• 4-star hike • 2 mile part-loop • Easy | Gain 70 feet • Wells, ME | Maine . Wetlands at the Wells Preserve at Laudholm. The Wells Reserve at Laudholm is a National Estuarine Research Reserve on the southern Maine coast, headquartered at historic Laudholm Farm. Reserve staff maintain the trails, boardwalks, and buildings. They also manage the surrounding woodlands, wetlands, dunes, and grasslands, and they run educational and research programs. Note that dogs and bicycles are not permitted on…

After a short hiatus, it’s time for another scorching hot spicy top ten. The Ramen Rater’s Top Ten Spiciest Instant Noodles Of All Time 2026 Edition includes the spiciest stuff you can get. I outline a couple at the bottom that are no longer on the list but were violently spicy as well. All products review on this blog whether spicy or not are sampled and judged prior to any external garnishes added. Note that down below there’s a big abnnoucement you wont want to miss! Know something I should…

Asian longhorned tick dorsal (top), from Wikimedia 13 October 2026 This morning the Post-Gazette highlighted a story by Mary Ann Thomas about a new tick in town whose method of reproduction explodes like a bomb. In late summer and early fall, each cluster of Asian longhorned eggs hatches 2000 nymphs that swarm on the nearest warm-blooded animal — cattle, deer, dogs, and you! (See Post-Gazette: As longhorned tick populations soar in Allegheny County, ‘larval bombs’ surprise residents.) I first…

Apple introduced a few new things this morning centered around home use. Updated products are mostly predictable updates with slight price hikes after the existing ones over the summer. The star of the show is the new $299 HomeView, the long-rumored stationary home gadget: Apple today introduced Apple HomeView, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning 7-inch Liquid Retina display, HomeView brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management…

a photo by G. Murray Levick of a fronting penguin, from the front of his book, via “The first Adélie penguins arrived at the Ridley Beach rookery, Cape Adare, on October 13,” Dr. G. Murray Levick recorded in his observation diary in the Southern Summer of 1911. Levick was the staff surgeon-turned-zoologist on Robert Scott’s Terra Nova British Antarctic Expedition, one of six men who stayed to study the coast. His findings were published in 1914 as Antarctic Penguins: A Study of their Social…

James Shore posits that each person-month spent writing code results in 10 days of maintenance in the first year, then 5 days every year after that. Naïvely interpreted, this is a threshold-based model for induced maintenance, and its interesting because it’s so simple. If it could be shown to be true, that’d be useful. The argument Shore is making about the effects of robot-generated code does not depend on the specific numbers, so Shore’s numbers come from a hypothetical wisdom-of-the-crowds…

Like most authors, I’m a big fan of libraries. This is partially because most authors are also big readers, many of whom are lucky enough to have cherished childhood memories of roving a library, feel gratitude for the ability to keep reading when money was tight, and have taken advantage of the resources available for researching (frequently) weird book details. And it’s partially because libraries are a great way to get authors’ books in front of readers. A library buys a book once, and then…

Using AI has started to become my daily routine. I am still very careful with AI's reply as I am worried about hallucination. I never see AI as a threat but as a partner. Imagine AI as Jarvis from Ironman. When I first use AI, I treat it like a chat bot. Then I started to copy AI prompt from the internet. Earlier this year, I started to let it perform data analysis. That's where I begin to have issues with AI's output. AI can be very convincing even though it is wrong. When your prompt is not…

Over the weekend, I started Kyle Conway’s latest book on the Bakken: At Home in the Petromodern Paradox: Landscape and Community in the Bakken Boom (2026). It’s a good read so far and since I have a special interest in the Bakken, I thought I’d reflect on it (don’t call it a review) in two posts rather than one. The first part of the book sets up the Bakken’s “petromodern paradox” which for Conway is the tension between our understanding of the environmental, social, and economic pain caused by…

💡Preliminary thoughts: I know that most of you follow me primarily for my posts about art in the Setouchi Islands. I also know that I haven't posted much about them lately. There are a few reasons for this. First, for the past months, I haven't had many opportunities to visit the islands and collect new "material". Second, although I have things to tell you and show you from previous visits, especially from last year's Setouchi Triennale, I rarely have the time or energy to do so. So, here's…

CSS Grid Lanes supports stretch alignment along the stacking axis, allowing items to fill any remaining space left between other items, and avoid a jagged end edge. See Aligning items within their lanes to learn more.

Discrobble now shows which Discogs folder each album is in, and you can move it to another folder from the album page. This release also collects everything shipped since 1.3.6: any of your collection fields on the album page, help for releases with missing artist credits, and a pull-to-refresh that always finishes. What's new Turn on "Show collection folder" in Settings > Display, and the album page shows the album's Discogs folder at the top of its collection details. Tap it to pick another…

It has been roughly a year since my last dedicated post on this question. Its first sentence has not changed: I happily admit I am deeply confused about consciousness. It would have been nice if a year had allowed us to make progress on this and the related questions. Looking back, we have made little progress. We have people, often the same people, making similar arguments. The post from last year has held up well, exactly because we have made so little progress. Thus, I will not be going over…

Dungeons & Dragons made a big splash at New York Comic Con with the reveal of Tyro Squadron, the Star Wars adventure coming out next year. The post 3 Predictions Based on D&D’s Star Wars Tyro Squadron Reveals from NY Comic Con appeared first on Hipsters of the Coast.

Went to the Games Plus Auction this past week. I was not expecting to pick up much, which naturally means I bought a lot.Some of that belongs to my oldest kid. He grabbed the Dune games, the magnetic tiles, the cookbook (natch), and the monster books. I am going to give Savage Worlds another try. I picked up Dark Age Vampire for us both, he has been wanting to try it out more.But the real surprise in the lot was the game Fledge Witch. Described as a non-combative, cozy Japanese RPG, it is about…

Images from the Visible Human Project. Source: The Visible Human Project / National Library of Medicine⚠️ Content warning: The images in this post could be upsetting to some readers. It’s really weird that we don’t know what is going on inside our bodies. Most of us don’t have a clear idea where our various organs are (let alone their actual functions). At the risk of grossing you all out a bit, let’s take a look deep inside the human body. The National Institutes of Health’s National Library…

Here’s the latest batch of indie game shorts I (Josh Bycer) looked at over on my Game-Wisdom Channel.

Last month I raced what has now become traditionally my last race of the season: Ironman 70.3 Washington Tri-Cities, in Richland, Washington. My primary goal for this race was simple: finish my season strong. If I could finish this race faster than last year, that’d be a nice bonus, but I simply wanted to put a bow on my season, test a few changes I’ve made to my setup recently, get enough points to renew my AWA status, and above all, enjoy myself, since this would be my last race until next…

43 Fava Beans

I finally got around to importing my whole historical Twitter archive (just my own original tweets, not replies or retweets) into this WordPress site as a proper Custom Post Type: https://chriscoyier.net/tweets I haven’t added it to the navigation or anything else on the site yet. Not sure what I want to do there. Just feels good having my own data. I used this and hacked it up a bit to fit my needs, and so I didn’t have to leave it as a permanently installed plugin. It’s coming at a weird…

Pascal’s triangle is the most famous triangular arrangement of numbers. I’ve written about other numerical triangles, such as Bell’s triangle and the trinomial triangle. There’s another well-known triangle that somehow I never heard of until recently: the harmonic triangle, first explored by Leibniz around 1700. To create the harmonic triangle, start with the harmonic series 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, … This is the first column of the triangle. Next take the differences of the terms: (1 − 1/2),…

Contents # I have a Patreon! Video Audio The full essay I have a Patreon! # I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing. I’ve been here a while and am not going away. But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in…

AI is great as a maintenance worker. I'm also noticing that it got better at search as well, but not because of the models getting better or some trickster prompts, no, but because the whole internet has turned to complete shit.We spent decades poisoning our infosphere with SEO and "content marketing posts", putting the useful stuff behind the closed walls of Facebook and Instagram, so it's now easier and more convenient to let a computer dig through the mess, and it's crazy to think now that…

Sony announced that all games from 2028 and onwards would be digital-only. It seems likely that Xbox will follow and that Nintendo will continue making “physical” releases for first-party games during the Switch 2 generation. In the all-digital gaming future, every game platform will be subject to the same problems and constraints as media streaming services like Netflix and Spotify. We can see hints of how this will affect future games and creative freedom in the medium by looking at…

For the first time in 9 years, there’s no fence surrounding Province House in Charlottetown. The building re-opens this weekend following extensive restoration.

During a bit of football banter about League 1 over the weekend, Ken said to me “I bet you’ve never been to any of those places either. All a bit far north” – it turned out I had visited 18/24 of the places in the League. That prompted an idea for a geography quiz, could I make a quiz that combined pinning the locations of cities on a map with some general knowledge questions about those cities? I started out with this prompt: I want to make a geography quiz about cities in the world. For each…

Soft sunlight through high atmospheric haze. Dew drips from the roof. The forest glows orange and yellow as spring peepers call from the leaf litter.

We’re watching the new adaptation of Carrie. If you aren’t, you’re missing out. It’s just shockingly good, but then again given that Mike Flanagan is the showrunner, we ought not be surprised. His resume is pretty much devoid of misses, and he’s zeroed in on something with King that nobody else is really touching. Anyway, he’s a careful producer. You quickly get to the idea that nothing is accidental, and so a close reading of the text is useful. Last night, we watched episodes 4 and 5. And in…

A return to form from Vinay Prasad with two short and sweet articles on AI in oncology: Terrence Tao does not understand cancer medicine Can AI ‘hack’ a cancer clinical trial If mathematicians want to complain that computers are replacing them, they should seek the comfort of chess Masters complaining that they have been bested. But they should not look for comfort from doctors. We would do anything to help our patients. We would do anything to extend survival. We already do things on a wish…

Seeing as it’s the start of Spooky Season, I’ve been casting around for seasonally appropriate