Darwiniana This plaque greets visitors to Christ’s, the Cambridge college where Charles Darwin was an undergraduate. Last Friday I’d been invited to lunch there by a friend who is a Fellow of the college, and afterwards she asked if I’d like to see the sitting room in his set, which had been restored to the state it might have been in 1828-1831, when he was a student. So we walked up the stairs in G staircase and there it was, complete with his gun in a rack above the mantlepiece. The earliest…

https://www.joshuastevens.net/blog/introducing-phosphor/ https://www.joshuastevens.net/phosphor/ Color ramps should be perceptually linear. Color ramps should be accessible Maps and data visualizations come from many tools.

Because most people stop at the ZBut not me! — On Beyond Zebra!, by Dr. Seuss A mysterious gentleman offers to give you a bag containing as many coins of any denomination of U.S. currency as you want. A million quarters? Easy. A billion double eagles, worth $20 apiece? No problem; the magic bag will enlarge itself to make room for them. “How about infinitely many?” you ask hopefully. “Oh, I can’t do that,” says the gentleman, shaking his head. “I can only ever put finitely many coins into the…

The Great British Baking Show series 17/collection 14 episode 4 was Bread Week, and it was a big fail—especially Paul Hollywood's poorly worded technical challenge.

This is Philippe, Belgium’s seventh king (and seventh monarch) since the country’s independence from the Netherlands in 1830. Like most European monarchs,1 Philippe is a constitutional monarch with a symbolic role and mostly ceremonial authority. Unlike most monarchs, however, Philippe’s isn’t official titled after his kingdom. Instead of “King of Belgium”, Philippe is “King of the Belgians” – and for the Belgians, this isn’t just a semantic distinction. Belgium’s monarchy is the sole current…

Murder in the Mazeby J.J. ConningtonGenres: Crime, Mystery Pages: 240 Rating: Synopsis: When twin brothers Roger and Neville Shandon are murdered by poisoned darts in Whistlefield's famous hedge maze, Sir Clinton Driffield arrives to restore order. He finds two terrified witnesses - visitors to the estate - and clues aplenty in this brilliantly conceived and meticulously realized country-house mystery. J.J. Connington’s Murder in the Maze is the second book I’ve read by him, if I recall…

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours If you are looking for TV repair in the East End, I recommend you visit Master Tech in Heneage St off Brick Lane – where, not only will the job be done expertly and at a fair price, but most importantly you will have the opportunity to meet Javed Iqbal, one of Spitalfields’ most engaging raconteurs. Although I do not even possess a TV, I was happy to spend my Saturday morning in Javed’s shop beside his workbench and surrounded by TV spare parts,…

Half of the chefs on Tournament of Champions: All Star Christmas season two were not on season one—and among the returning chefs, every pair is new.

about lunchtime on Friday, our phones were going krazya big one (earthquake) was comingthe thing I don't like about the Naver app is that it shows you the countdown (in the photo: where the number says "162") before the earthquake hits the area where you are (and the ring gets bigger as the earthquake "wave" approaches)...Anyway, we had 189 seconds before it was gonna hitLuckily Satoshi was

Week 10 I usually write parts of my weekly post throughout the week. And for some posts, I take about 30 mins to sit down and recap the week straight thought-to-keyboard style. Today, I decided to try a new experiment: write with a pen and paper. It’s been an unusual day in many ways. For a Sunday, I woke up way too early, around 7am. Kristen was going to work so I went to drop her off. When I woke, I felt a sudden dizziness, a first for me. And I immediately thought to myself that I didn’t get…

so i wanted to clarify by choosing not to bury the lede in this post that i don't intentionally title things based on a topic i only mention in the last paragraph of a post. i normally come up with title when i'm finished writing and so usually the last thing i wrote is what sticks out to me. i just title things based on what i think is amusing, not because i'm trying to get clicks. some time ago i decided to turn off bear blog analytics because i was checking them too much and it defeats the…

Are you in control

Calisthenics, dancing, acroyoga/acrobatics - I cannot stick to one thing, so I do them all

American Chemical Society. “Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or incisions.” ScienceDaily, 29 September 2026. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260927034004.htm This Science Daily article caught my eye. There have been all kinds of technologies that have tried to replace PRK and LASIK over the years. INTACS, SMILE, and CK come to mind. I used to work for TLC in the early 2010s. Refractive surgery was much more popular than it is now, but it wasn’t as much…

Not that Time Magazine is a particularly good arbitrator of design and innovation, but it was interesting as to what they picked as their top Consumer Electronic gadgets this year. Of the 23 choices they made, three were cameras: GoPro Mission 1 Pro ILSFujifilm Instax Mini EVO CinemaNikon ZRThree very different cameras, all distinguished by the fact that what they are didn’t really exist prior (action camera with lens mount, Super8 meets instant film, and RED-level product in a small,…

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini WILLIAM H. HALLAHAN – The Ross Forgery. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1973. Avon, paperback, 1975. The Ross Forgery, Hallahan’s second novel, is an unusual bibliomystery with a compelling and ingenious premise. New York typographer Edgar Ross, one of those brilliant but unsuccessful types, is approached by tycoon Emmett O’ Kane, who wants him to create a forgery of a nineteen thcentury folio by Thomas Wise. O’Kane’s stated reason: to show up a fellow…

The evening sun silhouettes sunflowers growing on ridge near Celina, Texas. The post Sunflower Silhouettes appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I am happy to say, recovery is going very well. So well, I’m suspicious! 😄 When I had a laparoscopy done, some 15 or so years ago, the thing that surprised me most was how it basically wiped me out for a month. I felt so weak for so long, and completely drained. Now? I … Continue reading Doing well, and some garden surprises

I just finished preparing my undergraduate lecture on the Debye model for solids. Here are my slides. The course is a third-year course on statistical mechanics. In the previous lecture, they learned about blackbody radiation and derived the Planck spectrum.(Note. The derivations are not included, as I sketch them by hand on a document viewer. This slows down the pace of the lecture and engages the students as they detect mistakes I make. :) ) A few things I find interesting about the lecture…

A c. 1904-05 photo of Jasper Johns’s father seated on his father’s lap. His mother Evelina died in 1906, and Grandpa Johns remarried in 1911. The artist, who lived with these grandparents, used this picture in works beginning in 1994. While re-reading this post about Jasper Johns’s use of an old family photo in a series of prints in the 1990s, I thought I’d look up his grandparents on familysearch.org. It turns out the grandmother in the photo, Johns’s father’s mother, Evelina, died soon after…

Here's Blake sharing his feelings about AI, software development and where we're all heading. He wrote the article that's been on my TODO list for a while. Let me comment on some highlights. I feel like I will be able to build things I never have been able to before, but at the same time, I have heightened fears about being replaceable or less valuable in my job. If all I’m doing is prompting an AI bot, why am I being paid so much? 100% this. I'm scared and worried that the skills I put so much…

James, Joel, and I had a discussion about favorite foods, which devolved, as it often does among folks who like writing, into an idea for a ‘blogging challenge.’ If you’re unfamiliar with what such a thing is, it’s often a series of questions around a certain theme you’re invited to participate in. James has since created the previously discussed ‘Food Questions Challenge’, and I’ve shared my answers! In this post, however, what I’d like to present to you is the ‘Cooking Conundrums Challenge,’…

cogdogblog. CC BY 2.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become involved in an honor society to which I was elected in college. I’ve mused a great deal since then about the split between two assumptions, namely a) my own naive ones regarding said society’s asserted raison d’être (service to development of the mind and hence social responsibility, love of learning much more robust than the instrumentalist “lifelong learning” touted in corporate culture), and b) the…

D&D was fun this week, I’m enjoying Luke’s creative encounters, we had to defuse some peanut-butter-smothered dynamite before some squirrels got to it. Weekly is quite nice tbh, something to look forward to on a Monday! Charlotte and I played Finspan again, it’s a good game and it’s nice and quick. I like it when we have a little phase of sitting down to a game, it feels wholesome. I invented a new game for the cats called Stargazy Pie. I have a cardboard box with multiple holes in it, I sit…

last updated 1 minute ago hey! it's weeknotes number sixty eight! what a large and ever growing amount of weeknotes! the fact that you can't wear glasses to try on glasses, and thus have to squint and ask other people how you look, is a crime. i hope i picked well cos they're so expensive, and i'm way more sure about one pair lol. been thinking a lot about community and "what i owe to others" at the minute, after conversations i do think i would do well to try and find places where people are…

At this point it is super clear that I probably have ME/CFS. This has not been determined by a doctor (not for lack of trying!), but by a lifetime of experience and the fact that the issues I have match the profile pretty much exactly. I’d be tempted to blame the bad case of COVID I got back in 2024 but the precursors were there for a long, long time, so if COVID did anything it was just to push me over an edge I had been approaching for a while.Here are some of the signs that are now obvious…

Chill out this winter with these Twin Peaks and David Lynch-inspired events and screenings taking place around the world in January to March 2027. TWIN PEAKS AND DAVID LYNCH-INSPIRED EVENTS FROM JANUARY TO MARCH 2027 Below is a round up of Twin Peaks and David Lynch-themed events taking place in January to March 2027 .... The post Chill Out In Winter 2027 with Twin Peaks and David Lynch-Inspired Events and Screenings appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

24. Cumberland Lodge Oak, Windsor Great Park