[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Yesterday, Numberphile released a delightful video with James Grime (redundant, I know) in which he walks us through a geometry problem first posed by Henry Dudeney in 1902. It’s known as the “Haberdasher’s Puzzle” and is reproduced in Dudeney’s 1907 book The Canterbury Puzzles. The problem was solved by C.W. McElroy after Dudeney published it in a…

Begrudgingly checked out of the Village Inn this morning. It was the last day of the season and they needed to winterize the lodge. Made our way back up the Going-to-the-Sun Road to Logan Pass for a hike to the Hidden Lake Overlook (After seeing folks along the edge of the Highline Trail yesterday, I knew my nerves couldn’t handle such treachery.) Turns out I could barely handle the moderate hike to Hidden Lake. Steep steps form the first half of the trail, I was out of breath after several…

⌾ : Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.⚲ : Near home. This photo was taken on a walk near my home and shows a bunch of Noisy Miners (there were actually more involved) harassing a Cockatoo. The Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala) is a small grey bird with a black headpiece and high-res yellow beak. They are endemic to eastern and southeastern Australia, and for a long time I wrongly thought/assumed they were an introduced pest. The truth is that this particular species is native. I strongly dislike these…

I hadn’t rotated the site banner for a while. This month we have a scene from Fagan Park, which I explored with my in-laws earlier this month around Hornsby Shire in Sydney. It was stunning. As always, I generated a pixilated image with dithering to render it as though it came from an early 1990s CD-ROM. This time I posterised it down to monochrome, then applied a teal cast. I had some feedback on my last banner that it was too “busy”, which made the overlaid text harder to read. This one is…

Search's first green is gold. An impossible hue to hold.

So I haven’t done a leg workout in weeks, to have my Achilles heal. And it’s gone down in pain, to the point where I’ve had a couple days without remembering it is there. So I picked some leg lifts today. Nothing with calf raises. My legs will surely be sore tomorrow but let’s hope my heel is not. Unknown location (probably inside)

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 6th November 2026 The debut full length from Penny Coffin, one of Scotland’s Big Four of extreme metal alongside Tyrannus, Coffin Mulch and Hellripper, is coming out at last and comes on the heels of a couple of excellent small releases like 2021’s ‘ΤΕΦΡΑ/ΣΚΕΛΕΤΙΚΟ ΣΚΟΤΑΔΙ’ and 2023’s ‘Conscripted Morality’ EP. But as ever with these things, I always like to see if a band can build upon the goodwill and potential of their initial releases and give us a full…

🗳️ All that worry and my vote was counted. In Texas. Fingers crossed.⚽️ Leo has come out of retirement from soccer starting with a trial practice at a nearby field. A few of his friends already play soccer there, so it's far easier to join when yes, you're the new guy, but also you have some friends looking out for you. Surprisingly his old uniform from preschool still just fits him.🤖 I fixed my OpenCode setup. It was an incompatibility between Docker's llama.cpp (?) and the new agents mode.…

Outside of big exhibition builds, it is generally considered a sin to glue LEGO bricks together exactly because it robs the toy of perhaps its most attractive quality: that we can always take it apart and reconfigure it if we get a new idea that becomes more interesting to pursue.How LEGO Engineered the Perfect PlaythingOkay, this is true: it generally is a sin. But what if you were making your wedding cake topper out of LEGO, and wanted to make sure it was sturdy? Then it might be okay.Photo…

Over the last week, Clare and I took the dogs and spent the week in Mystery Bay, NSW. A ~3hr drive from Canberra, Mystery Bay was so named due a mysterious disappearance of five men, who left behind only a holed ship they had used to get to a nearby goldfield. The campgrounds are about 10 minutes drive from Narooma, which made it really handy to pop into town for supplies and such.The week overall was an incredibly relaxing and restorative experience. Being in nature, in the ocean and under the…

Image by Chad Osburn from the Sad Chairs of Academia project | sadchairsofacademia.tumblr.com At the end of August this year, I clocked up two important milestones: 12 years in Australia, and my departure from Griffith University in Brisbane, where I had spent those 12 years after arriving from the European University Institute in Florence in 2014. This time of change has led me to reflect on university life in Australia, at least as I’ve seen it. My initial years in academia here were…

Up until last week I had only ever used AI to find bugs, migrate dependencies, or implement small features in projects I had already spent years coding up on my own. Last weekend that changed when I asked an AI to develop a web app for me. I have a 3D printer and, sometimes when it notifies me the print is completed, I will go to retrieve my print only to find a mess of spaghetti and wasted filament. The 3D printer company sells a specialized camera that works with their printer, but I didn’t…

i haven’t posted for a long time. i haven’t been truly happy for a long time. when i first joined i posted some of the corniest sh*t. i didn’t think of myself as a writer (and i still don’t). i would read other blogs and feel inspired by what they had to say and wonder why i couldn’t be write like that. i guess in hindsight it’s because i’m not them, i am my own person. the more i shared, the more i cringed at myself. was i giving too much of myself away? do other people think of me in the way…

Cycling infrastructure, like this Marion sidepath,allow children to navigate their town safely(10/26/2026) You probably heard that there's an election next week? Many U.S. Senate and state governor seats are up for voting, along with all U.S. House seats. For a variety of reasons that need not detain us here, Democrats smell blood in the water and are looking to make big gains, while Republican efforts to game the election (Marley and Binday 2026, ProPublica 2026) seem likely to fail. One of…

It’s a new work week and I just got back from my lunch. I restocked on rice and some side dishes, so here is the morning packing of my lunch. Having lots of colors makes me excited for lunch. By the way, I was running late, but still got coffee (I ran out of milk!). And the eating of my lunch! My Libby book finally came off hold so I've started to make my way through it. YUMMY!! Also yesterday got a roasted sweet potato treat, yum yum. This is from a few weeks ago but egg sandwich. I made this…

It's nice to look back at my writing history and see all the cosy nooks I've poured my creative energy into. I was writing a note on my Thoughts Page earlier today. Looking back at the history of his page, which I only started a few weeks back, I felt creative pride. I might only have been writing on it for a short while, but it's something I'm sticking to. My page has no metrics or way for me to know if anyone is reading it. Yet I persist. There is something freeing in not being emotionally…

I sent a brief note to a friend via a major chat platform a few days ago. More than a day ago, less than a week ago. I have their email address. I have their postal address. At least I think I do.. I have their Bluesky handle. Mastodon too. Might have a Twitter too but screw that platform. I got a reply today! The friend started the reply with an apology. They apologized for the delay in answering. That is polite. Etiquette. But to me? Unnecessary. Asynchrony is beautiful. It’s humane. ASAP is…

Although last week we had some server admin certificate-wrangling, we dodged the PHPocalypse that caught many others this week. That’s mostly because the online platform for Museum in a Box is Python-based, and this site is static-files, so there’s less to be compromised. The Museum in a Box website is Wordpress, but we pay someone else to keep on top of that; I (Adrian here this week) checked up on it to confirm that they were on top of things, and as expected that was the case. As with many…

Throughout Frieze Week I heard conflicting reports about how available the WHERE’S OOZEWALD? poster actually was at the Cady Noland show at Gagosian. Were people not aware they could take one? Were they prevented from taking one, or somehow given different information from others? Were the posters gatekept by the gallery, the artist, the security guard, or did some people just go through the little show with museum hands, not ever thinking at all that the stack is for the taking? I do not know,…

www.frogans.org/en/main.html

Did Witnesses for Arbuckle Get Quid Pro Quo? As the work-in-progress progresses, this passage stands out because it may answer the aforementioned question for this woman. And, given the history of Southern California at the time, this passage also brings in its oil boom in the first half of the twentieth century. Many motion picture executives, as well as actors and actresses, who did not know what to do with their money, found companies such as Guaranty Oil Company (note the pun) that started…

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) This is a really enthralling video walking people through a 2023 fan-made Doom level myhouse.wad: When I say “a fan-made Doom level,” I’m not doing it justice. It is not just a cool map, or just a technically impressive one. myouse.wad treats the Doom game engine as a canvas to tell a particular, and perhaps even poignant story, and a story could have only been told this way. From the author of the map, by…

I was going to continue the sub-series on quantum mechanics by talking about waves, but the first installment didn't quite lead to the spirited discussion I was expecting. In an effort not to lose my audience I'm going to take a little detour and tackle another more philosophical topic. I first wrote about this ten years ago. In the intervening time no one has ever pointed me to

One of the typefaces I acquired on a 2012 trip to Montreal was a one I labelled simply “36 pt. Sans Serif” once I got it home.Longtime readers will recall the typeface from my pieces You Are On Mute, and Furiously Curious.Today, in an effort that was part satisfying shopcraft, and part procrastination, I set out to vacuum out that type case, using a DRY Inc. vacuum cleaner attachment. Once I’d removed each letter, vacuumed out its cubby hole, and replaced each letter, I set out to identify the…

This afternoon, when temperatures were at least a bit above freezing, I headed out to see my daughters’ hard work. Wow. Because these last haskap transplants are so much smaller, with tiny, over crowded root balls in tiny little pots, they are harder to see. So I marked every one of them with a garden … Continue reading 140, plus four more

Pathnames become memory.Streams pipe unseen.Prompts wait patiently Reading the The Unix Time-Sharing System (1974)Start Select Reset 📑Photo 365The Ministry Of My Own LabourTerminal AccessDipping the StacksReadingMusicRemember Kids: Reading the The Unix Time-Sharing System (1974) I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of the command line over the last couple of months. Mostly as a continuation of the inside-out thinking I started in Hard Worlds for Little Guys. What’s the difference between…

Real Life Cartographers place "phantom settlements" on their map so they can prove copyright infringement if other mappers copy their work. SPOILERS ABOUND In The Cartographers, these phantom settlements are real, as long as you have the map in-hand when approaching them. seriously, I'm going to spill the entire plot now So. This book starts with an absolutely amazing premise - that maps contain magic, that real physical spaces can be created by adding them to maps. This is an idea I absolutely…

Never been to Cambridge before. We've come for a break for a few days. It's quite nice, even in the rain.133 words · 4 images