The USA is mostly batshit crazy: We have experts. They always have something to say. Quite rightly too. As for the colour of Mountain Dew, all I know is that it came in a number of different colours - at one time anyway. Most of them were quite bright. Lurid even. Possibly disgusting. Why drink that stuff?Kids like it. I have personal experience.Is it actually for sale on this septic isle these days? I think a ban would be in order. Outlaw it, quickly. Along with any other things that are too…

Few things have become as topical since the fighting in Ukraine kicked into high gear in 2022 as long-range strike and air defences, preferably of the kind that US-based billionaire can’t switch off at a whim. And few companies are better placed to meet those demands than MBDA. As such, the EURONAVAL press trip kicked off with a presentation by the company at their facilities in Le Plessis-Robinson outside of Paris focusing on their missile programmes. The portfolio of MBDA – the “only western…

Title possibly signs checks the article doesn’t have backing for. This is just a brief pro forma project update. Not much new functionality or anything to announce, last few months have mostly been bug fixes and technical debt cleanup. Most big parts of the search engine are in place, and while there are many things that could be better, we’re less likely to straight up see massive new features, at least in the immediate feature. Per familiar intuition from binary searches, the closer you get…

There are many myths in sports. One of the enduring ones is that the best athletes win on their talent; the dopers are the lesser ones who can't rely completely on their natural ability.This myth persists despite Lance Armstrong, Jose Canseco and numerous other cases. News has emerged that the Tokyo marathon gold medalist & 2025 world champion has been provisionally suspended for doping (link). Oops. The process has begun, and we'll soon learn if he has an "explanation" for the abnormality.This…

American politics in recent years has become unserious entertainment with very serious and life-changing consequences. Something broke when the country elected its first Black president in 2008, and it has never been put back together. Perhaps it’s because white Americans did the lazy work of assuming that a Black president meant that our nation’s race ... Read more The post Vote like your life depends on it and why I am supporting Troy Jackson appeared first on Shay Stewart-Bouley.

Up and down again this week, not helped by it now being winter – gales, rain, cloudy skies – and several nights featuring hours lying awake. Searching for the bright side, the downs feel more related to specific issues than the overall and overwhelming downs of a couple of months ago did. I’m guessing the lack of sleeping is due to continuing to be a bit slack about exercise. As someone fully on board with the importance of regular exercise (no matter how tedious it is to do) it’s been more of…

Why shouldn't an opera be set in an office? Not merely set there; performed there! On Saturday night, a couple of dozen audience members were ushered in to a genuine office in Tooting to watch a short comic opera by Opera UnTouched. It was a burst of sunshine in a rainy day. We're at Ben's leaving party. A flustered woman is busy on the telephone. Will Ben ever get her attention? Both Grace Watkins & Stephen Whitford are astonishingly good opera singers. They cover all the tropes, hit all the…

The AI RCEssion is driven by tech debt, but that debt is not evenly distributed. AI isn't the adversary coming to destroy us, it's the auditor pointing out our decades of neglect and lack of investment in secure systems.

Daily Drawing 1030

One of the great dilemmas of twentieth-century spycraft was how quickly to act when valuable, insightful information came to light. Do you blunder in and arrest the person under surveillance for what might only be intelligence that John le Carre would have called ‘chickenfeed’ or keep listening in the hope of even greater prizes? Robert […]

Today being the last Monday of October, it’s a Bank Holiday here in Ireland – Lá Saoire i Mí Dheireadh Fómhair (literally, the Holiday at the End of the Month of October) so I had the morning off; I have a telecon this afternoon. This week is Study Week too so there are no lectures or tutorials until next Monday, when we resume for the seven remaing weeks of the Semester. I’ll be travelling tomorrow to give a seminar at Queen’s University Belfast. My talk will have the title Open Access…

Read on the web → Hi, hello, how are you? The Hunter’s Moon is out, and so it’s time for me to send you another loosely knitted-together set of thoughts under the title Syzygy Business. This issue is reaching you on International Chocolate Milkshake Day—a holiday that I invented eight years ago, to mark my late mother’s birthday after her passing. She loved a chocolate milkshake, and so if you need an excuse to enjoy a chocolate milkshake, I offer you this one. If you’d like to toast a small…

With most of the forest understorey bare, one can see so much more through the trees: a full moon setting in the west, a flock of geese, the white tail of a deer retreating like a ghost into the dark mountain laurel bushes.

Three method overloads… which one runs? java static String f(long x) { return "f(long)"; } static String f(Integer x) { return "f(Integer)"; } static String f(int... x) { return "f(int...)"; } f(1);

Red sweetgum leaves in Oakland neighborhood, 20 October 2026 (photo by Kate St. John) 26 October 2026 Fall leaf color has been weak this month. The maples turned red early but their leaves were blown off in strong winds about a week ago. In the city’s urban heat island, the oaks have not changed yet so it was a relief to find bright red sweetgum leaves in Oakland (at top). Leaves were still green in Schenley Park last Friday, though the sun rays were a nice touch. Sun rays at Schenley Park, 23…

I have heard the words, “this is the life.”I think about what this means. I think about the places I have been or the views I have seen, which are beautiful and perhaps local and maybe they are only subjective to me, a typical New Yorker with an accent and all.But I can say that I have seen beautiful things. I was listening to a song the other morning. I am not too familiar with the music of today or the youth of today and at the same time, I heard the words to the lyrics.“Man, this must be the…

The Xcode 27 MCP can lead to higher token costs when your agent navigates the iOS Simulator, because it reads about seven times more text after every action than RocketSim’s CLI did in my benchmark. Efficient navigation comes down to what your agent reads after every tap. A screenshot shows what the screen looks like, … → The post How the Xcode 27 MCP can lead to higher token costs when navigating the Simulator appeared first on SwiftLee.

😎 a little fun break to start the week: Street Racer The city is yours. Street races, flying cars, and open roads... [ 📌arnicas ] Wordgy “Daily Word Chain Game” Connect the chain of words once a day to get the highest score, and create your own word chains to challenge your friends. [ 📌tdjones ]

You may think that I post a lot of old music in this Music for the Next Generation series and... well... It's true. I'm not that young anymore, so most of the music that has been with me for a long time can't be very recent; I'm not a time traveler, after all. The other reason... Is it me? Or is it the state of the current music industry? Is it a little bit of both? I'd wager it's a bit of both. The truth is, I don't find much current music that interesting.But every once in a while, I stumble…

Show this picture to anyone who has worked in tech a long time…. …and they will likely nod vigorously in agreement. I am sure most people believe otherwise. Until last week. Last week we all saw PHP sites go down all over the world. (Some estimates that 70% of all websites are PHP based.) All … Continue reading The Internet is a fragile thing propped up by the efforts of a few good men mainly working for free

This blog is the main place I write, but I also use other platforms, either to write new content or to announce blog posts. X (née Twitter) I have a several X accounts, one personal account (@JohnDCook) and several specialized accounts (@CompSciFact, @AlgebraFact, @DataSciFact, etc.). I announce new blog posts on the most relevant account. RSS You can subscribe to the blog via RSS and find out about each post as it’s published. RSS was very popular before Google killed its RSS reader, but it…

Some thoughts on hearing older tracks with fresh ears, chance discoveries, and why “new to you” is new enough. Good morning! I first penned this intro around this time last year. I’d love to say it hasn’t aged well, but well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I penned my first eulogy to the gatekeeper a few years ago now. It was premature, but it felt like a corner had turned. It has, but it also turns out that they’re hardy creatures. Someone’ll need to keep the cockroaches…

In 1988, Taito released an arcade game called The Ninja Warriors. It was a belt-scrolling beat ‘em up whose main attraction was that it was played on the same three-monitor setup of Taito’s 1987 shooting game, Darius, giving you an ultrawide environment within which you would fight off the forces of the President of the United States, Banglar, while playing as robot ninjas. Got all that? The Ninja Warriors is fine and all, but fairly basic for a beat ‘em up even for the time, with a severe lack…

TL;DR Yes, user forums and the Internet Archive are extremely important for digital preservation work. LLMs also seem quite good for synthesizing information that is found in them, connecting the dots between aspects of the problem you are facing, and connecting you to other people engaged in similar work. Back in June I wrote about how my brother John had died, and how among the things he left behind were over 100 CD backups of music he had created in the early 2000s. Each CD was clearly…

While the Wright Brothers had huge, often-unsung help for their first powered flight in December 1903 from the nearby U.S. Life-Saving Station at Kill Devil Hills, it took time for the service’s descendant, the U.S. Coast Guard, to get full-time airpower of its own. Just as the Wright Bros.’ flying machine lifted off, one of the witnesses pressed a rubber bulb attached to a box camera, capturing for posterity the miracle that occurred near Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.…

The U.S. Army used the pixelated Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), often incorrectly called ACU camo (which is the uniform style), from 2004 to September 30, 2019, making it a staple of the GWOT era. The Multicam-ish Operational Camouflage Pattern (OCP) replaced it because UCP performed poorly in desert and mountain environments like Afghanistan, and because the “pivot toward the Pacific” was formally announced in 2011. The gear itself wasn’t bad; it was just in a subpar camo pattern. Since…

Some 75 years ago this week, the first American submarine designed (not modified) for underwater performance rather than surfaced attacks under the GUPPY program entered service. USS Tang (SS-563) was commissioned at Portsmouth Naval Yard on 25 October 1951. USS Tang (SS-563), underway, circa post-1950s in an official Navy photo. The 1,600 ton (2,100 submerged) 269-foot boat was smaller than the Navy’s WWII-era fleet boats but were quieter, much faster underwater (18.3 knots vs 9 knots) and…

An uneventful day in an uneventful week, and I suppose we should be grateful for small favors like that. Over on NBC, one of the two schools on College Bowl is the University of Minnesota at Morris, located about ten miles from the World's Worst Town™. They lost badly to Bradley, though, so I don't feel too bad about it. On the syndicated music show Upbeat (1:00 p.m., WGR), whoever edited the listings managed to misspell Lesley Gore's name, but considering the number of typos I make, I…

Maggie Hoffman at Serious Eats on the best way to pair beer and cheese: “If I were to say, ‘Fill in the blank: Cheese and ______’, most people would say ‘crackers’ right away. Well, beer is made from the same ingredients as crackers (plus a few extras), so to me it just makes sense to put them together,” says Jesse Vallins, Certified Cicerone and Executive Chef at The Saint Tavern in Toronto. But of course, when it comes to beer and cheese, some matches turn out tastier than others.__ My wife…

“Driven by the de facto dominance of English, AI multilingual alignment shows a form of cross-linguistic deference, a systematic tendency to resolve cross-linguistic disagreement by treating the English judgment as authoritative, rather than acknowledging the natural cross-linguistic inconsistency of human natural language.” That’s from the “Cagliari ​​Statement on Linguistic​ and Conceptual Justice in AI​“, which objects to correcting such inconsistencies” in ways that “suppress legitimate…