From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 385-387: On the night of June 18, 1942, the Gripsholm of the Swedish American Line set sail from New York with a group of Japanese nationals aboard who had been detained in various makeshift camps, including one on Ellis Island. The Japanese government, in return, had dispatched the Asama Maru from the port of Yokohama, and later the Italian ship Conte Verde from Shanghai, carrying North and South American nationals home.…

A classic investigation board appears in Limetown s01e01 (Facebook Watch, 2019). ▲ Limetown s01e01 (Facebook Watch, 2019) From contributor Colin Beineke.

There’s this funny little dynamic between my father and me where we try to gauge whether the other person actually needs to go to the bathroom or is just trying to sneak off and pay for the meal. This time, I managed to beat him to it. The waiter told me it’s the same with him and his father, and that he likes it because he sees it as a sign of love. That was cute. Then he came back to the table with me to say goodbye to everyone and told us that he’ll soon be leaving Germany because he’s…

Laying dark fiberStealth Communications CC-BY-SA Wikipedia's Dark Fibre article starts: Dark fibre originally referred to the potential network capacity of telecommunication infrastructure. Because the marginal cost of installing additional fibre optic cables is very low once a trench has been dug or conduit laid, a great excess of fibre was installed in the US during the telecom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This excess capacity was later referred to as dark fibre following the…

On the left, the Aura Estelle I’ve been using all year. On the right, a great system with the Owl Paper Co and Lauren Phelps A6 notebook that just didn’t work for me. Only two weeks into my October Planner Set-Up where I changed everything, I realized it was a mistake. Not that the planner was bad but that I had a system in place. When I say system, I mean I had a personal process that I used in how often, when and where I used the planner. So I want to start by saying, the issue was NOT the…

Last year I founded the Gem Fellowship with $100,000 in funding. Myself and the gem.coop team judged applications from 40+ projects and funded eight with awards between $2500 and $20,000. This year I’m providing $100,000 again but we want to do more! Would you and your company like to join me in supporting Ruby OSS maintainers? More details on sponsorship here. Ruby open source tooling and its community are fundamental to Sidekiq and its success. I believe in committing both time and money to…

The 4K release of Aliens is a spectacular transfer. The amount of detail is an astounding demonstration of the format, and the film still stands at the pinnacle of action-meets-horror. Hard to believe it’s had 40 years of impact on the genre aesthetics, costume design, and sets. (With restraint!)

8714/21633More thoughts on Twitter�€s part in my downfall, after my initial decision to stop using it.Good on the British Comedy Guide for picking up on the sea change in podcasting. Sad to see Pappys and All Killa go, though understand the reasoning I've also noticed a few great stand ups posting about low ticket sales on their tours, which might be part of the same basic trend. The bigger name comics have always commanded the audiences, but perhaps it's skewing even further that way now.

What was it? A short story entitled “Alien Animal Encounters,” which I sold to Strange Horizons magazine, and which they published on this day in 2001. Prior to this story, I had never submitted a short story of any sort (much less a science fiction short story) to any publication. I had written short stories in high school and one in college (although that one was actually half written in high school, finished in college), and then after that there was a long dry spell for years until this…

A spaceship crash landed long ago in the desert and now it is buried in sand. Only the airlock pokes out just slightly. Inside, chrome surfaces with ivory frames. The whole place is reflective and wonderful. Most doors lift vertically. Marked doors demand a check to bypass! The whole ship is dangerous. Test your CON every turn spent exploring or lose 1HP due to radiation exposure. 1 Airlock and LobbyAn airlock in the tall ceiling meant to be accessed in 0G space travel is the first obstacle on…

Mugwort may well be the most cross-culturally consistent herb I've researched for this project, and I'd like to devote this article to it and do it properly, as I feel that it demonstrates the reach of folk knowledge quite nicely, or, in this particular case, the lack thereof that still leads to the same conclusions. A plant with many namesMugwort has been known under a variety of names in various European countries, including cronewort and felon herb; and, fittingly perhaps, Anglo-Saxon…

In artificial intelligence, general methods that make use of more computation end up winning, and by a wide margin, over systems into which someone has built what they know about the problem. As Rich Sutton argues in The Bitter Lesson, this did not happen once. It has happened again and again over seventy years of research. The reason is the price of computation. Each unit of computing costs less than the last, exponentially, yet researchers tend to work as if the available power were fixed.…

Television - “Little Johnny Jewel Parts 1 & 2” (live)I just finished Cool Machine, the final volume of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy, and I can’t emphasize enough how much I’ve loved these books. Perfect NYC period detail from the 1950s through the 1980s, fantastic and complex characters, genre-specific thrills that never devolve into cheap, lurid zones … if you haven’t checked it out, you gotta. And as if Whitehead was writing just for me, Cool Machine features a beautiful digression on…

I bought a Camp Snap digital camera that emulates the film camera experience. There’s no viewscreen, it’s point and click, and the camera takes 8MP shots. The only difference is I don’t need to send the film out to be processed. The cost of processing two rolls of film covered the cost of this camera. I am very pleased with my experience with this camera for the first 12 hours of owning it.

Previous posts in the series: On being a new parent, one year in, having a second kid, and five years in. It’s been nearly three years since my last parenting update, so I thought it was time for another one. Now that AI is better than me at everything I used to take pride in, my experience raising kids is maybe one of the only things I still bring to the table in life, so I may as well write about it, right? Kidding! I’m fine, really. Totally fine. 😅 Anyway… Here are some random thoughts about…

I don’t know if there is a God in this world. I am trying to figure that out myself. I do think that the ultimate path to God is the discovery of truth. God is truth, and in truth lies God. I am not a profound religious thinker. I don’t know the shape or size of God. That is also why I don’t think I am lucky. I don’t believe in something called luck. There is serendipity. There are lucky coincidences, whatever that means. But I do believe I am blessed. Being lucky means experiencing an event…

Reality doesn't follow our time-keeping rules, because Earth's rotation isn't the same every day. Which was why we started having leap seconds ("23:59:60"; can your input-validation code handle this?) in some years since 1972. Of course, leap seconds bring pains to a lot of people, including software developers. So, we are now transiting to a new system: leap hours. All of us on this Earth today is unlikely to be alive for the first leap hour, predicted to be needed after 1,000 years from…

I have been wanting to share this news for a long time. I am delighted to tell you that The Silent Film Companion: A Recovered and Expanded History is now available to pre-order from Rutgers University Press. This book, which will be published on 12 January 2027, contains 57 entries on individual silent films. It … Continue reading Pre-order now: The Silent Film Companion →

Over the course of the semester, I’ve been ruminating on the idea of a device free classroom. This is a nation wide trend that often begins with faculty abandoning devices such as the dreaded “powerpointer” (and embracing slides), avoiding enshittified Learning Management Systems, and not using phones in the classroom. Eventually students are drawn into process by leaving their phones and laptops in their bag and engaging more fully in the learning process while thinking more critically about…

Why Teach Philosophy is a new series of interviews with philosophers known for their teaching, their research on philosophy pedagogy, or their work on curriculum design. Created by Russell Marcus, professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, the interviews, he says, are “an offshoot of a larger research project about philosophical learning goals.” Currently there are interviews with David W. Concepción (Ball State), Mo Janzen (Anoka Ramsey CC), László Kőszeghy (International Baccalaureate),…

So now that the Kpop cups are done for the time being, now we have this one. Made in South Korea for the US market. Let’s start. It’s Friday. Bibigo Sweet & Savory KBBQ Flavor Ramyun Noodles In Sauce – United States Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, fill to line with boiling water and cover 4 minutes. Drain, saving about a tablespoon of water. Add in sachet contents. Finally, stir and enjoy! Detail of the lid (click to…

A friend reports being beset by requests from book clubs, readers circles, reading groups, to prepare some remarks for the edification of their members on the subject of his most recent book. He has a website, which may be critical in attracting these enquiries. Interacting with these requests eventually leads to a request for a donation to defray the costs of the event. The same problem was being reported recently on the SHARP listserv (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, &…

It being a perfect autumnal morning, with warm sunshine, blue skies, and just a touch of freshness in the air, we took ourselves off to the Terme di Caracalla for a Cultural Quickie®. The primary purpose was an exhibit of photos by Frank Horvat but the ruins of the baths are themselves always worth a visit. The Terme has a unique approach to photo shows, mounting large prints, made specifically I’m sure, on both sides of a free-standing transparent block of plastic. How they stand the heat, I…

Segmented mini-scenarios had existed prior in role-playing games, such as a series of individual town narratives in Dragon Quest or a variety of non-linear objectives in Ultima, but SaGa presents sketches of four separate quests entirely, bound together by an anonymous central tower. A mundane start in a sword-and-sorcery setting gives way to a steamy island-hopping locale, each with a laconic cast of characters that mostly stay out of the protagonist’s way. This changes towards something more…

I'm on the second day of an adverse reaction to the latest vaccination. Yesterday I did practically nothing, and today has been weird- a dreamy morning with my laptop doing all sorts of music editing that I'd normally be far too impatient to do. It would have been nice to be able to sing today, but I'll have to wait for that. It would have been nice to take some exercise, but ditto.I did manage to change my browser to Duck Duck Go. Sorry Googs, but I tried to search a track that Gideon Coe…

It’s been a few months since our last update, but a lot has been happening. We’ve been on the road, making connections, and continuing to lay the groundwork for Artist Corporations. Here’s where things stand and what’s coming next.The first Colorado A-Corps: July 2027In June, Colorado passed the Artist Company Act, creating a new kind of LLC designed around creative work and artist control. The law went into effect in August, but there’s been an open question about when the first A-Corps would…

If one has been following news out of Apple, this new interview of John Ternus by Andrew R. Chow, Time Magazine, will not have anything that will be surprising. (Did you know the first foldable-device patent by Apple was filed back in 2011? That was the year when Apple released iPhone 4S, the first iPhone with Apple's Siri.) But if one hasn't been keeping up with what's happening over at Cupertino, this interview is a nice summary of the what's and how's over at Apple. ~ Link: John Ternus Is…

We’ve seen the trailers. We’re in the swirl of they hype storm. What the real story wil be is yet to unfold. Even so, some are declaring success before the first reel even kicks off. It’s not hard to see the excitement around the iPhone Duo, Apple’s folding iPhone, and the Homeview gadget meant to be used in your home by you and all of your very loud family members. Even so, Time Magazine’s cover story about The Best Inventions of 2026, featuring new Apple CEO John Ternus feels a bit premature.…

"He could not face the prospect of looking at what he had shot yesterday." A documentary film about the prolific American photographer. As a film this is pretty straightforward and takes a roughly chronological look at Winogrand’s works, those that were revered and those that were reviled. The talking heads are well chosen and it gets the balance right between painting a portrait of the man, and discussing his photographs. What’s interesting about Winogrand is that unlike say Vivian Maier, he…

The idea was simple: replace the PhD student’s cumbersome NLP pipeline for the surface realisation step to generate the ontology-based educational questions, answers, and feedback with an LLM. We’d start with English and then expand to other languages relevant for both the Horizon Europe project “STARWARS” and the South African project KeBoNa that we’re part of and leading, respectively, being French, Italian, Arabic, and isiXhosa. For instance, given Disjointwith(Valve ConnectionPoint), an…