The European Space Agency’s Euclid Mission is mapping the distribution of galaxies on large scales with the intention of finding out about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Making such maps involves surveying large areas of the sky for a very long time and doing that makes it inevitable that something unexpected will crop up. That happened last month, between 16th and 24th September 2026, when the Euclid telescope accidentally discovered a comet. Here is an image showing what Euclid…

I'm tired, boss. 🔗 https://things.pagecord.com/dark-forestry

Preschool is a time for children to experiment with community and their place in it. One of the things they experiment with is hoarding. What happens when I manage to control all, or most, of a valuable resource?Of course, they probably don't frame the question so clearly. More often than not, a child who likes, say, Hot Wheels, will keep adding to their collection until they have all of them. A boy once took a fancy to our giant plastic insects, put them in a pile and sat on them. It happens…

UofG Tower from the bridge over the Kelvin flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license Today’s TDC says One of the options on the Write Out 2026 Choice Board is a prompt to consider the voice of a river. You can learn more about the prompt — including a walk through an urban block by Amanda Eke of The Poet Speaks and Puerto Rican poet and educator Mario José Pagán Morales here. Think of a waterway near you or one that have visited. What would it say…

After a year, I decided it was time to do a proper write-up of my "stack system" so I had something I could point at. This update also introduces an entire new section of my website for creating things with cardboard, including two new photo-illustrated articles about creating "stack displays" for your stacks.

I remember the first time I heard The Beatles sing “and in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make.”I was younger then. Of course.I was much different too. But so was the world and so was my address, so was my state of mind and my lifestyle and so were the times, and so was the people, places, and the things around me. Life changes and so do we.Love changes too and then again, the alterations and the changes we face can be eye-opening to say the least. The changes we experience…

I have a new paper that just came out (link), coauthored with Peter Doshi, Mark Jones and Linda Wastila, entitled "Transparency of clinical trials: reproducing and extending analyses".This paper stems from some work we did to make use of the release of many thousand documents from Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine trial. This release was made possible by a FOIA request, made in the public interest since the vaccines were subsidized by a lot of public funds.The trove of documents was vast but…

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

This is a recording of our AI Book Club discussion of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, held October 18, 2026. Ratings ranged from two stars to five, but most of the group agreed the book made AI warfare feel immediate rather than futuristic. We talk about how much of the kill chain is information work long before anyone fires a weapon, moral injury among remote operators, the habit of clicking allow on every permission prompt, who's to…

Mushrooms, birds, animals and landscapes have composed much of my photography. As of late, however, I have wondered about my connection to people, or lack thereof. This focus on connection has had the camera fall silent for a time, but now my lens seems to find a new focal point. I have started to see in myself just how very distant I have kept people in my life. At the same time I have also been drawn to photograph people and places, entirely virgin ground for me. I was never drawn to the…

So Constans II survived the attempt by Valentinus to become emperor in 644, and ruled for another 22 years, accomplishing a few "firsts" for an eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor. He was the first Byzantine Emperor to visit Rome (in 663) since the fall of the Western Empire in 476. Pope Vitalian greeted him warmly (since 476, the emperor in Constantinople was also the emperor of the entire Roman Empire, west as well as east, and so the pope's secular lord). Constans, however, did not respect…

Power Cat 2026-10-21 Hey Y'all! Power Cat is unfortunately going to be uploaded more sporadically from now on. I haven't been able to keep up with drawing him every day due to school. I still want to draw him when I have time though, and I hope I can make some of them drawn a little better the way I was doing it for a while. Thanks for reading Power Cat! School is going well!

The Finite and the Infinite Borsuk problem TYI(60) The question Let f(d) be the smallest integer so that every set of diameter one in can be covered by f(d) sets of smaller diameter. Let g(d) be the smallest integer so that every finite set of diameter one in can be covered by g(d) sets of smaller diameter. Clearly g(d) ≤ f(d) Test your intuition: Is g(d)=f(d) ? TYI (60): my intuition The answer is not known, but my own intuition is that g(d)<f(d) for every large d. In my lecture around the…

Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start building furniture with marshmallow while quite a few places in Europe are on fire.Hi there! If revenge is a dish best served cold, what is revolution? A buffet. Everyone shows up hungry, no one agrees on the menu.Piero✹Jean-Jacques Rousseau, quoted in Histoire de la Revolution Française. Centuries later quoted on Wikipedia, and by the Aerosmith. The Marching Pantry, with StyleA protester in Paris wearing an 18th century period costume…

For many, the two best months of the year are July and August. (You summer people know who you are!) I’m here to make the case for why September and October are truly the best months. Here’s just some reason why I love them so much: you get the best of both Summer and Autumn. … Continue reading Why the best two months of the year are September and October

I was watching a video by John Higgins this morning about the poem in Ecclesiastes 3, one of the most famous passages in the Bible. There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time…

I mentioned back on the very first day of this year that my friend Scott Wood and I were planning on setting up something around the “Hastings Weird”: There are some existing loose local networks/communities that I’d like to get involved with or am already getting involved with—both for the joy of being part of a community and with an eye towards Prefiguration—and there is also a gap that Scott Wood (of Reweirding, the London Fortean Society, and the Londonist) and I have identified for a…

On the road this week, so an abbreviated Warship Wednesday. Some 85 years ago this week, the final Yorktown-class fleet carrier, USS Hornet (CV-8), was commissioned on 20 October 1941 at Naval Operating Base Norfolk, Capt. Marc Andrew “Pete” Mitscher (USNA 1910) in command. Laid down on 25 September 1939, three weeks after Hitler crossed into Poland, she had launched at Newport News on 14 December 1940; sponsored by Mrs. Annie Reid Knox (nee Reid), wife of SECNAV Frank Knox. These below LIFE…

Working for gold coins.A few weeks ago, I wrote about different kinds of payment methods for freelance creatives. That article is titled, Design Hireling: Payment Models. Today's article is a sequel about calculating your rate—how much do you charge for your work? How much do you charge hourly? And how much do you charge for a flat-rate project like a zine, book cover, or illustration?Reminder, this article is partly a reminder to myself. I'm the worst offender when it comes to charging what…

Over the past couple of weeks I have been experimenting with Linux Mint on two devices: a MacBook Pro and a Microsoft Surface Laptop. You don’t really notice the habits you develop over years of using macOS, so spending time with Mint in different hardware was a good opportunity to question which ones were worth keeping and also try out new experiences altogether. For future reference and because I believe sharing what we do fosters adoption, in this note I will jot down the tweaks and changes…

Dead Wake, by Erik Larson, published 2015, history, 440 pages. Really good, though my interest in ever going on a cruise may have plummeted. The conjecture toward the end about a possible and kind of horrifying reason why England didn’t send an escort for the Lusitania (and didn’t have the ship go around the north of Ireland, etc.) was fascinating. Recommended. In our current age of AI psychosis smothering the software development industry, this part also hit home for me and lined up nicely…

Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead, by K. J. Parker, published 2026, fantasy, 430 pages. Earthy bits aside, I enjoyed it, as I typically do with Parker’s books. Most of his (at least those I’ve read) have been low fantasy, but this had a bit more, which was a fun surprise. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe, published 2018, history, 540 pages. Quite good. Compelling and well-written. There’s the titular murder as a frame story, but…

If you know me, you know I love Elixir. The language is beautiful and LLMs are good at writing it. The bigger reason is that it takes away the need for a lot of other things you may instinctively reach for when developing serious production systems.

If you know me, you know I love Elixir. The language is beautiful and LLMs are good at writing it. The bigger reason is that it takes away the need for a lot of other things you may instinctively reach for when developing serious production systems.

Been sleeping late and today I woke up just before 0800. Last night was peaceful too. I barely coughed at all and I was only entered in one toilet trot race. I coughed off an on all day but nowhere near the volume and intensity yesterday. I hope this trend continues because it was nice for a change. ready for clean upThe box looked good when I eyeballed it. All the tails/pins appeared to be gap free.flushing the cornersThe bottom of a box (or a drawer) is the reference surface. I flushed the…

The 250th anniversary of the battle of White Plains is nearly upon us! This weekend not only will over 1500 revolutionary war reenactors converge for the largest event in decades, but the German Auxiliaries will have historic turnout as well! We are excited to have such dedicated people, many of whom are travelling over a thousand miles to participate. So come to the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation this weekend and see a Hessian style camp, uniquely German maneuvers and tactics, and of course the…

House collapsed in the ocean at Rodanthe, May 2024 (photo from Wikimedia) 21 October 2026: Part 2 of The Ocean is Unforgiving When You Build Your House on Sand When I was a teenager my family used to vacation on the beach at Nags Head, North Carolina in cottages across the road from Jockey’s Ridge sand dunes. Fifteen years later when my husband and I visited Nags Head, the ocean was closer to the road, the beach was narrow, and the cottages were gone. I wasn’t there to see what happened to…

An idea that we discussed recently that stuck with me: ten extra minutes spent making sure what you send is concise and clear can save the organization two hundred minutes. The math is simple. Send something vague or sloppy to twenty people, and each of them spends ten minutes decoding what you actually meant. Brevity and synthesis aren’t just good writing. They’re a form of respect for everyone else’s time.

“Before the Flood” by W.S. Merwin --

In case you missed it:Let's get the obvious out of the way. To the extent that a car is defined as a vehicle for personal transportation, what we saw demonstrated last week was a flying car-shaped object (possibly with scare quotes around "flying"). The cold-gas thrusters that kept the "car" aloft for a few seconds didn't have anyone in it, partially because the passenger seats had been replaced with compressed air tanks, but mainly because the thrusters were so loud that anyone within by some…