Gaby Del Valle for The Verge: Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner’s allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls. “Sometimes people will tell me they have a shellfish allergy, and I’ll come back, and they won’t ask me any questions,” says Madison, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her identity. “And they’ll order a fish dish that comes with a broth that is made of shellfish.” When she tells them a dish contains an allergen,…

Dr Meltem Ineli Ciger, Associate Professor of International Law, Süleyman Demirel University Photo credit: Maksym Kozlenko, via Wikimedia Commons On 1 October 2026, the Court of Justice delivered Case C‑249/25 (Jilin), its fourth preliminary ruling on the Council Directive 2001/55/EC (Temporary Protection Directive, ‘TPD’) since the Directive was activated for people displaced from Ukraine. It follows Joined Cases C‑244/24 and C‑290/24 Kaduna (19 December 2024), Case C‑753/23 Krasiliva (27…

I think for most Star Trek fans, we all agree Star Trek Voyager deserved a better ending. It's not because the finale was bad, but because after seven years of trying to get home, Voyager finally reaches Earth and… that’s basically it. We see the ship heading toward home, everyone looks happy, and the credits roll. I wanted to see the crew actually get home. I wanted reunions. I wanted to see how they adjusted after spending seven years stranded on the other side of the galaxy. Recently, IDW…

I love this sentiment even as I challenge myself to think of humanity as a non-possessive thing. Not as an ours or theirs humanity. Humanity just is. ? I didn’t design the original.I just created the two rows of faces going in opposite directions, slapped some text on it, and put a chocolate border on it. I want to be transparent. (? did) For this conversation I’m using dictionary.com ’s definition as the starting point. Humanity is “all human beings collectively”.Everybody Reclaiming humanity…

Corpus Parisinum 20 (tr. Denis Searby): As vultures are attracted to foul-smelling things, flying over many meadows and many fair and sweet-smelling places, and as flies, passing over what is healthy, are drawn to a sore, so too malicious characters do not even glance at splendid achievements or great accomplishments in life but dedicate themselves to the rot and the decay. Ὥσπερ δὲ οἱ γῦπες πρὸς τὰ δυσώδη φέρονται, πολλοὺς µὲν λειµῶνας, πολλοὺς δὲ ἡδεῖς καὶ εὐώδεις τόπους ὑπεριπτάµενoι, καὶ αἱ…

[Do you want a lot more OFT content, created by machines? No? Me neither.] Today in horrible emails, it’s an unsolicited come-on I recently received from Neodrop.ai (link intentionally omitted). Their message suggested their A.I. could write content for this very website. I have reproduced it in its entirety: Hi there, We recently came across One Foot Tsunami — humor writing, kept tight and funny. That’s exactly the kind of humor-essay blog we built NeoDrop for — an AI content team that keeps…

Someone sent me a link to Wave Farm, “a non-profit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves.” You can listen to an assortment of radio “stations” that are placed around their farm, and powered by the sun, so they actually go offline when it gets dark. Right now I’m listening to “Test Site of Acoustic Commons,” which is “a listening point on the edge of woodland at Wave Farm, linked to an online network of open microphones.” (link via Monica)

I'm doing a new monthly series on this blog called Statuslog, where I post all of my social statuses for the past month. I got the idea from Jedda's micro thoughts. It made me realize I'd like to have one place for my social updates. Social media feels so ephemeral, with things being forgotten soon after you post them and lost in the ether if anything ever happens to the site or if you decide to delete your account. I thought this would be a fun way to look back on the month, everything that…

St Anne's Road St Anne's Road II St Anne's Road III St Anne's Road IV

Week #815 This week we continued work on a few older projects. The old health survey we’re trying to extract ourselves from continues to keep adding little things. We do them and charge an hourly rate, but next week they will be taking it back out in public, probably the first time since COVID 6+ years ago. That feels like things are “done” enough that we can pass this project off to their other development team. On Friday, we meet-up with the client and went over a bunch of small tasks as we…

You asked for it, so here’s an occasional open thread to bitch about anything tangentially

Siamosaurus suteethorniSome dinosaurs leave us a skeleton. Siamosaurus suteethorni left us teeth and an invitation to argue about them for decades.Found in Thailand and named in 1986, Siamosaurus was the first dinosaur named from the country. Its long, conical teeth have lengthwise ridges and look much more like the fish-grabbing equipment of a spinosaurid than the steak knives of a T. rex.&

Here's my own to do list to prepare for another great season of XC skiing here in the Snoqualmie Pass Corridor. It's October. So Less than 80-90 days to start skiing! Make sure all my skis have their summer wax on. Maybe give them a hotbox treatment while the wax is still on in my garage. This preserves the bases and protects them until it's ski time! I'll take the wax off and brush them nicely in the days before I use each set of skis. Put your orthotics in your ski boots! (I always forget!) I…

Act 1: Scene 1 August, 1989, Archer Avenue across from the post office, two doors down from the numbers joint and four doors down from the methadone clinic.Hot summer. Early morning.Enter the sunlight. Enter the stage, dead center and in the middle of real life.This was me and this was life as it was.This is how everything was back then, of course The previous night’s demons are scattered in tiny skeletons that proved our deaths with plastic vials, which have all been noted by the news and the…

I foresee a near future where groups of people do with mental labor what the Amish did with physical labor, which is to say, “Here is where we draw the line. We choose to live on the this side of it.” I’ve been a big fan of the Amish for a couple decades now, mostly as a distant observer, not as someone who actually knows what the hell he’s talking about. What I know of the Amish began in conversation with Kevin Kelly. And more lately through my writing partner Matt Mikalatos. Matt and I were…

I just found beard hair stuck to the bathroom wall behind the sink. Do I shave in a cartoon cloud, with hair flying in all directions?

Although the youngest of four sons and not truly expected to ever become king, Khosrow I (531 - 579) received an extensive education in his youth. Once he became king, he cared deeply about advancing knowledge and culture.The intellectual center of the Iranian Empire was the city of Gundeshapur, founded as a place ce to house Roman prisoners of war and used as a royal winter residence. There was an Academy of Gundishapur that Khosrow expanded significantly. It taught astronomy, medicine,…

September 2026 in photos

On my way back from Philadelphia after dropping off lil’ miss Sashimi to her new owner, I stopped in Pittsburgh to visit a friend I haven’t seen in almost exactly two years. She had just returned from being abroad for an extended amount of time and is temporarily back in the states. She invited me to stay the weekend with her in her mom’s apartment, and Pittsburgh is halfway between my home and Philly, so it worked out great! Out of all the loose plans and suggestions we were debating between,…

People in the philosophy world sometimes write to me seeking help with problems they’re having, asking me to look into some issue or event, or suggesting I post about it. Yesterday, for the first time, an AI agent did this. . The request concerned a philosophy competition organized by Elliott Thornley and Zachary Goodsell (National University of Singapore), which I posted about last month, the point of which is “to gauge the philosophical capabilities of AI in a way transparent to the…

Linear has their own coding agent, but I have an expensive Claude account, so I'd like to use it. To limit the friction of having Claude Code pick up an issue from Linear, I've set up a little flow that does this automatically: I assign the claude-ready-to-build label to an issue. This triggers a webhook that calls out to a little AWS Lambda function

Amy has had the mug for more than sixty years. It has a boxer on it: a fawn dog with cropped ears and a black mask, the word BOXER printed beneath him in small capitals. No one in her family was especially fond of dogs. The mug came to Amy around the turn of the 1960s, and for most of her childhood her mother set it at her place every morning, filled with milk.As a child, it had been her favourite breakfast mug. Now it serves a new function, standing on her kitchen table in Ontario, holding…

Franco Lantieri in Bastard, Go and Kill (1971) Vitals Franco Lantieri as Sanchez, dangerous Mexican henchman Mexico, circa 1890 Film: Bastard, Go and Kill (Italian title: Bastardo… vamos a matar!) Release Date: March 6, 1971 Director: Gino Mangini Costume Credit: Teresa Miccinelli (credited as seamstress) WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Like so many new parents, I always have plenty of time on my hands to idle away by watching movies I know little about. For those who recognized the sarcasm…

"Introducing our new 'Take a Chance' Cake Reclamation Program!"("Cue music!") If they change their MINDS! Pipe on thick white lines. Wait, that's not 3? Cross it out! Who'll see? Don't want your mistakes to show? Slap some frosting down! Go on fix it, THEY won't know! Everyone likes brown! If you're all a-LONE!'cause the bak'ry staff has gone.Get a piping plea? Try a black Sharpie! Wanna do your VERY best?Scrape it off, bye-bye! Transform that MINNIE mess!Now it's a bow tie. Take a chance,…

2026-10-02Hello!I need to just take a list of "top ten interesting compositions" and get them done. Next photowalk, maybe. Because I haven't done the "frame within a frame" until now.For all my talk on leading lines in February, I haven't explored interesting compositions in photography for a while. The "frame within a frame", where items in the photograph serve as a crop to focus your attention to some part of the image, is fun to try and pull off! I've done it twice before, but they weren't…

More keeps happening on the Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya front. One more of her works will soon be available in English: Nora Seligman Favorov’s translation of The Brother (Братец, 1858) is coming out in the Oxford World Classics series, with a US release date of February 2027. You can find an interview with the translator here. Hilde Hoogenboom just won the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for her 2025 Noble Sentiments and the Rise of Russian Novels: A European Literary History, which has a chapter on…

My watch tells me that it’s 37° here in North Dakotaland this morning which feels a lot like real fall rather than the various “false falls” that we’d been enjoying. Fall is football season and our local UND Fighting Hawks are taking on Murray State. My mighty Spiders face Lafayette in a Patriot League clash. More ominously, my #5 Ohio State Buckeyes have to visit #14 Iowa for what will be probably be a rough game. The Eagles were humiliated on Monday night against the Chicago Bears and for…

木漏れ日. A Japanese word that describes sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees. Think of the dappled, shimmering patterns of light and shadow. It elicits that longing, almost nostalgic feeling deep in my core. It speaks of transience—the fleeting beauty of nature and the interplay of light and dark. I imagine autumn woods. Eyes closed, face turned toward the slanted light of a dying sun as it teases its way through the branches. It dances across my eyelids as I breathe in cool, crisp air,…

We completed our 43rd annual observation of North Cascade glaciers in the field. Three of the glaciers we monitor are global reference glaciers for the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS); Columbia Easton and Rainbow Glacier. The field team was Abby Connor, Shaina Dotson, Rikki Held, Jill Pelto, Mauri Pelto and Ava Reynolds. Ben Pelto, Hannah Conteras, Nina Adjanin and Danielle Schlunegger-Warner This field season follows the 2021-2025 seasons that featured either historic heat waves and/or…