Per Wiki A 2023 study recorded a dwarf reed snake “cartwheeling” to escape when startled.[5] The rolling motion is four times faster than the snake’s normal slither,[7] reaching speeds of around 9 miles per hour (14 km/h),[8] and requires a great deal of energy, limiting its use to emergencies such as an immediate threat.[9] The authors of the 2023 paper speculated that it may also hinder predators by confusing them, or by making the snake’s scent trail harder to follow, as only a small portion…

Many thoughtful persons who want AI to go well are preoccupied with AI alignment. This means making sure that the AI models and the systems that build on them will be aligned with humanity. Basically, that AI will be nice to us. People who think that AI systems will start self-improving and get better than us at everything tend to think that AI alignment is extra important. Super-intelligent AI could take over the world, the reasoning goes, so it’d better be morally good.How do I disagree with…

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Who finds this fun? Finished chapter one. It's a good chapter to get it started off. It's fun that you get to play as Sephiroth and that they bothered to build out such a move set for the character. They could very easily have made it something you don't get to control. One thing that's not fun, that this game and the prior do in certain spots, are these little mini games like the Mako vacuum to open the elevators. It's just busy work. Why bother? Sephiroth is having a…

Today I am posting my last piece of blog housekeeping for October, taking a look at the classic crime reprints which were released. I wasn’t sure there were that many, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it was quite a full month. In particular I noted a relatively large number of short story collections being published. As always let me know if I have missed any September classic crime reprints…

Hey all and welcome to my Meals of the Week post. Every Sunday I like to share with you, my beautiful readers, all of the deliciousness that I (and my daughter at the moment) have enjoyed as our main meals over the past seven days. Hooray for the cooler weather and for comfort food season! I have really been enjoying getting back into it. Comfort food season is my favorite time of year. These are only my/our main meals and do not cover the other meals we have, like lunch or breakfast, which…

Why I'm not excited by HS2 HS2 is amazing, as you can tell if you go and look at it. This is the Colne Valley Viaduct, a two mile concrete swoosh on the western edge of London. Specifically it's the point where fast trains to Birmingham will cross the Grand Union Canal, close to Harefield Marina, during a rare burst above ground on the approach to the Chilterns. To get here I took the bus to The River Garden pub and walked down the towpath past 26 moored narrowboats and a tabby cat stalking a…

Capability systems lost on cost, not merit. Agents change the economics of authorization enough to make them practical again. I have spent most of my career working on systems built on ambient authority, where software gets to do things because of who it is or where it runs, rather than because the task at hand requires that access. We knew there was another way. The alternative had been described in the 1960s and 1970s, and some of it had even shipped. We built on ambient authority anyway, and…

I saw a variety of social media posts about people being able to use AI to “hack” their televisions into having a smarter home screen, and I finally sat down and did it myself! I am SUPER happy with the results. In this post, I’ll talk through how I made a new home screen launcher for my TV, and reprogrammed the remote to use it. About my TV I have a 2021 Samsung TV (not a Frame, it’s one of their QLED TVs that they used to sell at Costco), and it took some effort to get here, even with all the…

The Financial Times reported that Apple, by declaring some profits in Singapore and Ireland rather than the U.S., managed to reduce taxes it has to pay by $5.3bn. And that's with both Singapore and Ireland already implemented the Global minimum corporate tax rate under OECD. ~ Link: Apple Saves $2.7bn in Taxes by Booking Profits in Singapore, by Jamie John, Michael Acton, Financial Times

Welcome to another The Simple Catholic Sunday Funnies! Growing up, one of my favorite parts of Sunday was flipping to the comics section of the newspaper: a little pocket of humor, color, and light-heartedness to start the week. Now, in that same spirit, I’m excited to share this weekly collection of wholesome, funny Catholic comic … Continue reading The Simple Catholic Sunday Funnies: Episode 42 The post The Simple Catholic Sunday Funnies: Episode 42 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The…

An old friend tells me he’s reading Sir Thomas Browne for the first time – Religio Medici (1643) – and having a wonderful time. If you like your first taste of Browne, you’re likely to stick around for the full banquet. His prose is rich and nutritious. I’m pleased that another writer I admire agrees. Rose Macaulay is best known, if known at all, for her novels but in 1931 she published an excellent little book, Some Religious Elements in English Literature (Hogarth Press). She writes of…

The CasaBlanca blog went on a quiet hiatus in the beginning of August of 2026, due to personal reasons, but also due to me wanting to change up the blog while also not knowing how to do that exactly. In my attempt to move my blog posts to a new blog account, I lost my posts. I'm not very tech savvy I admit, and I decided I didn't want to bother figuring out how to get them back, as I still have my trusty phodopus Roborovski compendium that I use for jotting down hammy notes from time to time.…

Welcome to Day 8 of the Daily Dish, where today’s topic is Favorite Dame Name Noir. What’s that, you may ask? It’s a noir whose title has a dame’s name – you know, like Nora Prentiss or Laura or The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Or my favorite: Mildred Pierce! Released in 1945, this feature was the first noir I ever saw on the big screen, and I’ve loved it since the opening scene, where a hapless gent is riddled with bullets, uttering a single name as an empty gun is tossed on the floor next to…

I don't often update previous posts, but I recently updated four things I really wanted to revisit. I went back to drinking coffee, returned the Honda Civic from my car-buying post, stopped recommending zero-drop shoes for calf strains, and released a new version of my documentation theme for Jekyll, which now looks more like idratherbewriting.com.

Yesterday, Allan & I spent the day exhibiting an NCI modular layout at the West Sussex’s 40th anniversary show. This was about 8m in length and comprised all my modules (9) plus Allan’s Toblerone bridge. We set up on the Friday evening, and it all went together in a little over an hour, and ran very well all Saturday. A good test for Stuttgart in 10 days time, as most of the modules are going out with us. Here are some of the modules… Allan provided the trains…. And a few other layouts…. I did…

Sunday Mailbag Sorry this is late; as you can imagine, we got a LOT of e-mails this week, and it took time to go through them all. On that subject, we got more reports about state and local elections/dynamics than we can plausibly run today. So, we are going to extend our pre-election practice of running Local Bytes on a regular basis during the week, at least for a week or two. We also got a LOT of messages about what the results mean for the Democrats. Again, more than we can run today. As…

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…

What's been happeningAnother week around the sun! Can't remember how the week went by so fast. We had a slow start to the week - Jo wasn't feeling too well so she took a sick day off. She asked me if I could give her some company, so I took a carer's day off as well. I had my sprint planning the next day and had a bunch of pre-sprint work that was pending, so I completed some of that work while Jo was sleeping and then I joined her in the nap. It was a very nice relaxing start to Monday! By…

📷 Sunset at the mouth of the Shoalhaven River, NSW.. #photography #Australia #LandscapePhotography #Sunset

This year's model engineering show was a little special for me. Our boat club always puts on a display, and I'd entered my Dad's Victorian Steam launch. This isn't a competition, although there is a Best Boat On The Stand vote; it's just a chance to show off his workmanship. Dad was always proud of this model. OK, it's electrically powered rather than steam, but he put a lot of effort into the wooden deck, and it shows. The lines of the model are pleasing, so it doesn't look out of place at the…

New section of The River Wye, the furthest upstream I've fished it (so far) - guest of my mate Jack. The morning was spent leap-frogging upstream with lures. As well as trying to bank a pike, also looking for signs of baitfish as a starting point for an afternoon on the deads. I landed a little jack about a pound, probably watching a shoal of fish. Our only clue. In the afternoon I went back to the swim, launched out a sardine and was soon rewarded with a 14lb 1oz long, lean beauty - double #10…

I am in beautiful Atlanta attending the annual meeting of the Southeastern Academy of Legal Studies in Business (SEALSB), so I thought I would feature the artist SZA on my weekly Sunday song feature. Although SZA was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised primarily in Maplewood, New Jersey, according to this website she has a connection to Atlanta. Before pursuing music full-time, she moved to Georgia to study marine biology at Clark Atlanta University, and it was during her time in Atlanta…

Okay but why would anyone choose bad food for the same price when there are better options. Had a family lunch that was at a place that was such a cheap hotel buffet the food was worse than hawker centre. Obviously I didn’t pick the place but I suffered through it. I brought it up cos there are so many better choices. But then the person who picked the place told me to them it’s about the family being together. And they don’t care about the food. For a moment I felt chastised but then I’m like…

Big chuffed about the election results this week. Not that I think a Democratic congress can do all that much for the next two years. I just appreciate the majority of Americans being like no, f–k this. My own state of North Carolina showed up big. Gives me hope for the future of our country. In October, We spent about a week up in DC for some work + family time. We had the company all-hands and then team offsites. My coworker Nick put together this “dungeon crafter” activity, where we split…

Nicola Paton was back at the Old Grocery last weekend with her amazing needlefelted creations. We met Nicola a few years' ago and we marvel at her work every time she comes to Wivenhoe. What is even better is that she always has something new on display and her business is expanding into the creation of kits for visitors to buy and create their own aork.The first kit was the simplest possible: a

We took everyone to dinner at Coopershawk in celebration of Zane's graduation from the UEI School for HVAC and Air Conditioning Handling. We are so proud of him for getting through the program. It was Zane, his girlfriend, Lucas, Sadie, Buffy, Barb and me. We had great drinks and I did my best to keep Barb occupied so she would stop complaining about the service, which i thought was fine for such a large group. The restaurant was completely packed, and several tables turned around while we were…

Decision made: I’ll be using NEO for this rewrite, We’ll see how it goes! My initial plan is this: Import the novel into NEO (done) Reread the story, taking notes as needed (in-progress) Write a loose outline on where the rewrite should go (pending) After this, I begin writing on the story itself.

I am writing a last-minute player advice post, one last signpost on the road to player greatness. You want to be a great player? You should write a 30-page backstory. I hear your eye roll from over here, you think I am joking. No, I am dead serious (and thank you again Dante, for the inspiration and encouragement to write this one). Let me explain. There are many ways to be a good player, most of them overlap with being a good friend, passing kindergarten, or just learning how to play the game…

Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and the like want you to only search on their platforms, even if their search sucks. In the early Internet, websites wanted (and still want) to be crawled by Google, Yahoo, etc. The social media era said “actually, needing an account to see this content is the point”. Do LLMs flip that around again? If the agent never reads the FB post or NYT article, it won’t mention it to the user. The user never sees the paywall, they move on to something else. FB will want you to…

Links Posted to Thoughts The Week of 11-01-2026 There were 2 links posted this week. 11/05/2026 @14:50 I Launched My Selfie Camera Payload to 30,000ft - YouTubeThe shot of the powerslide off the launchpad from the drone is just... *chefs kiss*You could almost have gotten away with a Super Eurobeat drop from Initial D for the BGM... 11/04/2026 @07:17 WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR dot COM(I hate screenshots as a method of sharing text... the following quote is from one of the screenshots from the link…