The Plough and Stars, a pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has begun hosting “philosophy nights”, and they’re a hit. Last month, people piled into the place for food, drink, and a talk by Agustín Rayo (MIT) on math and certainty. photo via The Plough and Stars Later this month, Helena de Bres (Wellesley) will be giving a talk there on “What is meaning in life?” and reportedly there are around 120 people on the waitlist to attend. While there is a high concentration of academic and…

I just finished watching the film, KDE: The Documentary — The Story of Free Software Underdogs. I’m not a Linux user as my main computer although I could see myself using Linux very easily. Whether you are a KDE fan or not, this is an interesting film. I enjoyed it!

I reread Stephen King's Carrie last night, because I last read it when I was nine, and mostly what I remembered was the false bill of goods it provided on the wonders of puberty. (Still waiting for my telekinetic powers....) This morning I am shelving books, minding my business, when suddenly I get burn-the-school-down mad over this: In the book, we're told that Carrie's mom supports their household on an entry level job at a laundromat. We're not told, or given the impression, that Carrie has…

NASA/ESA/P. Jefferies (STScl) Illustration of the stages of a dying star as it collapses into a black hole. A core-collapse supernova occurs when a massive star reaches the end of its life. After running out of hydrogen and other light elements to burn, the star makes a last ditch effort to counter gravity, fusing ever heavier elements at an ever faster pace. Eventually it reaches the point where heavy fusion extracts energy from the core rather than adds it. The core rapidly contracts, then…

by Jim Nielsen Jim gives his notes on an amazing talk by Alexander Petros, and the topic is super relevant for any web dev. It goes into how many of us, when modernizing our tech stack just for the sake of modernizing it, end up with objectively worse results than we’d have if we stuck to the tried and true. HTML’s ideological goal is to make websites good for their users. React’s ideological goal is serving Facebook, which mostly wants to serve you ads. Both have completely different…

I see that today is Oscar Wilde's birthday (born 1854). Here is something I wrote some years ago about him – or rather about an altogether extraordinary Max Beerbohm essay, 'A Peep into the Past'...'Browsing my overcrowded bookshelves with a view to some thinning out, I came across a collection of previously uncollected pieces by Max Beerbohm, A Peep into the Past (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972) – definitely a keeper. The title essay is a quite extraordinary piece, written in 1893/4, when Max was a…

I don't (and try not to) rant on here very often. This morning, however, I was once again presented with a situation that has convinced me of my position on a couple of things. So, here is the simple backstory: It is 6:30 a.m. I am on my way to work and hit the drive-through at McDonald's on the way. Simple order: two sausage McGriddles and a large Diet Dr Pepper (yeah, healthy, I know...). It's not busy, there's one car ahead of me, and my order is not complex or specialized. I pull up, she…

Now you have found your land, navigated the law, built your cabin, kitted it out with furniture, collected your food, and bought your cheapest possible computer, you might want to include some services that provide connectivity like internet. How about Starlink for £19 up front and £9 monthly? Starlink have given me a personal referral […] The post [non-free] Cheapest possible Off-Grid Connectivity appeared first on Circuspam.Coffee.

Table of Contents Table of Contents What dockurr/windows Actually Is What Was Left in the Storage Directory Bringing It Back With One Command NETWORK=nat Silently Became passt Checking That It Works Without Touching a Mouse Making It Permanent With a Quadlet What It Uses: RAM, CPU and Disk WinBoat or Plain dockurr/windows? Caveats Conclusion A few weeks ago I set up WinBoat on my Fedora laptop. WinBoat is a nice Electron frontend that runs Windows applications as if they were Linux windows. It…

Week #817 We organized three surveys this month. We continue with our monthly student survey. October is usually one of our largest months. We also started a survey for younger students and high school students. For the 1st-5th graders, it is all anonymous, no names, just sex and grade. We send the info to the school contact who keeps track of who’s taken it and hasn’t and hands out the unique codes accordingly. The survey is all text to speech and images. At the other end of the spectrum, we…

Jekyll and Hyde (2015) In my review earlier this week, I mentioned that the show

My thanks to Mojave Paint for sponsoring 512 Pixels. Development is moving quickly on Mojave Paint; during this week’s sponsorship they added true Clipping Masks.

For the Balkinization symposium on Diego Zambrano, How Americans Enforce the Law (Stanford University Press, 2026).James E. Pfander In How Americans Enforce the Law, Diego Zambrano sets out to document and to explain that distinctively American legal institution: the private lawsuit aimed at the enforcement of public law. In a book length treatment of the subject that combines careful study, elegant theorizing, and inspired description, Zambrano provides an exceptionally readable and engaging…

An exhibition about the Cassini map, La Carte de France de Cassini: Une encyclopédie du territoire, is now running at the Musée des Archives nationales in the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris. Chef d’œuvre cartographique… More

I love this time of day. . .Quitting time.It is another day above the dirt . . . More accurately, it is sunset in my mid to moderate sized town in the suburbs. I am south of Paradise and north of damned. Or more to the point and for all else who fail to understand, I am somewhere between Purgatory and all points east of Eden. Or maybe I am west of the infernal, depending upon the view or the time of day and the flow of traffic.I am somewhere familiar and someplace that knows me well enough to…

A Friday Hodgepodge Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.*** 1. Contrary to how things usually work out for me, I managed to celebrate Columbus Day this year. One of the things I enjoyed was a guided tour of the Abita Springs Brewery, who craft Andygator, one of my favorite local beers. 2. I love poached eggs and my son loves hard boiled eggs. I hate guesswork and messes, so I used to buy his eggs pre-made and enjoy…

After inktober last year, I dove into gothicized italics with watercolor and gouache. I still have a pile of construction paper to scan and share. , A light grey on black paper got pushed into a gold villain with curves and hue-saturation adjustments. , A little capricorn—the discovery of using R’s as ligatures still sparks joy each time I see it. , A sunset to go with the sunrise that started Inktober 52 in 2025. , A sharp bloody cruel. I’ve really pushed for thin hairlines wherever I can amp…

Hey there. Here are 4 links I thought were worth sharing this week: #1. Let’s use AI as much as we like, but we should still write our PR descriptions (7min). #2. The xkcd cartoon is real. A few people hold up the entire internet (15min). Some of them do it on their free time, for free. #3. If we shouldn’t use AI to produce art, what about programming? It isn’t special if it’s art too (10min). Do you think programming is art? #4. As a funny side note, these 6 countries secrelty have the same…

Yellow leaves falling in the fog. A chipmunk runs onto the porch, sees me and stops short, with a walnut larger than its head between its teeth.

ChatGPT: Electrician, Registered nurse, HVAC technician, Plumber, Physical therapist, Mental health counselor, Industrial maintenance technician, Firefighter and Special education teacher. Gemini: Plumbers, Electricians, & Skilled Trades, Surgeons & Emergency Physicians, Psychotherapists & Mental Health Counselors, Elementary & Special Education Teachers, Firefighters & Emergency First Responders, Trial Lawyers & Litigation Advocates and Construction Site Managers & Heavy Equipment Operators.…

Kusama Infinity Nets the bigger, the earlier the better, unless they’re tiny and from the 2000s. This pocket-sized, 5×7 acrylic and glitter painting from 2000 has been around, the secondary market equivalent of cigarettes in prison. But it still delivers. It just sold a few minutes ago at Sotheby’s in London, after not selling in 2017 in a horrible-sounding, two-artist sale/show with Louise Bourgeois at Sotheby’s S2 Gallery called Traumata, and then selling—untraumatically—three months later.…

Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he… More

It happens infrequently enough to not investigate too much further, but sometimes I'll end up with my Xorg/X11 session crashing, or something else happening which leads to my existing tmux sessions failing to interact with the new X session, with errors like: % gh repo view --web Opening ... in your browser. Error: cannot open display: :0 % xsel xsel: Can't open display: (null) : Connection refused In this case, the existing panes/windows may end up seeing a related error about failing to…

[2009]And now for something completely different.Aquatic/tropical ambient gone wrong. Hazy and hypnotic. The ethereal surreal vibe insidiously gets threateningly cataclysmic. From the lo-fi ambient/psych-drone end of hypnagogia comes this slice of atmospheric weirdness. I still can't quite figure out why Ferraro was so compelling in his peak era 2006-2010. Endlessly fascinating.Mysterious.

(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.) We’re all familiar with the acronym NPD for New Pen Day, or NID for New Ink Day, but have you heard of SPD (and no,I don’t mean Shimano Pedaling Dynamics for you cycling folks). I’m talking about the (hopefully) lesser known and used acronym for Sad Pen Day. While I hope none of us…

Nipponites mirabilis photo by Masahiro MiyasakaOf all the unlikely body plans, Nipponites take the cake! Just look at the twists and turns in these great photos captured by Masahiro Misaka. Imagine slipping beneath the surface of a Cretaceous sea. Above you, sunlight breaks into shifting ribbons. Tiny particles drift through the water, catching the light before disappearing into

Jessie ordered this cute kitty design from her bakery's book: Her bakery ran out of the printed paper, though, and then I guess also people who know how to decorate cakes: Yowch. And I don't think that candle placement is helping any, Jessie. Do you have any large house plants instead? Maybe a piñata or two? Shannon ordered a Minecraft sheet cake, which usually looks something like this: Instead, she got what appears to be an Oscar-the-Grouch skin carpet on a dirty tile floor: Double "yowch."…

From January to September 2026 I was product lead for a small multidisciplinary create/change team at NHS England. Our mission: work out how people could see and manage all of their NHS appointments in the NHS App, not just the ones from their GP and hospital.In September the programme decided to end our part of the work. I wanted to bring some closure to what we started and shared in the design history we published in March, and take stock of where we got to.Where we left off in MarchWe'd…

2026-10-16Back at the New York Film Festival...Hello!The Korean drama film Possible Love is set to release on October 23 in the US, a month after South Korean theaters held screenings. I didn't see the film myself at the festival that night — I had a train to catch home, and I didn't fancy paying tickets or registering for a full press pass — but the critique online seem good. It seems to be well received.I've already talked about my preparation for the portrait photography frenzy, and my…