This article is part of my ‘Big Ideas’ series, in which I help readers understand complex issues within the world of film. Today’s article includes a bonus report for paying subscribers, titled “Predicting Movie Hits” (download link at the end of the article).In the past couple of months, two films made silly amounts of money. Obsession was made for about $750,000 and has already grossed $297 million worldwide, and Backrooms earned $257 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. This is the…
I predicted what was going to happen the whole time, and I was happy to be right about most of it. Great to see Dustin Hoffman. I liked Leo Woodall, but there was this low-grade smirk on his face too much of the time. Anyway, thumbs up.
What connects cross-dressing sex workers, three embattled groups of nuns and monks, soldiers, a roller skating rink, feral cats, lucertole (lizards), a bridge of many names and the sea women of a river?This is an attempt to explore these odd but real connections.Bartolomeo Coghetto detto Medoro (1707-1793). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The author's apartment was located at the site of the building on the left, and the sex workers congregated toward the right.During the mid 1970s I…
“No one has yet determined what the body can do.” (Spinoza) While it has always been thus, today more than ever, higher education consists of helping students find out what their bodies can do. We can, perhaps, limit this learning to their ability to do things with words, or, somewhat more generally, symbols. I stress that these “symbolic” skills are bodily because we have become a little too used to “off-loading” our understanding of the “mental” to machines. (Note, that when I call this a…
2026-06-24Hello! This is now the oldest photo I've uploaded to the website.This is from my offline 2025 series, and I've talked about why I don't like looking at my past work. At least this time, I got creative with motion blur.It seems like anyone with a camera would try to take a photo like this, at any subway or metro station around the world. When the area is dimly lit, the camera sensor needs more time to gather light from its surroundings. Without a tripod, long exposures tend to have…
Cliff Robertson and Sandra Dee in Gidget (1959) Vitals Cliff Robertson as Burt “The Big Kahuna” Vail, beach bum and Korean War Veteran Malibu, California, Summer 1959 Film: Gidget Release Date: April 10, 1959 Director: Paul Wendkos WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Now that it’s summer, let’s flash back to the beach party movie that started it all. Before Frankie and Annette and before we ever followed Elvis to Hawaii, there was Gidget. Czech-born writer Frederick Kohner was inspired to pen a…
The format impacts everything.Choosing a format or "paper size" will affect everything about your project, so I recommend thinking about it early. The earlier the better. The sooner you start thinking about format, the sooner you start thinking about what your project actually is. Examples in this article are estimates based on what I can gleen from measuring the dimensions of books. The following advice isn't going to make any sense if you're not planning on printing a book or publishing a…
It’s been (inexactly) 46 days since my last rant, and the place wouldn’t feel the same if I wasn’t (mildly) furiously hammering my current train of thought into vim, bare-brained, like the semi-civilized ape-like creature that we all are when bereft of our AI crutches. Even as (finally) Z.ai puts out something that is close enough to Claude and Codex and the bemonied digerati gushed all over Twitter (yes, I still refuse to call it “X”) that finally they can run something comparable to cloud…
I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food. And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but heat and water gelatinize the starch and make it bioavailable. [1] This means you need some way to heat…
I believe that all new scientific discoveries should be announced via cake, don't you?[pushing back glasses and consulting clipboard] Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to present... The Majestic Bagel-Nosed Falcon of Uganda!Or it might be a fish. Fish...falcon...you know. Whatevs. [Shuffling papers] Next we have... The Majestic Happy Chicken-Footed Spiny-Backed Slime Devil.(Watch out; they spit.) We're still working on the scientific name for this one: So for now let's just call it the Majestic…
Learning Chinese, or any language, makes you more aware of language in general. And one thing that surprised me is that, despite Mandarin being so different from my mother tongue (Dutch), both languages reach for the same units when weighing things: the kilogram (公斤, gōngjīn) and the half-kilogram (斤, jīn). It’s a small thing, but […] The post Half a Jin, Eight Liang appeared first on Jaap Grolleman.
https://kolistat.com/blog/the-stats-duck-v0-6-0/ Announcement of a really neat duckdb extension called the-stats-duck (KoliStat/the-stats-duck) which puts statistical functions inside duckDB. It then goes on to add some visualization in duckdb sql, by serializing out to vega-lite format, á la ggsql (which the author calls out on news.yc as a direct inspiration) My favorite bit is the function meta() as a table-valued function, allowing you to select from it: SELECT column_name, kind, n_missing…
To the Archon of Burdock's Valley, Lord Iskander Basileon, Imperial salutations, etc. This song was taken from one of the rabblerousers we were charged with vanquishing. We heard them sing it as a form of morale booster. It is the recommendation of this commander that we seek to identify it wherever possible and arrest those who sing it on charges of potential collusion with the Thorcin Recovery League, as we believe the "Strig" referred to in the song is the folklorical Eadric Strigona. Here…
Nakameguro is my favorite area of Tokyo, so I decided to stay nearby this trip. Jet-lagged, I headed to the Starbucks Reserve Roastery because it was the only nearby cafe I could find serving coffee at 7:00. A woman saw me taking photos along the canal and suggested I visit a historic bridge farther down. I took this photo soon after. It was not until writing this post that I realized she probably meant the bridge next to this pink one.
My first photo on the Leica M11-P. I will be shooting with a 35mm lens this whole trip.
Responding To My Former Web Host TOC: Part One Part Two Part Three I stated the other day that I was surprised my former web host emailed me asking for feedback after I'd closed out my account. No survey, or feedback form, just a straightforward email. And now I am surprised again. Why? Yesterday morning I received a response to that email. Only nine or ten hours after I sent it. And, much to my pleasure, the representative largely understood what I was talking about. She had some interesting…
What did medieval people think about different races? How did they distinguish one ethnic group from another? This question occurred to me when reading up on Regino of Prüm, who around 900CE wrote the following:Nec non et illud sciendum, quod, sicut diversæ nationes populorum inter se discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus, ita sancta universalis æcclesia toto orbe terrarum diffusa, quamvis in unitate fidei coniungatur, tamen consuetudinibus æcclesiasticis ab invicem differt.Nor should it be…
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Ariel Delgado Dixon’s novel Sourland is an immersive literary thriller, brilliantly original and atmospheric. Kirkus wrote of the book: “[A] gritty neo-Western, complete with double crosses,…
Looking at my peak male physique, and my Keanu Reeves baby face, you would never suspect it, but I recently turned 50. As is the tradition, I thought about writing a post titled "50 Lessons at 50". Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of wisdom. The thing is, I still feel like I'm 18, same age as my son. Turns out this is the secret old guys have been hiding from us all along. You get older on the outside, but inside you still see yourself as the same young lad.Still, fifty years should count…
In this post we’re going to see how share.acquire.mode=record_limit combined with:fewer consumers than partitionsand various cases of “partition skew”…can result in subpar performance with share groups. I stumbled on these issues when running large sets of dimensional tests with Dimster’s explore-limits mode, which finds the highest sustainable throughput while staying within a target end-to-end latency target. There was a specific subset of the tests that explore-limits mode would consistently…
An Important reminder at Hunter Gatherer 21C: We are never just ourselves. We are ourselves plus the world we move through. A human being is not a sealed unit but a creature in constant exchange with its surroundings: light and dark, warmth and cold, soil underfoot, water, the company of others. Take the natural half of that exchange away and something in us quietly begins to fade. It’s time to go outside and play.
Everyone is nervous, at least to some extent, on their first day at a new job. Yet spare a thought for young Pierre (as I have called him). He is the only human living in a world of animals and even his recent couture diploma isn’t going to get him very far when it comes to competing with his colleague, whose eight legs put her at a distinct advantage to him when it comes to completing new dresses on time. So, his first day is going to be challenging, to say the least. Regardless, plucky Pierre…
The St Katharine Docks are a very pleasant, picturesque and pedestrian-friendly part of London that deserves much, much better restaurants than they has hitherto been blessed with. Banquet 88's immediate neighbours are Café Rouge, Côte and Slug & Lettuce and though I can sense some of you bristling with indignant contrary defences of this particular rogues gallery ("The Côte lunch menu is actually pretty good value" ... "The Café Rouge steak frites aren't completely inedible" ... "I once ate at…
There’s long been a disconnect between concerns about the massive impact of AI data centres on electricity demand and claims by Sam Altman and others that the impact is really modest. Ed Zitron recently posted a summary of OpenAI’s 2025 accounts which helps to clarify things a bit. In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to…
Escaping the Heatwave, Evading the PubA walk from "Best Pubs in South Devon" holds plenty of promise.Yet compromises need to be made. We are on day 2 of the heatwave that has had the news outlets reaching for ever darker crayons. Mrs M wants us up and out early - 6am was mentioned - and on the shortest walk I have for the area. I'm up for the early start. England vs. Ghana last night provided no reason to stay up celebrating.The Globe at Frogmore will have to wait. With opening hours of 3pm -…
Thunderstorm in the distance Week in rewind⚽ I went out with friend to watch the Belgian game against Egypt, on the big screen. It wasn't exactly a big screen, rather 2 smaller ones, making it hard to follow at times. However, going to such places is for the atmosphere. Luckily, it did not end in a loss, or the atmosphere would have been less pleasant.On Sunday, I stayed home to watch the game against Iran. I was too tired to go out and it gave me the opportunity to watch with my oldest son. It…
Wesley Yin-Poole / IGN: Rockstar Games has finally announced the price of GTA 6, while confirming it features a “single-player experience” at launch. Rockstar said GTA 6 costs $79.99 across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, confirming a $10 jump from the standard $70 we’ve seen this generation. The Ultimate Edition, meanwhile, is $20 more, priced $99.99. There’s no word yet on any new version of GTA Online, which suggests the existing experience will continue to operate as GTA 6 launches…
In this piece on why he blogs, Noah Smith says that blogging has allowed me to inject ideas into the discourse with unparalleled speed, breadth, and access. A researcher goes deep into a few topics; a blogger can quickly hit the main points of many topics. This enables speed; academics might take months to write something useful about a breaking event like the Iran War or Trump’s tariffs, while I can have something out in hours. Then he continues, Injecting ideas into the discourse is…
I have linked to videos from OTR a few times on my link blog but this one deserves a post on here. It’s a feature-length documentary about the “Golden Triangle” within Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, the history how it became the center of the global drug trade and how it in many ways still is. A fascinating story of lost armies, hill tribes, gangsters and – of course, because it is ORT – food. Very much worth the time. Reply by email
