Snapshots, time travel and writable branches for pipelines, experiments, reproducible reports and more. A data import needs validation. A report needs last month’s numbers. A migration needs realistic test data. An analyst wants to compare two transformations, and an agent needs somewhere to try its own. These workflows share a requirement: keep a known database state, then inspect it or work independently from it. I built duckdb-differential to make that available directly from SQL. It adds…

It’s the time of the year where horse apples (also known as Osage oranges) are thick on the ground at the local nature preserve. I call them “brain fruit” because, well, look at it, it kind of looks like a green, sickly brain just lying there on the trail. As I understand it, these fruits are not poisonous to humans or other animals, but none of them particularly like it, either. There is some speculation that this fruit evolved to attract a seed-spreader who no longer exists (like a giant…

And somehow, if I get to trying it, I am often able to enjoy it. A side of me thinks my taste is pretty good because of this. I’ve never finished a book or videogame thinking that it wasn’t worth it. To tell the truth, I also happen to get recommendations from friends and reviewers with good taste, excellent podcasts, YouTubers I trust, and all the cool bloggers that I follow here, there is so much good stuff to enjoy, I rarely put myself in a position where I think of something as a slog. I…

Notes for a talk introducing highschools to differential calculus.

I am bassist in a Grateful Dead cover band. I do a lot of DJing. I'm a utility guy in a variety show (that sadly ends this month). And I also do synths and drum programming in an '80s-style band. It feels like a lot, and it feels like it should = me as a middling generalist, but that's not at all the case. It all seems to be going somewhere, and I don't know where, and I'm real good with that. I think I'm doing a good job in all aspects, and if I wasn't, I'd quit the band, whichever situation…

The proposal period for Interop 2027 closed in late September, which means the Interop team is now in the process of working through all the proposals and ultimately deciding which will be taken on next year. Part of that process is looking at “developer signals”, which is a loose amalgamation of “State of…” survey results, feedback gathered by developer relations teams, blog posts, YouTube videos, and so on. A relatively new tool is Jake Archibald’s ranking tool, where anyone with a Github…

Day 2 of not daily journal writing and actually writing my book and... ... darn it, no natural image to accompany 'The Aviary' on my https://legs.bearblog.dev/ blog. I literally drew a blank, but heard birdsong. And this idea flew in which makes possible the other thought I've blogged about before - sharing sound. Thanks to https://icyti.me/ emailing me some good advice on how to upload tracks, and taking the plunge and creating a Soundcloud Account, I've created a slash/sound page where the…

I’m delighted to announce the details for the launch of my new book, Confessions of a London River Hunter which will be at Housmans Bookshop, Kings Cross on Monday 9th November at 7.30pm. Booking is required on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale or you can purchase the book in advance which grants entry (free tickets can be requested by emailing: shop@housmans.com) https://housmans.com/event/book-launch-confessions-of-a-london-river-hunter-by-john-rogers/ Join us for an evening with celebrated…

Cady Noland, Untitled, 2026, printed posters, 2 1/2 x 36 x 27 in., installed on a table next to Untitled, 2026, table, UV print on aluminum, sheriff’s badge in acrylic, 33 x 60 x 30 in., at Gagosian Davies St, London, : a greg.org hero on the ground The important news from Cady Noland’s new exhibition at Gagosian in London is that an edition of Oozewald has been stolen, and the artist wants it back. According to the STACK OF WANTED POSTERS WHICH CONSTITUTE A WORK IN THE SHOW, ed. 3 of 4 of…

When I wrote about the harmonic triangle yesterday, I displayed the triangle left-aligned using fixed-width text because that was easier than producing the format you usually see for Pascal’s triangle and related triangles. 1 1/2 1/2 1/3 1/6 1/3 1/4 1/12 1/12 1/4 1/5 1/20 1/30 1/20 1/5 … I asked Claude to write a LaTeX package to make it easier to create Pascal-like triangles and it did a great job, including handy features I didn’t think to ask for. You can download it here: numtriangle.sty. I…

For most of human history, astronomy meant looking. Eyes, then lenses, then mirrors, then glass plates bolted to bigger mirrors. The instruments got magnificent. The band never moved. We surveyed the entire universe through a slot roughly three hundred nanometres wide, declared the catalogue essentially complete, and settled in to argue about the decimal places. The universe, meanwhile, was doing nearly all of its interesting work somewhere else. The sky was never quiet, we wereIn 1932 Karl…

This is the definition of the word in a dictionary. It is not something we can scientifically measure as temperature or weight, but we adjudicate high or low intellgences subjectivelly. The scientifical approximation we use in society is the IQ test, which intends to measure what it's creator thought intelligence was. Probably he thought of himself as a very intelligent man and abstained himself from adding things to the test that he could not certainly pass. No, I don't know how to measure…

Ford Bronco Ford Raptor Lego Technic engines.

Guilfoyle tried to blame AI for damning texts in effort to save her job: Guilfoyle told the White House the money-requesting texts were not legitimate, but had instead been generated by artificial intelligence. Uh-huh. “AI did it” is the new “I was hacked”. But also, this KRON4 bonus content: “I will not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service,” she added, although it’s unclear what exactly she was alluding to. “There were no real decades of public service, there was some…

This September, my wife and I started viewing houses to buy for our first home. This’s been a long time coming—for the past 5 years, we’ve been saving aggressively and safely investing our savings in index funds, which have performed remarkably well. We genuinely thought it’d take us at least a few months to find a house that we’d want to put an offer in for just because our budget is tight and we’re looking in one of the least affordable places in Canada (the Greater Toronto Area), but, as…

A few people have asked how the scoring works, and one or two have asked, a bit pointedly, why their pin 40 km from Lagos only got half marks. Here’s the longer version of the info box: how to play, how the points add up, and where it all comes from. The basics Every day you get 5 cities. For each one you drop a pin on a map with no labels: no names, no roads, just coastlines, borders, rivers and lakes. Then you answer 3 multiple-choice questions about the city. Pin first, then questions. It’s…

Last night I was honoured to be in the company of Yazz Ahmed, Donovan Haffner, Knats, Heidi Vogel, Iain Ballamy, Olivia Cuttill, Jean Toussaint and others as recipients of the 2026 Parliamentary Jazz Awards. The event took place at World Heartbeat, a venue close to the new US Embassy in Nine Elms. It was the 21st year of the awards, given by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Group, and I was delighted to be given the Jazz Media Award. As one does, I gave a short acceptance speech in which I said…

Wednesday, October 14, 2026 - 10:00 The Lesbian Historic Motif Project I could have sworn I'd finished posting all the chapters of DeVun, but I went to start the next book and found this one still in queue. I have my second book on intersexuality all written up and will start posting it tomorrow. And the related podcast will come out this weekend. Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #581g DeVun 2020 The Shape of Sex Chapter 6 About LHMP Full citation: DeVun, Leah. 2020. The Shape of Sex:…

@yesyesmedialtd Derren Brown exposes this simple trick a TV psychic used to seemingly talk to the other side @Derren.Brown #derrenbrown #richardbacon whyareyoumoresuccessfulthanme ♬ original sound - WhyAreYouMoreSuccessfulThanMe? @andrea_carver How I animate from audio in Unreal using Vizibeat. 1. Find a band that moves on the beat (109Hz here), 2. normalize it to 0 to 1, then 3. use a Write node to share it all across the Motion Graphs. vizibeat.com/start Track: Rêve by Brvmes #unrealengine…

What is it that I'm looking for?The world has shifted from hourly slaving the VA to loops and automations, and I bet I can handle those tasks as well, but I clearly still lack the experience. So I'm looking for a lucrative yet very specific problem to solve.The thing is, that is still quite a vague search... So I don't think that's what I'm looking for. Maybe it's the community that comes along with something like that? An ecosystem, a market, a place to grow in as a collaborator, a cocreator.…

Screenshot of the Scroll-Triggered Animations Debugger Extension fopen in DevTools. The extension shows a minimap, the ranges, and fields to edit the ranges. I’m extremely pleased to announce the release of Scroll-Triggered Animations Debugger, a DevTools extension to visualize and debug CSS Scroll-Triggered Animations. ~ Table of Contents Demo Get the extension Backstory Known Issues and Limitations Future Plans Spread the word ~ # Demo To jump right in, here’s a video of the extension in…

Solar Dynamics Observatory Limb darkening observed during the transit of Venus. The Sun is so intensely bright we can’t safely look at it directly. We need a filter to block much of its light. And when we do, we can start to see some interesting features. Sunspots are one of these features, and the ebb and flow of their numbers has been studied for centuries. But a more subtle feature is that the edge of the Sun appears less bright than its central region. It’s an effect known as limb…

ESO/L. Calçada Illustration of a white dwarf with a strong magnetic field. In the 1930s, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar placed a limit on stars. Using our understanding of relativity and quantum theory, Chandrasekhar demonstrated that white dwarfs could never have a mass greater than 1.44 suns. It didn’t matter how they formed or whether they were mostly hydrogen or carbon. The very laws of physics forbid a greater mass. White dwarfs are the remains of smaller stars such as the Sun. When such a…

Photo by Christobal Zanartu Sheila Hicks is a major global artist, one of the women who moved textiles from the world of craft to the world of art. Born in Nebraska in 1934, she started art school as a painter but became fascinated with weaving on a trip to Peru. In the course of her life, she has collaborated with weavers in India, Japan, Sweden, and other areas known for their distinctive weaving techniques. Her art is held by major museums and adorns public spaces, such as the famous textile…

If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based on your plan: Meta One Advanced plan: up to 4 posts and 4 reels with links per month Meta One Expert plan: up to 8 posts and 8 reels with links per month Meta One Max plan: up to 12 posts and 12 reels with links per month Meta is trying to sherlock Linktree. But I can't stop and think it's completely bananas that the internet was built on hypertext and openness, and Instagram created a…

I recently updated nycdogs, a data package for R that I originally made for teaching purposes. It bundles up New York City’s dog licensing and dog bite datasets into an R package. The data is already provided by the city in a directly usable way (as CSV files), but packaging it up makes it easier to integrate with other packages and get things moving a little more quickly in class. The nyc_license table looks like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 nyc_license #> # A tibble: 819,323 × 12…

TFW You take your dog for a walk and find an AirTag on the ground in an ElevationLab TagVault. You’re like: “I know exactly what that is! I have a few of those!” You scan the AirTag with your phone so that you can find out who the owner is and give it back to them, and to your surprise, the last four digits of the phone number of the owner are yours. Then you realize that the leash in your hand is missing its TagVault