A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Motheringby Elinor CleghornGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 416 Rating: Synopsis: Mothers make history. For centuries, motherhood has sparked social and political change. Yet the acts of growing, birthing and nurturing children - and the power they hold - have been pushed to the margins, overlooked in our narratives of the past. In A Woman's Work, Elinor Cleghorn reveals the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, and community leaders…

The software field is in a knot-twist about AI; but the people who are doing some of the best thinking about the impacts of AI are mathematicians. (Note: I’m going to use AI here because it’s the parlance of the times. I continue to be very frustrated by the terminology flattening caused by continuous use of the term AI -- the difference between LLM, agent systems, generative video and image systems, audio processing, transcription, virtual manipulation and ink detection, and more is enormous,…

On who votes left, right, and center—and what it means to vote either left or right.

Every year I try to do a little bit of gaming specifically tied to the Halloween season. Usually this consists of retro games that fit the theme, and this year is certainly no different, but I’ve been playing or plan to play a handful of newer titles, and some newer indie games as well. So without further adieu, here’s what’s been on my Halloween gaming playlist so far! Creature Kitchen Itch.io, Steam page This is my favorite of the bunch, by far! It’s a a cozy/creepy indie game, and I found it…

Importing content with the Default Content module is really useful when populating a site with content. There's an increasing number of recipes and modules that can be used to populate a site with content either for setup or demonstration purposes.Default content is really useful when figuring out how a system works as it can show relationships between content types that are not always simple to discern through the site itself. It also has a place when deploying content between sites as you can…

StarringJohn Cena, Jessica Biel, Arturo Castro, Sam Richardson, and Teyonah ParrisDirectorSam HargraveOverviewSave the world, bring your friends.When a group of former childhood friends reconnect, their reunion takes a wild turn as they stumble upon a dangerous international plot—and must save the world.Review Matchbox the Movie What if Fast and the Furious meets Central Intelligence? Honestly, this was a lot of stupid fun. It had comedy, completely impossible action, and just a hint of…

The 10th anniversary of GoGraz has also been its last in its current setup. Right after the last meeting in September 2025 some things happened in my life that required my full attention and that made GoGraz unfortunately irrelevant. I wanted to wait and see if things could get back to normal again but a couple of weeks ago Dorian and I met and decided it was finally time to end GoGraz. It’s been interesting 10 years. We never got the meetup to the same level as PyGraz but it was still a lot of…

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: No Spoilers My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars) Good watch. Would recommend it. One of the few movies from Amazon Studios I've actually enjoyed. It combined comedy, drama, and mystery in a fun and entertaining way. This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb.

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: No Spoilers My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars) Good watch. Would recommend it. One of the few movies from Amazon Studios I've actually enjoyed. It combined comedy, drama, and mystery in a fun and entertaining way. This product uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb.

Where: Reifel Bird Sanctuary, Centennial Beach (Delta)Weather: Partly sunny, 11–14°C Last week’s birding felt like an extension of summer, with clear skies and warm temperatures. This week we got the clear skies (to start, at least), but the temperatures were decidedly fall-like. We still wore short, though! Reifel Bird Sanctuary The marsh, looking a lot less summery now. The news out of Reifel is that the assorted geese migrations were underway and we did indeed see geese flying in…

Orange is my favorite color, so I am ALL about Fall, y'all.It's not just the warm colors, though; I love rich jewel tones and gleaming metallics: [By Arte & Sabor in Costa Rica] Not to mention the natural touches of tree bark and dried leaves: [By Bellaria Cake Design in the Netherlands]It's all so elegant, but manages to feel welcoming at the same time - like a warm hug that smells of spices and rain. Mmmm. Check out this gilded beauty with her sugar marble base: [By Have Some Cake in the…

Capturing photos and potentially sharing them has been on my mind lately. Coincidentally, I discovered the #the100pics challenge through Adam Duglas and was tempted to give it a go. It involves taking and posting 100 photos in a year on your blog. The rules allow you to share already existing photos, but if I were to do it, I’d like to stick to new photos and have some descriptive captions to go along with them. The more I thought about it, the less feasible it sounded for me. I’ve also started…

There is a special kind of embarrassment in being the person who explains Ansible to other people during the week and then spends Sunday evening typing freebsd-update fetch install into a dozen SSH sessions. My RHEL machines were fine. They have been patched from Satellite through Ansible for a long time. Everything else was not: FreeBSD routers, jail hosts with Bastille and with classic jail.conf jails, a mail server, a Proxmox cluster, a Proxmox Backup Server. Each one had its own little…

I recovered another program I wrote in 1995: ELPDS, or Enhanced Logical & Physical Drive Status. Run ELPDS C: and it reports physical disk geometry, partition entries, FAT boot-sector details, and free space. It doesn’t change anything on the disk. My help says it was for checking whether a partition existed and was formatted. I think I was just trying to learn about the underlying partition mechanics. I didn’t write all of it. The help credits “Mr. Schaeffer” for a “huge part of FIPS code.”…

I saw Ned Batchelder's post about a zsh function to show git hooks in the current repository, which was in turn inspired by a post by Frank Wiles, detailing a hack that nearly got him, reliant on sketchy git hooks in a shared folder. I use fish shell, though, not zsh, so here's my version of the same script. I put this in ~/.config/fish/functions/_show_git_hooks.fish: function _show_git_hooks --on-variable PWD set -l git_dir (git rev-parse --git-dir 2>/dev/null) if ! test -d "$git_dir/hooks" #…

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. GitHub – Myraas/BetterGreenButton: A tiny macOS menu-bar utility that makes the green window button maximize instead of fullscreen · GitHub — A tiny macOS menu-bar utility that makes the green window button maximize instead of fullscreen. YES! We are going to kill “unalive” – Anil Dash — “One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is…

Man and machine as one.

I haven't posted in a while and I don't want to make a stream of various posts so I'm gonna smush things into one big post because I'm ✨lazy✨. Autumn is finally here. 🎃🍂 We have some days where it's still 18C / 64F (which shouldn't happen in October in Ireland in my opinion) but it's been mostly cold and rainy. Physically, my bones are very upset about it getting colder and are making their opinions known, but mentally I'm sky high. I've always preferred the dark and cold nights. For me, it's…

Chris just let me know that Alan Thornett has died. International Viewpoint has a long obituary here. I doubt The Graun will carry an obit, and The Times certainly won’t. I got to know members of the Oxford branch of what was then the Socialist Group (a successor of the Worker’s Socialist League, via a fusion with, and then a split from, the International-Communist League), through the Oxford Miner’s Support Group, of which they were the backbone, in the wake of strike’s defeat in 1985. I saw…

Jetzt mal ehrlich: was kommt Euch in den Sinn, wenn Ihr an Speisen in einer alteingesessenen Kneipe mitten in der Dortmunder Innenstadt denkt? Ich denke da an Salzkuchen, Frikadelle und vielleicht noch ein Schnitzel. Tja,… Der Beitrag Kneipe? Restaurant? Beides! – Zum Sauren erschien zuerst auf Sternestulle.

An Taibhse (The Ghost) is an Irish-language horror movie1 from 2024, set in the period after the Great Famine. It deals with a young woman, Máire, and her father traveling alone to a remote Edwardian mansion to become its caretakers for the winter. After they arrive, Máire fears that the malevolent spirit she calls Alexander has followed them to the new house. The movie is gorgeous, full of every-frame-a-painting cinematography that emphasizes the solitude and the emptiness of the house. We see…

Each week in Refill, the Pen Addict Members newsletter, I publish Ink Links as part of the additional content you receive for being a member. And each week, after 10 to 15 links, plus my added commentary on each, I'm left with many great items I want to share. Enter Misfill. Here are this weeks links: Read: — New Nib Day: Schon Design L'il Dipper (Cheryl Lindo Jones) — Holding the Intangible: October Notes (Line Variation) — Finding what paper I want to use to make Plotter paper (Stationery🍕) —…

Greg Iacurci, CNBC Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on Saturday called for advanced artificial intelligence systems to be built with containment, independent controls and an “emergency brake” that lets authorized people pause or shut a model down mid-task. “We need to surround non-deterministic models with strong, deterministic system design, human controls, and reliable operating procedures, and establish industry standards where existing ones are insufficient,” Nadella wrote in a post…

Looks Unfamiliar with Nina Buckley talking to Tim Worthington about Colin's Sandwich, Baby Boom, Hinge And Bracket and more...!

The picture above is dark, the important thing is that little bit of light on the top of Grand Teton. We got up extra early to watch that triangle appear and slowly spread down the range. I should mention we did this without coffee because of the water issues in Jackson (and poor planning on our part). After basking in the glow, we headed into town and luckily found coffee before packing our bags. We spent a large chunk of the day winding north through Grand Teton National Park, checking out…

Training a @bot to manage an updated version of ThocStock for me.I’m not sure about the necessity of a personal assistant, but a semi-personal business associate makes a lot of sense to me.

I went to the GP about my recent urology clinic appointment. The letter sent from the clinic had been generated by AI from a voice recording of the consultation - it wasn't wrong, but it was incomplete. Apparently this isn't unusual! I wanted my GP to do two things that were agreed at the clinic but weren't clearly documented in the letter. I wanted to add Tamsulosin to my Finasteride prescription to which the GP agreed. I also wanted the GP to request hormone assays that the consultant…

Lance blogged on the OpenAI solutions to many problems here and also created a website of the TCS-related problems OpenAI claims to have solved here.Scott blogged about it here. Terry Tao seems to have had an infinite number of guest bloggers talking about AI and Math even before the OpenAI .... WE NEED A WORD FOR IT.Now it's my turn. For now I will just discuss some of the results without getting into what it means for the future of mathematics, the future of academia, and the future of…

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter offers retrospectives on its 25-year history of reporting on cultural developments in Poland. Here are some excerpts from a 2025 retrospective by Patryk Zakrzewski, translated in 2026 by Agnieszka Mistur, offering A journey to the graveyard of Polish social media – before Meta products took over the world. Before the word ‘selfie’ became established in the Polish language, the Fotka.pl service was launched (the portal was inaugurated on Valentine’s Day – 14…

What happened? Some time ago I realized that I'm part of this stupid rat race, and I no longer wish to participate. Also, I watched The More Boring You Are, the More Impressive You’ll Become - The Paradox of Boredom last night. P.S. If you need to relax, why not visit the Koi Pond? Companies are trying to redefine our understanding of what happiness means to us, instead putting us on a treadmill with a ‘happiness’ carrot in front of it, and all that you have to do is to not fall off the fucking…