Brian Martell 1938-2026. A slightly revised version of what I said at my dad's funeral. Brian was born in 1938 in Wolverhampton. He kept a trace of black country in his accent through his life. Of course, he supported Wolverhampton Wanderers, and even in his last days in hospital was asking about the Wolves scores. In the 2nd world war his dad, Cyril, was posted to India and they were separated for Brian's early years. Dad and his Mum, Hilda, hunkered down in the Anderson shelter in the garden…

Well, if I'm going to talk about the advantages of elevated rail, it feels only fair to discuss some other advantages: like the advantages of the other main grade-separation option, underground rail.Because if there weren't any, well, we'd all build the cheaper, elevated option, wouldn't we?Note that when I say "we," of course, I don't mean the Quad Cities. Lord no! It would be nice, but let's get some basic bus frequency and maybe a rail link to Chicago first.But "we" in the larger sense do…

I’m loving the resurgence of zines! Violet B. Fox just released on on radical books that aren’t a slog, a collection of books for leftists that aren’t super dense theory by old dead white guys. There’s so many good ones to choose from, but I started with The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. For posterity, I’ve saved a local backup, but you should visit Violet’s site instead.

Mitzi's in Montreal, so I've got the table cleaned off and I'm playing with one of my Apple IIc computers. (Siri tells me the plural of "Apple IIc" is "Apple IIc's" without the apostrophe, inserted by autocorrect, which I suppose actually reports to Siri, so I don't know what's up with that.) There was an interesting thread at the Retro Computing Forum, discussing the chronology of Star Trek gameplay and code. Apple Trek, by Apple III creator Wendell Sanders, was one of the programs included…

netip.Addr features an Unmap() method returning the unwrapped IPv4 contained in an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address: from ::ffff:203.0.113.10 or ::ffff:cb00:710a, it returns 203.0.113.10.1 There is no Map() or To6() method for the reverse direction. Such a method is trivial to implement, but Go maintainers have rejected it on the grounds that users should write netip.AddrFrom16(ip.As16()) and let the compiler optimize it.2 Today, this pattern is eight times slower than a native method. How can we teach…

Every morning, before the family wakes and after the cat has been fed, I light a stick of incense, bow toward a kakejiku of Amida Buddha, and plunge it into the little bowl of sand and ash. It’s said that our sense of smell is more closely linked to memory and emotion than any other. It bypasses the Thalamus; straight to the dome. Shoyeido's Kyoto Autumn Leaves (Kyonishiki) incense takes me places. There’s a whole world in that tiny stream of smoke, rising in the light of a fake candle. It…

My host at Brown University was the fascinating Basilis Gidas whom I first met in Rio in 2018. Basilis has had a remarkable career, taking him from electrical and mechanical engineering through quantum field theory to many areas of applied mathematics. In the context of AI, Basilis told me about a well-known passage in Plato—new to me—expressing concern that reliance on writing (new technology at the time) would weaken human memory. Overall, Basilis thinks that the most creative aspects of…

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This episode I speak to Saskia Reeves about her performance on Slow Horses. We talk about Lamb’s relationship with Catherine and Reeves character choices. Plus how the books inform the show and how she works with the directors to add character moments to the show. Finally, what does Reeves want to tell fans of the show? All that and more in this episode! For more on the slow horses, click here.…

That’s the title on the video. Here’s a link to it. (4 minutes) It’s played by “The 8-Bit Big Band,” and it’s pretty snazzy. Even if you haven’t heard the Mii Channel theme since your Wii left service, it’s a pretty popular piece of game music even now. The channel doesn’t post often, but they have a lot of bangers, relatively speaking. Their video just before this one was a Klezmer version of Bonetrousle, Papyrus’s theme song from Undertale (5 minutes), with animation to boot, and that…

Recommended: A23a: Biography of an iceberg, The Documentary Podcast, BBC World Service, 3 September 2026.It’s a 28 minutes documentary including iceberg sounds, and hearing the awe of people as they meet an iceberg “twice the size of London”.* * *After listening, I wondered about the naming convention used. Wikipedia tells me it’s The US National Ice Center who names and tracks icebergs. The first letter indicates the position where the iceberg was first spotted (A is 0–90 degrees west, Weddell…

by Cláudio Alves Between Wuthering Heights and The Odyssey, much has been said this year about the merits and demerits of film adaptations straying from their source material. Most of the time, I’m a defender of unfaithfulness in the transformation of a text between mediums. Indeed, some of the most interesting aspects of both those box office success stories are precisely the dialogues established between them and their literary origins, deviation as conversation. Moreover, the general…

This promotional video is either too weird or not weird enough, but I like core idea of im Water: a carrying strap for a water bottle designed into the label itself. The family business had a screen printing business growing up, including a big die cutting machine, which could totally be used for a job like this. I suspect the strength of the plastic involved would require basically… more plastic. Which I don’t super love for a world that makes too much throw-away plastic. Not to mention the…

In common with anyone else too old to seriously contemplate a mid-life crisis, I often find myself grumbling at BBC radio’s faintly risible efforts to lure a younger audience. So it was rather comforting today to hear the Desert Island Discs of Parveen Kumar, whose operatic lollipops (Mascagni, Verdi, Offenbach, Richard Strauss) could have fitted unobtrusively into a Plomley-era show. Even better, over on 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie, there was a spontaneous F.R. Leavis gag. The old farts…

Capital Punishment Incarceration Education Free Culture And So Forth Probably another short post. We’ll see how it goes. I also didn’t expect this to go out too late, honestly… Some of you probably can guess that I’ve had parts of this post kicking around in my drafts for a long time, because I often find myself noting that many of the world’s problems tend to stem from never having a discussion about what we want from our institutions. Our lack of consensus, and often lack of any significant…

Agentic AI is becoming somewhat a norm. Instead of you doing something directly, you tell your agent to do it and the thing is done indirectly. This is both useful and dangerous. However, it doesn’t stop applications from still being important. Let’s begin with that last sentence. The notion that applications (and application-producing companies, such as Adobe) will go away is dead wrong. At least in the short- to mid-term. There’s too much built up capability and performance in them for anyone…

The start of the academic year is always very busy and so September slipped by pylonless. October’s Pylon of the Month will hopefully make up for that. It was drawn by a colleague whilst out walking near Northmoor, just to the west of Oxford. Here it is in the wild: My trusty friend, the Open Infrastructure Map, tells me that this is a pylon on the National grid, Cowley – Seven Springs 400 kV line. The middle cross arm being longer than the ones above and below also, I think, identifies it as…

More specifically, Lucerne. October 2 was my 10-year anniversary in Switzerland, though when I checked my old photos, I landed in Switzerland on October 3, 2016. Ah well, potato potato. I had wanted to do something special this year, like make Lozärner Chügelipastete* from scratch. Thanks to my injury, I can't stand for too long without feeling pain, so cooking was out of the question. * This is when I also learned that the "beef balls" I'd been eating are actually cattle glands. The more you…

I’ve previously written about setting up your own AtProto personal data server (PDS), for hosting data for BlueSky, Standard.Site, and other AtProto applications. When I wrote that post 2 years ago I had used DigitalOcean as the host as they had a quick-deploy template to get things up and running very quickly. I’d always intended to move from DigitalOcean, but it ended up quite far down the priority list. Some recent events reminded me I did not want to give the company anymore of my money and…

project c190 ⇦ Angels Are Mathematical → iwillneverbehappy.neocities.org → saddleblasters → Michaelmas → clearglass → loneliwish → Maggotgirl

Let’s be honest, we all know this was coming. From the moment I kicked off Real-Time Stratember, StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty was always locked in and planned for the finale. StarCraft 2 is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the genre and this entire month was leading nowhere but here. I briefly touched on it in my StarCraft: Remastered review, despite being a bit of a diehard RTS player back… Source

It's time for a trip down memory lane. We're going way back. Before "deliverability" was even a recognized industry term, our attempts to protect the inbox weren't called "email security." Instead, we called it "spam fighting."Back in those early days, we found community and collaboration with fellow spam fighters via the usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email (NANAE). It was the absolute Wild West. Terminology was new, best practices were forged in flame wars, and debates over exact…

The mornings are dark and cool hooray, but the days are warming up again boo. Three gyms. Eating my feelings this week (see below) so let’s not upset ourselves unduly by thinking about bodies. I must admit Absolution Gap has engaged me much earlier than the previous two novels did. Maybe it’s just because I’ve become more familiar with the Revelation Space universe, but I somehow don’t feel as impatient for it to get going. In fact I think it’s already going. My Mastodon instance stopped…

netip.Addr features an Unmap() method returning the unwrapped IPv4 contained in an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address: from ::ffff:203.0.113.10 or ::ffff:cb00:710a, it returns 203.0.113.10.1 There is no Map() or To6() method for the reverse direction. Such a method is trivial to implement, but Go maintainers have rejected it on the grounds that users should write netip.AddrFrom16(ip.As16()) and let the compiler optimize it.2 Today, this pattern is eight times slower than a native method. How can we teach…

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), Letters of Obscure Men II, LXIII (tr. Francis Griffin Stokes): Then was I sore afraid, and fell into such a pickle that I savoured ill in the nostrils of those who stood by. Tunc fui ita perterritus quod perminxi et permerdavi me, quod omnes nasum praetenebant. Note the euphemism. A more accurate translation is: Then was I so afraid that I pissed and shat myself, so that all held their noses. Related posts: The Smell of Fear An Effect of Fear Thin Soup An Effect…

We’re spending our final weekend at the lake this season so Sunday Morning Reading is on hiatus this week. We’ll be back next weekend with good writing and good reading to share. Thanks for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you want. It’s free. If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s…

Part 1: cutting files is a lie[permalink] I’ve written before in detail on how the clipboard works: when I copy something that program announces to others “I have something for you to paste”, and when you paste on another program, that one says “gimme that copied data”. (this oversimplifies, see linked article if you want the full details) So what happens when we cut? In a text editor, cutting just copies something and removes it from the text file immediately. It’s a “copy and delete” action…

In Kuala Lumpur, in Brickfields, there is a temple called Sree Veera Hanuman, whose vimanam is a green furry tail coiled 41 times into the shape of a tall dome.This tail drops through the temple’s ceiling, into its main sanctuary, where it joins the person of the monkey god, garlanded and enthroned.Regal serenity is not the only face he wears. In the temple he is rendered in North- and South-Indian styles. He kneels in black stone, sits bored and crosslegged in white marble, stands as gilt…

Act 1: Scene 3The holding cellI knew that an ending was on the way.I knew the impending doom was moving too fast. I remember being told that it is only by dying that one is awakened to eternal light. And I remember being told that life comes with opportunities, and, so, when one door closes, another door opens.Tragedies can lead us to the greatest comebacks, or so I was told. I do not know about these things. Or, maybe I know more than I think No, I sat this way, alone in a segregated cell…

Upcoming fixtures My public visibility took a nose-dive in 2020 (can't think why!) and didn't really begin to pick up again until 2024, due to multiple reasons, principally COVID19 and some chronic health issues. The health issues are now under control and I'm planning on coming out of my shell a bit more over the next year. My definite fixtures over the next year or so include 5 SF/F conventions in various countries, none of them the United States but one of them on the same continent: 4-8…

Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind (1956) Vitals Rock Hudson as Mitch Wayne, oil company geologist Texas, Fall 1956 Film: Written on the Wind Release Date: October 5, 1956 Director: Douglas Sirk Costume Designer: Bill Thomas (credited for gowns) WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background German-born director Douglas Sirk’s third in a trio of lushly photographed melodramas starring Rock Hudson, Written on the Wind, premiered in London seventy years ago this week on October 5, 1956.…