

Kumimanu adapted from Nobu TamuraSome penguins belong on postcards. This one deserves its own weigh station.Around 57 million years ago, an enormous penguin swam through the seas of what is now Aotearoa New Zealand. Known from fossils described in 2023 as Kumimanu fordycei, this ancient marine lovely had an estimated body mass of around 150 kilograms.That is a great deal of penguin.The

Are you bothered by strange noises in the middle of the night? Plus rampant rodent droppings? Do you experience feelings of dread in your basement, attic, or bakery? "You guys, I have a feeling there's something really creepy below us..." "SEE?!" Have you or any of your family ever seen a spook, specter, or super sarcastic ghost? "Like, boo, or whatever." How about an entire tray of cupcakes giving you the finger? If the answer is yes then don't wait another minute! Pick up the phone and call…

Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out. Hugh Latimer, to Nicholas Ridley at the stake, Oxford, October 16, 1555 (Foxe's Acts and Monuments)

Walking to kindergarten with Nora this morning, I asked if she wanted to practice crossing the street: once she got good enough, she could walk to school on her own. She didn't want to practice today, but she asked if she could walk the final block herself since there were no more crossings. I said sure, hugged her goodbye, and she set off: She turned around to smile at me once, and I got a quick picture: I went around the block the other way, to the other side of the schoolyard, and waited out…

2026-10-29Hello! I was going to leave yesterday's photo as the final one from Central Park (and of New York City as a whole) for the calendar year.When I received a couple of emails speaking positively about that image, I decided to preserve and upload this one as well. Not because I have anything interesting to share, but so I have a reason to archive it online and send them this image as a wallpaper.That's all. I still need to come up with a Halloween costume. How the hell is November coming…

I don’t know why I started to put this together. These machines fascinate me, because so much of early computing/hacker type culture happened on them. I started writing a table, but realised a timeline would be more intuitive. In this graph, the price is for a minimal configuration and adjusted for inflation. The time is the memory cycle time, a decent proxy for speed. Some notes: The PDP-1 was created mostly as an experiment. At the time, industrial control systems used either humans or…

October 29, 2026 It's fall here in New Jersey, which means cold mornings and the heater running. We've already seen temperatures in the high 30s a few times. With colder weather on the way, we topped off our heating oil today. We took delivery of 150 gallons for $869.85. Back in December 2025, the same amount cost only $466.35, or $3.109 per gallon. That's an increase of $2.69 per gallon—an 86% jump in less than a year! Fortunately, we are in a position to absorb this increase. This will be a…

When you live next door to a canyon in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, you can never guess what the weather will bring. Weather reports are wildly inconsistent, but sometimes there are exceptional surprises. Rock Canyon is one of the major natural attractions of Provo, Utah. The peak in this image is Kyhv Peak.

It's been 19 years today since I started blogging. Really. You could go back through my blogroll and read that first one if you want. I don't really recommend it since it's mostly focussed on training for triathlons. The first real blog (and it was a rant) is Feb 2010 about the Olympics. And actually, I just discovered I goofed, somehow. I started Oct 27, not 29. I only discovered that when looking up the URL for the 4000 blog, which includes links to other posts, which in turn will lead you…

Replying to iPhone Duo Preorder Madness On iPad Duo launch day, I walked into my local Apple Store and just bought one. Apparently, I was one of the last people to get one. I spoke to an employee there today, and she told me they’ve been completely sold out ever since.

I picked up a new “Mozzarella cheese” from a vegan brand I like. I understand the marketing, but calling vegan products cheese or meat is bullshit. They don’t taste like the real thing. People who look to replace the real thing with the “fake” version get disappointed anyway. Isn’t “Cashew spread with herbs and spices” more appealing? Need to market it? How about “Cashew spread with a kick” or something similar? It would also skip the chemicals they add to make these taste, look, and smell like…

번역 없이 공부하기(번공모) 4기의 첫 모임이 코앞으로 다가왔다. 작년 9월에 진행했던 3기 이후 1년 넘게 멈춰 있던 모임이라 그런지 잘해내고 싶다는 마음이 크다. 번공모 3기를 마치고 고민이 많았다. 작은배가 여는 다른 모임이 그렇듯, 번공모도 내가 세상에 있길 바라던 모임이었다. 영어를 공부하는 대신 영어로 공부하는 모임. 시험에 나올 법한 괴상한 지문 대신 솔직한 주장과 경험을 담은 글에 빠져보는 모임. 같은 주제에 관해 쓰인 여러 글을 읽으며 내 생각을 점검하고 관점을 확장하는 모임. 함께했기 때문에 해낼 수 있었다고 말할 정도로 어렵지만 보람찬 모임. 아무도 시키지 않아도 시간이 나면 영어로 읽고 쓰는 것을 낙으로 삼던 나는 번공모가 내 삶에서 필수적인 톱니바퀴가 될 것이라고 생각했다. 번공모를 실제로 운영하면서 어려움이 있었다. 읽어야 하는 글이 생각보다 어려워서 좌절하는 참가자가 생길 때마다 어떻게든 도우려 했지만, 끝내 참여를 포기하는 경우도 있었다. 참가자…

I’ve been interested in procedurally generating fantasy settings for a long time. Terrain is one part of that problem, and noise is a useful place to start. The name doesn’t tell you much, though. What does noise have to do with making a map? In this context, noise is a function that takes a position and returns a number that appears random. If we use that number as the height of the ground, we get a heightmap. That’s what the examples below show: a map viewed from above, with black…

The apartment is packed up and empty and I'm leaving New York for Durham this Saturday. Just short of my 9th full year here. People, visitors mostly I guess, seem to associate New York with skyscrapers and traffic and concrete. To me New York is the water. Looking out from Astoria Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Fort Totten Park, Orchard Beach, the parks on both sides of the Hudson, (JFK) Boulevard East, Shore Road Park, and the Belt Parkway looking out at Jamaica Bay. Looking out from the ferries…

Apple’s platforms are built on “there’s an app for that”. When I have a problem, I find an app, download it, and learn to work the way it wants me to. I can change what I put into it. What it does is mostly someone else’s decision. LLMs change that. I can describe the behavior I need and build it. A small tool takes an afternoon. When models get fast and reliable enough, a request could produce its own interface on the spot, with controls I can use and change. Apple should take its OSes in this…

Daily Drawing 1033

I’ve been on a tear with misquotations lately, and once I started, I seemed to find them everywhere. Some are technical. Some are philosophical. Some are…

I’ve just bought myself a Pocket Operator from Teenage Engineering. And I can’t wait for this little device to arrive!

On 17 October, at 10:17 UTC, the search gate went live on www.freshports.org. A search from a visitor without a login or a search_ok cookie now gets a small challenge page instead of a search. I wrote about the first day in the FreshPorts October speed-up post. This post looks at the twelve days since. I expected the traffic to drop once the bots got nothing for their trouble. It didn’t. What dropped was the cost of that traffic. What the search gate is The gate is described in detail in…

Quick update post-surgery. It went very well. I’m back home taking time to recover. I must be patient. Trying to stay hydrated as the pain meds help me get through the day. It’s challenging. My wife is helping me greatly; she’s a blessing. Thankful to finally be fixed. Eager to get back to normal functionality.

Clouds sinking into the trees at daybreak. A thin, high jumble of notes from a brown creeper. It feels and even sounds like rain, but that’s just the dry tick of leaves falling into leaves.