The masses are often overruled. How often do they act against the interests of the people they represent? Clear majorities want a decent minimum wage of $17/hour. Majorities support a host of other downright leftist policies. Most americans say government should run a universal healthcare program. These majorities often hold up across political parties and the urban/rural divide. But even with our broad support, we haven't achieved these goals yet. Why not? Our achievements, from the civil…
Two classic string boards are connected by red string in Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022). ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022) ▲ Mind Thief (dir. Matt Steinauer, 2022)
Tomorrow is International Cat Day. If you know me, everyday is Cat Day so let’s celebrate our favorite feline couch potatoes. Trying to narrow down our combined love for stationery and cats was such a challenge. Van Dieman’s has a 15-color ink collection called Feline with fabulous illustrations on the bottles including Persian Princess which looks 100% like Princess Donut (IYKYK). Midori D-Clips Nano Clips – Cat – Box of 16 ($8.50) “Everyday is Caturday” Cat Rainbow Washi Tape ($4) Uni…
It is of course impossible to predict the effects of new AI technologies on total economic growth in a precise way, but there are strong reasons to believe that the effect will be modest for a decade or two, anyway. Charles Jones Jones explores some of the reasons in “AI and Our Economic Future,” in the most recent Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 2026). His arguments readily accept that AI capabilities both have grown very rapidly and will continue to grow very rapidly: indeed, Jones…
A worker at a US government lab got bitten by a monkey carrying a deadly virus, and it turned out nobody knew what to do about it. Around the same time, someone from the same lab tried to smuggle outbreak samples into the country. All of this while everyone's worried about AI making bioweapons. Let's take a look.
A week of Blaugust, a honkaku mystery, some music for Bandcamp Friday, Traitors NZ, and more Zelda. We are a week into Blaugust and I have managed a post a day so far. However next Monday I'm back to work for a full seven days so will probably not continue that pace. Probably another link post on Monday or Tuesday and a digest on Friday at least. I also need to spend some more time job hunting. I am only really employed at my current job until the end of September. Which isn't that far away.…
I saw this Spotted Eagle Ray last weekend and it might be the biggest one I’ve ever seen. The head was huge. Compare it with a photo I posted last month (below) of a juvenile Eagle Ray.
Pega Um! mini music player widget (2026/08/07) As I'm working on the site for the local fanzine project Pega Um!, I want to welcome with music the people who pick up the zine and find it interesting enough to visit the site. The playlist is made up of songs by local artists they won't hear on the radio, and is an homage to old alternative events called Junta Tribo (Tribal Gathering) that would have rock, hip-hop, punk, reggae, metal and ska groups all in the same line-up. Check it out here.
Loads of anglers have been a great help to me over the years. I always try and help others when I can as it's always good to give something back to the community. It's also nice when someone tells me that they enjoy reading my fishing related ramblings and if it's helped them get more out of their own fishing then that's even more satisfying. Welsh angler Ben Price is an acomplished match angler and specimen hunter who turned his attention to species hunting a few years ago. Finding this blog…
Last month, I visited Lawers Dam in the Grampian Mountians with my mate Nick, for a day stomping around a boggy hillside hunting for mountain ringlet, a species of butterfly that's only found high up above an altitude of 350m in the Scottish highlands and also down south in the Lake District. Having managed to find the remaining thirty three species of butterfly found in Scotland, the mountain ringlet was the last one I had to see. After a long drive, we spotted one very quickly and my…
The results to the State of CSS 2026 survey are now available. Here's my summary from the parts of the survey that are most relevant to my work on the web platform. My findings are almost entirely based on the free form comments which developers left in the survey. Features developers love Before we get all depressed and dive into pain points and missing features, let's start with some positive stuff. Favorite new features (Results) Developers really like the following new CSS features: Anchor…
tag(s): #fútbol #español Estuvimos de visitas familiares por el sur argentino[1], y tuve dos encuentros tan improbables que quise documentarlos en un post. El gallito en Neuquén Fui con mi sobrino a hacer unas compras cerca de su casa y me presentó al almacenero como "hincha del gallito de Morón". Obviamente como producto de la Zona Oeste de GBA[2], la mención del equipo local inició una conversación con el buen hombre, que me contó que se mudó a Neuquén hace como 20 años. Si bien emigrar a…
Lunch break conversation at Pete Galbert’s school/shop can be as educational as the class itself; George is even taking notes. Maybe it’s Pete’s chairs that ease conversation. We did get up from time to time to make shrink pots and … Continue reading →
In Stonington for an iced tea (and WiFi) Wind filling in and heading west.
*Poor little Mistral
Think I found this at Asian Family Market on 130th & Aururoa. Anyways, it’s all in Korean with a nondescript info sticker. A little image translate and bar code lookup helped with this one. Last one of the week. Kidari Instant Noodle Kimchi Flavor – South Korea A distributor / import sticker (click to enlarge). Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Contains ancovy. To prepare, remove lid and add everything in. Add boiling water to line and stir and stir. Finally, stir some more and…
The arbitration award surfaced in the last week of January 2026, and if you listened close enough over the Los Angeles freeway hum, you could almost hear a Stratocaster set down for the last time. Mick Mars, the crooked-spined riff wizard who spent forty-plus years welding sleaze-metal to a Marshall stack, lost. Got flattened. The arbitrator ruled entirely for the band, ordered Mars to repay over $750,000 in unrecouped tour advances, and added a coda reading like a shrug in a black robe: he…
On her blog, Lea Verou makes a case that each user-facing website dark-mode toggle should only ever show two options, but in a smart way. The challenge is that any dark mode toggle needs to actually accommodate three options: dark, light, and the default “whatever the system says” (which can be always dark, always light, or change with the time of day). Many toggles simply pass that complexity onto the user: I want to get something out of the way: I don’t think Verou’s article as an article is…
As I began understanding myself better, I realised that my understanding of the world is inverted. I understand almost everything through its absence rather than its presence. If you ask me what kind of furniture you should buy for your house, my mind doesn't imagine the perfect piece of furniture. Instead, it imagines a house without any furniture and concludes that anything would be better than nothing. I don't picture what would look beautiful. I simply recognise that furniture ought to…
Week #807 Our WebRTC project has somewhat stalled. We meet normally on Fridays, and the consensus is that it’s moving too slowly between bug reports and fixes. We proposed to meet on Wednesdays for a short time, then Fridays to organize priorities. This week, they cancelled the Wednesday meeting (not sure why), then last minute cancelled the Friday meeting. Which is annoying because we spent some time over the previous weekend and Tuesday night to fix the immediate issues for review. Now we’re…
A rather uneventful visit to EKSN. It was windy, with a single airplane parked on the airside.
Somehow it is August already. They made an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie. I had hoped to watch it with all three children but Emma said she wasn’t that interested and, truth be told, Rowan’s enthusiasm was at least 90% due to the popcorn I had opened into a bowl. I thought the film itself was fine. It was fun to see the characters again but I admit that it’s been less than a week and I’m struggling to remember much of what happened. It’s perhaps not that surprising given Rowan’s always…
Last month, I drove all the way to Taynish National Nature Reserve on the west coast of Scotland to look for the marsh fritillary butterfly. I didn’t see one sadly, so about two weeks later, I returned with my mate Nick for another attempt. Staying overnight, the first day we wandered around the reservse for hours, but didn’t have any luck. After dinner and a pint or two in the Tayvallich Inn that evening, we did a spot of fishing around the village. As well as a few small corkwing wrasse, we…
Torness Power Station is coming towards the end of its lifespan. In the next few years it will be decommissioned. I’ve caught a good variety of species from both the area where water is drawn in to cool the reactors and where it returns to the sea in a much hotter condition. The fishing can however be very mixed. Like the water around the station it can be hot or cold! I’ve had a few amazing sessions there, but also some very tough ones! Last month I visited twice and unfortunately the fishing…
And there you are, at the moment you knew it was about to come. You feel you cannot stand another day as a physician. You want to leave. You’ve decided you’re going to leave. You could leave now. But now you’re in the middle of your medical specialisation. You’ve been on a path for nearly a decade, and now you’re nearing its conclusion. How can you walk away? You make a decision. I don’t know if it’s the right or the wrong decision, but it’s a remarkable decision. You decide you’re going to…
Years before Github (or git, for that matter) existed, I was publishing my open source software on my own websites. However, larger projects (and eventually some of mine) used a website called SourceForge, which was a reliable source — you could trust downloads from that website. At some point, SourceForge offered CVS and/or Subversion support — for the youngsters, CSV and Subversion were other version control systems that predate git. Around 2007, Github launches and popularized Git and having…
Reading Maps plots fictional journeys on the map. Creator Aires Loutsaris explains: Reading Maps came out of a nagging thought that every story has happened somewhere. Odysseus crossed a real sea. The Pequod sailed real… More
When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I hoped I'd done enough to deal with an ant invasion into our home. I'd anticipated it. We live within the jurisdiction of a home owners association and periodically, when ant populations begin to surge, they lay down insecticide. Whenever they do this, within 30 minutes, the ants come inside.Of course, they're escaping the tragedy and my home, being relatively poison free, is a sanctuary. Usually, they just mill around on the floor, but this time, one the…
Barack Obama has announced his annual summer reading list: Kin, by Tayari JonesThe Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth StroutA World Appears, by Michael PollanWhistler, by Ann PatchettThis Land Is Your Land, by Beverly GageVigil, by George SaundersOne Sun Only, by Camille BordasSeek Immediate Shelter, by Vincent YuData Empire, by Roopika RisamTranscription, by Ben LernerCool Machine, by Colson Whitehead You can catch a video at The Obama Presidential Center’s Instagram post. (Don’t forget to turn…
I’ve never really held back from jumping in at the deep end, with both feet, not worrying whether in fact I can swim or not. I created my own self-belief long ago. Something I think I learnt from a very early age; maybe 3-4 years old? Preschool, one bright sunny afternoon, poolside, I took a huge flying leap towards some random guy in the pool my sister was dating who, arms open ready to catch me, turned at the very second I flew over his shoulders, whereupon I landed in the water with a rather…
