The 1963 Bulletin of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art noted a little-known London inventor, George Remington, took out a 14-year patent on a globe table in Dec 1807. A few months later, the rights to produce his invention were bought by cabinet makers Morgan and Sanders Co.English globe writing desk, c1810, Morgan & Sanders.This company had produced a working model of Remington's patent by 1809, when their first article appeared in the Ackermann's monthly Repository of Arts, Literature,…

This week, I came across two Our World in Data charts on Europe’s productivity gap with America and went down a bit of an econ rabbit hole. In the output-per-hour series, German productivity more than doubled between 1990 and 2022, compared with a roughly 70 per cent increase in America: Yet America pulled ahead on GDP per person. With all the Euro summer memes1 in the back of my mind, I thought perhaps Europeans had just used some of their productivity gains to buy time off, while Americans…

Jason Snell writing in iPhone Duo: 24 hours in the Splash Zone: Encountering apps not optimized for iPhone Duo, even if they worked perfectly fine on the iPad. This is one of the biggest surprises.…

Neither Screen Time nor folders could stop me reaching for social apps. Now I avoid them entirely with a custom menu that combines the functionality of an iPhone with the user interface of a Nokia 3310. | Read full post >>

Nobody knows what happen after death, so can you write an interesting absurdist story about death where anything can happen? Sure, you can. ~ Link: Cloud Six, by Amy Fusselman A Philosophical Hall of Mirrors in “Cloud Six”, by Gianni Washington, Chicago Review of Books Book Review: Amy Fusselman, ‘Cloud Six’, by Sam Franzini, Our Culture

Source Some of the best pix of a goonch I have seen. Wade made it famous and it made Wade famous. I remember the mention of it in Wade’s first book, Somewhere down the Crazy River. I have multiple copies. I checked the price of a hardcover copy and it was $500. Wow, I am glad I got it when I did. Somewhere down the Crazy River was about Mahseer and Goliath Tigerfish. This is one of the nicest Mahseer photos I have seen. This appears to be a mahseer from the Himalaya stocks. I just found out…

Another Sunday, another Meals of the week post. The post where I catch you up with all of the things which I have cooked for myself over the previous week. I may live on my own, but as you can see, I eat very well. I love doing these meals of the week posts. I know that I, myself, on occasions need a bit of inspiration when it comes to meal planning and if I can help anyone to do that for themselves or their family that makes me very happy.I try to keep everything as nutritious as possible, and…

Sunday Q&A: Special Polling Edition Today, as promised, a LOT of questions about polls. We were also going to run reader comments about polls, but: (1) this post is likely to generate a lot of comments, and (2) this post is already quite long. So, we'll run some reader comments about polls during the week. Click here for full story

November is a special month in the AI space: ChatGPT was released on 30-Nov-2022 (roughly 4 years ago), and Claude Opus 4.5 was released on 24-Nov-2025 (about a year ago). Software engineering has transformed over the past 10-12 months, and the work of a software engineer has already undergone a paradigm shift, whether you like it or not. In this post, you'll read some thoughts and opinions (and a few facts) on how software engineering has rapidly evolved over the past 12 months or so. Let’s…

Sigh, time continues to advance! The World The US midterms are in less than 10 days! I say this with a mixture of dread and anticipation for the world. The cybersecurity industry has had quite a week: Eight intermediate certificate authorities were compromised because of a massively bad practice: The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography…

The big news in money and politics is AIPAC's announcement that it will no longer issue endorsements or make direct contributions to candidates. This marks a substantial retreat -- AIPAC only began giving direct donations in 2021. (AIPAC will continue to operate its SuperPAC however).Needless to say, this decision is generating plenty of crowing on behalf of AIPAC's adversaries, who've labored hard to turn it into a toxic brand amongst Democrats (and, to a lesser but not negligible extent,…

I don't know if this can described as a "trend", but there were several layouts this year that offered little operation at the front, replying on the fiddle yard operator being efficient and sending around a constant procession of trains. Instead of operation, they provided superb scenic displays. I particularly liked Penhelig, seen above. It's a halt, and very accurately, doesn't have much other railway around it, but treated as an attractive moving picture, it just works. I like this idea,…

It's an identity I'm trying on right now, without dwelling on it too much. Unemployment. I mean, I've been here before. 2020. COVID. I do believe I can land a new job in a jiffy tho. The real question is what it's going to be about. Growing up, I was always into the occult: synchronicities, geomancy, and even a bit of ESP, which was my thesis topic back in high school. So I've been checking these niche corners for job openings. I'm not picky about skills, since I'm a fast learner. For me it's…

The Crimean War (1854-56) is remembered in the West for being the first photographically documented major conflict and for Tennyson’s barnburner of a poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The blundering attack during Battle of Balaclava, on October 25, 1854, was a slaughter for British forces. The war pitted Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia against Russia, which threatened to take control of the Dardanelles. Apart from its rousing rhetoric-- “Half a league half a league, Half a league…

(not in that order) I took the trolley with Gwen (the Goblin) this morning. Dogs are amazing. We co-evolve with them. They would not exist in the way they do without human ingenuity and intervention. And I suspect we would not exist in the same way without them. And when I think of that I do usually think of the line in Vinny Thomas’ video “The Galactic Federation interviews Earth for membership”: Why did you turn the wolf into the pug? A solid question. Gwen at a trolley stop Kelly’s not been…

James Cook is a British artist who has been creating artwork using vintage typewriters since 2014. What began as a school art project has developed into a distinctive artistic practice that has taken his work and his typewriters around the world.James was initially inspired by the story of Paul Smith, an American artist born with cerebral palsy, who was give n a typewriter at an early age. Unable

Sunday 25th October 2026 To mark tomorrow’s 40th Anniversary of bus deregulation here’s an article I wrote earlier this year for the Omnibus Magazine (the bi-monthly magazine of the Omnibus Society) explaining why deregulation worked so well in Brighton and Hove as well as a number of other British towns and cities. It perhaps also explains why deregulation manifestly didn’t work in other places most of which are now first in the queue for implementing the now available alternative of…

10 years ago, my friend sent me a RIPE Atlas Probe to be plugged into my home network in India for contributing to an open worldwide internet diagnostics measuring network. Other than a USB hardware failure because of which I had to replace the USB stick, the probe has been working perfectly all this time. It is simple enough that it is simply plug and play and I don’t need to bother about any updates and software issues, which is perfect because I can only make it to my home in India every few…

🏀 That was… intense. Go, Nuggets! 🛠

Do you set personal goals for yourself? Seriously, WordPress? This is the sort of question that makes me suspicious of the person asking it. What are you hoping to accomplish here? Are you trying to improve me? Because I have news for you. At my age, personal improvement is a bit like renovating a house with a crumbling foundation. Sure, you can slap some paint on the walls, but eventually the whole thing is going to collapse, and now you’ve wasted perfectly good paint. Still, I suppose I…

My favorite part was when the real estate agent drives over a grave and goes, “damn tombstone!”

I'm currently reading the book Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman [1]. Chapter 7 begins by discussing how much better life is for humanity today than it was a few centuries ago. At the top of page 124 it reads: The share of the world's population that lives in extreme poverty has gone down nearly 90 percent, and the poor in wealthy countries now enjoy a higher standard of living than kings and emperors did a few centuries back. [2] Bregman sees this progress as proof that humanity can solve…

The night was uneventful. Lille Ø kept sailing on its course with little to no intervention from the crew, who were slowly getting fitter from the various levels of sea sickness. The morning grew gray as scattered rainclouds kept swiching the wind between 7 and 27kn. Afternoon brought the sun out and steady winds around 20kn. In the horizon we see the also heavily reefed Mathilda flying past us at around 10kn of speed. Fiji Met Office bulletin promised rough seas north of 22°S, and indeed…

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also…

Today I'm checking out a figure that might not exactly fit this year's theme but I'm still going to go with it. When you have your own action figure blog, you can do stuff like this, too. Besides, I've reviewed Scare Glow action figures during 31 Days of Toy Terror a few times in the past, so let's just call it tradition at this point. Yes, today I'm checking out the Masters of the Universe x Transformers crossover version of Starscream Armor Scare Glow. If you've kept up with my reviews over…

It's the weekend, so I figure a TRIPLE feature is in order. These movies are not going to be accused of being classics. No. But they all put me in mind of what has been on my mind this month: 1980s small-town horror with a side of witches. Plus two of these have some great casts.There is The Midnight Hour (1985), Midnight Offerings (1981), and The Dark Side of Midnight (1984). One will have its share of witches, vampires, zombies and Halloween; another puts teenage witches in suburbia; the…

Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 10-18-2026 There were 4 links posted this week. 10/24/2026 @20:55 RailpassA cozy simulation of various train rides right in your browser. Quite the vibe.h/t kottke.org 10/24/2026 @08:37 Ninajirachi - iPod Touch (Madeon Remix) [Official Visualiser] - YouTubeThis is a good remix of a good song.h/t surasshu 10/19/2026 @19:19 Sidewalk Show On Valencia and 16th Street in San Francisco - Doc Pop's WeblogLast night we heard some music coming from a nearby street…

As I sit in a hotel in downtown Brooklyn listening to cars honking/people arguing and screaming - I can hear what they're saying from around ten stories up! - I am still playing Dog Online. Here is my dog: He is a "Level 377 Wolf", which is a lot of levels. I have been playing this game maybe Too Fast this week. I've observed: It is insanely good at drip-feeding you secrets Like Neopets was, it's a big site-scale mystery, with weird and mysterious systems unlocking other weird and mysterious…

Lots of undead and a bear and a lizard lady. It's amazing how much time I spend in this game not just with inventory management but skill management. I loathe that the game adds any little thing you pick up into your skill hotbars. Between that and switching skills around between battles it becomes a mess. Since last time we finished up in the ruins in the sort of middle-north coast area I continued along that path and ran into a dead bear, a sad bear cub, and a blinded magister. Killed the…