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I recently updated nycdogs, a data package for R that I originally made for teaching purposes.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

Town Crier appointments are sometimes many weeks apart but this November is going to be a bit different for me. The diary is looking pretty full. On the 8th November we have Remembrance Sunday. I never make any proclamations on this sombre day. This year as usual I will be at the Windsor ceremony. I feel it is important to be there and a real honour to play a part in the ceremony. Then on the 11th I will be at Daniel of Windsor on Peascod Street for their late night shopping event and the…

For years, I've been going back and forth on whether or not I should save up and get an e-reader. I've been able to happily give up on that dream with the help of a matte screen protector + greyscale mode + the Cantook app. Cantook's interface is simple and very customizable. I can change the text's size, colour and font (green and black, terminal style!). I can also use my volume buttons to flip from one page to the next! I love that! The matte screen protector significantly reduces glare.…

You can't choose how you're born, but you can choose how you die.— Tamaru Kenichi, 1Q84I wonder if tripping on acid makes the world feel as surreal as mine has become. If so, I imagine the chief difference is that the experience eventually wears off.Starting last week, I had to get used to driving my love's jalopy to work. Before my first trip, however, we had to get the car a new battery. Again. You can read the story of the previous one, which managed to outlive its warranty by a matter of…

Gremlin and I were discussing the art of housecleaning, which Gremlin admits never explicitly learning. I (being A Girl) was explicitly taught, but later in life I learned that a lot of the things I was taught were inefficient or just plain wrong. So I had to unlearn and relearn how to clean my house. Gremlin, meanwhile, was...surprised? to learn that I schedule one block of time to clean my house per week. "Oh, so that's what you meant when you said the house was going to be a mess this week,"…

Gina Trapani Recently at a community gathering I was asked to give a 5-minute lightning talk about something I’m into. I landed on the physical activity that is making me feel my best these days. Here’s my talk transcript. Hi everyone. I’m Gina and I’m here to talk about the joy of lifting heavy objects. And by that I mean weightlifting. My endocrinologist Dr. S is the best doctor I’ve ever had. I’ve seen her twice-annually for thyroid stuff for about 8 years. The first 6 years, at every…

Blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1179/drawing-the-line

Meetable can now replace your Doodle polls! Meetable, my open source event listing website, now lets you propose an event with several possible dates/times. People vote on which one works for them, and the organizer can choose the best date from the votes later. Up until now, every event in Meetable needed a date before it could be created. That works fine when the date is already known, but a lot of events start out as "we should do this, when can everyone make it?" That part of the planning…

Link: Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app in Argentina., by Hanaa' Tameez in Nieman LabI think there are several notable things about this story.The first, most obvious one is that two 23 year olds were able to create a news app that rose to become the top-ranked news app in their country, using AI. There is no way they would have been able to build this with the time, team, and resources at their disposal otherwise. From an engagement…

Someone emailed recently to tell me that they like the idea of Pure Blog, but they thought the admin interface was "really ugly" so they can't use it. Fair enough - beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I don't think that was a fair evaluation of Pure Blog's admin UI. When I built Pure Blog, I wanted it to be different from the rest of the crowd. The whole point of it was to have just enough features, and no fluff. So to me a more brutalist/utilitarian UI made sense. The likes…

Greetings, everyone!I hope you’re having a lovely October. I’m personally enjoying the fall colors and crisp weather here!ALTSouth Minneapolis, Minnesota in the FallWe have a few updates for you all!Askbox closes at end of day Sunday, Oct 18, 2026We once again, need time to catch up on the plethora of asks we have received. We will close the inbox around 11:59 p.m. Central time on Sunday, Oct 18. Re-opening date TBD.We thank you for your patience with the issues with the askbox not working well…

You know those questions people ask something along the lines of "If you could give everyone in the world a skill what would it be?" Self-awareness. Self-awareness! Previously I'd've said critical thinking. Which would still be nice. Critical thinking is about being able to assess other people and other things. Self-awareness is doing that to yourself. The problem is self-awareness is a Socratic paradox. The more you have the more you realise you don't have it. Last week I had some training and…

We arrived back from Brighton on Monday afternoon, and I proposed that we take the 381 bus that conveniently goes from London Bridge station to the end of our road. It’s a little slower than taking the Jubilee line and walking, but it’s cheaper and we had baggage. After waiting for 20 minutes, the bus turned up, only to terminate short at Southwark Park. We stepped off and waited some time for the next bus, only to find that that one was terminating there as well. Finally, a C10 bus (also a…

In this article I will describe a novel technique that allows an attacker to pass attacker-chosen string keys to a hash table implementation such that each lookup query takes $O(n)$ instead of the expected $O(1)$ work. The attack takes $O(n \log n)$ interactive steps with the hash table to prepare, and does not require knowledge of the hash function used by the hash table. Instead, the technique directly targets the underlying structure of the hash table. Luckily these attacks as described are…

If you like me enjoy nicely looking fonts and can actually distinguish them, you may have also noticed that many new sites have something in common: they are generated by LLMs and use combination of Inter and JetBrains Mono. These are great fonts, which I started using on this very site long time ago, well before ChatGPT. Let’s consider that their widespread usage as a confirmation of their excellence. I didn’t want to change them just because someone can think that my site is AI-generated.…

*I got my handssss on one

14 October 2026 Notes from a seminar on 14 October 2026 on Real-time carbon intelligence: turning digital impact into better decisions. Part of a series of events on responsible AI by ClimateAction.tech with ustwo (previously: AI sweat). Any errors are mine. (answering the question in my headline:) Maybe but there’s a long way to go “Every digital decision has a physical consequence. The AI model we choose, the cloud region we use and the way a product scales can all change the energy, carbon…

Pictures from some rather restrained Halloween decor.It must be Halloween because my Halloween village is up (complete with creepy new "Cemetery" gate!)Hopefully I can go all out for Christmas!

Created by ChatGPT May 2026 The issue is: if a website imposes a government-compelled age authentication wall, what percentage of users will stop at the authentication wall, either because the users turn around or fail to navigate the process? I call that percentage the “balk” rate. For background on prior studies and why balk rates can vary widely, read my prior coverage first. I’m now reporting on a study by All About Cookies entitled “72% of Americans Don’t Trust the Companies Verifying…

My wife Eliza loves to play mahjong. She also loves mahjong accessories! She decided to create some herself. Today she opened a store where you can buy mahjong mats. If you, or a friend, or a family member, also like mahjong maybe you can pick up a few as gifts?

Apple finally announced a thing: HomeView. Immediately I was surprised at the pricing, given that Apple is now charging the same for a streaming box. I have an old iPad in the kitchen, as well as a HomePod, so slamming them into each other makes sense. More space-efficient and better looking. But then I thought about it. For us, the two primary uses for the old iPad in the kitchen are cooking and FaceTime. Cooking primarily means a third-party app (Paprika in our case). HomeView certainly will…

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-92392 for the project curl, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a use-after-free in HTTP/2 upload retries where cleanup turns leftover upload data into a new request and leaves a pointer to a freed Curl_easy handle (apparently freeing it was only a suggestion), allowing a malicious server to achieve remote code execution under specific conditions. This is due to the…