In the last year, I’ve published not one but two books on scientific writing: the new edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing just last month, and Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences (with the wonderful Bethann Garramon Merkle) last December. But (with Bethann’s help), I’ve noticed something very strange: “reverse outlines” are mentioned […]

Gaze upon this beautiful new “long hull” Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigate USS Klakring (FFG 42) underway on 28 June 1983 during her builder’s trials off Maine prior to commissioning later that August. Gotta love that “one-armed bandit” launcher on her bow. Bath Iron Works Corp. photo via National Archives, Identifier 6405085, Navy Assigned Identifier DNSC8605676 The first naval vessel named for famed WWII submarine skipper and Yankee Wolfpack leader RADM Thomas Burton “Burt”…

In the aftermath of Hurricane Polo in the Pacific, which crossed over Baja California, the Mexican Navy has dispatched a relief force to include the 2,933-strong Brigadas de Respuesta a Emergencias and the camouflaged Buque de Apoyo Logístico (Logistics Support Vessel) ARM Isla Tiburon (BAL-01), complete with an Fuerza AeroNaval Mil Mi-8 “Hip” aboard, of which the service owns 22. Thus: While she looks like a WWII-era LST, Isla Tiburon and her sister, ARM Isla Holbox (BAL-02), are fairly new,…

A kapok-clad crewman on the Sims-class destroyer USS Wainwright (DD 419) brings coffee to the open bridge during the escort for the ill-fated Arctic Convoy PQ-17, July 1942. LIFE Magazine Archives – Frank Scherschel Photographer. LIFE Magazine Archives – Frank Scherschel Photographer. Various events have been held, called Coffee Day or National Coffee Day, with many of these on or around September 29. Cups up, gents.

When you’re launching a brand new SaaS application or service, you know it’s going to send emails. That means you’ve got to pick an email delivery service. Which API are you going to use to allow your new app to send transactional emails to the world? Luckily, the market is crowded with options: SendGrid, Mailchimp’s Mandrill, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark, Mailersend – the list goes on. For most developers, dropping in an API key from one of these transactional providers is the path of least…

Fun event. Read here.

CrystalMeet turned Ruby into Crystal with a pile of regular expressions. It half worked, and the other half lives in Ruby's runtime, where no regex can reach. /r/rails deleted it in 2024. Its scenarios are landing in spinel now.

In my last post Claude and I failed to get reinforcement learning to play Manic Miner, and we ended up solving the whole game with plain old search. Around the same time, TypeSafe released Jev. Jev is what they call a “System One” model - the name comes from the fast, instinctive kind of thinking, as opposed to slow, deliberate reasoning. It doesn’t generate text, it makes decisions. You give it some information about the situation (as JSON), a paragraph of instructions, and a list of options,…

Well, I said I had plans to come back here to talk a little bit about the 2XKO stuff that happened like a month or something ago now. To be honest, this wasn't something that I was hoping for with the game. As someone who enjoys fighting games, the more, the merrier. To be honest, the only fighting game that I've been playing recently is SF, but it's not like I don't try other games. I tested 2XKO during a beta, or alpha, I don't know, but one thing that I remember feeling was that the game…

A very brief bonus post! Always alert to Civil War related podcasts ......the latest mini series on Noiser's Short History podcast covers the English Civil Wars. Part 1 of 2 has just been released and is a very good explanation of the causes of the Civil Wars. An excellent way to fill 50 minutes of commuting time.Available via all good podcast apps, and BBC Sounds.Recommended!

“I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.” Donna Harraway (1988) Situated Knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial…

On September 29, 2009, the animated film Superman Batman Public Enemies was released. Of all of Hawkman's TV and movie appearances over the years, this 2-minute 10-second scene is probably my all-time favorite. Superman and Batman are fugitives, and President Lex Luthor gets Hawkman and Captain Marvel to bring them in. During this fight, Hawkman is the only one who never gets beaten. Batman gets caught in Hawkman's net, but right after he escapes the net, he gets a mace full in the face (plot…

★★★★☆ A new confession: I struggle with a lot of accessibility writing. I am not necessarily saying this to blame people writing in this space, whose work I respect even if it’s not resonating with me. I think it’s more of a recognition of how difficult it is to talk about accessibility and disability. Advocacy is never easy. It’s hard not to be impatient with the pace of progress, hard to contain your incredulity that others don’t get that what is so obvious to you, hard not to constantly…

Greetings from Providence! Next week there will be a conference at Rutgers University in honor of Jeff Kahn. Jeff is a great mathematician whose contributions span all areas of combinatorics. He has also been my friend for four decades and is my closest collaborator. Here is the conference description: Probabilistic combinatorics lies at the heart of modern discrete mathematics, with deep connections to probability, theoretical computer science, and statistical physics. This conference will…

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too). Returning to owning things in a streaming worldby Sophie Koonin at localghost Will buying CDs and mp3s instead of streaming…

For as long as people have been noticing the environmental issues associated with the AI bubble, commentators have been supplying articles like this despite the massive fallacy that's obvious as soon as you take a serious look at the problem. Andrew Beebe writing for Heatmap. The Future Climate Benefits of AI Are Worth the Risks For three years the entire conversation about artificial intelligence in the climate tech and clean energy communities has been about demand. This, of course, is…

To what extent is the “the story about the analytic turn” in philosophy a story about politics? There’s been an increased discussion in recent years of externalist explanations of philosophy, and one such explanation that has gotten a fair amount of attention lately is the idea that McCarthyist anti-communism in the United States in the middle of the 20th Century played a significant role in analytic philosophy’s emerging dominance in the discipline at the time. In the following guest post,…

That is from director Rob Moss talking about his new movie The Bend in the River, which is incredible.

If you read this blog you have probably heard the the standard advice about the right temperature to serve various wines. Sparkling wines should be served quite cold, around 42-48°F. Light-bodied whites and rosés at roughly 45-50°F, with richer whites between 50-55°F. Light reds such as Beaujolais or some Pinot Noir can be served around 55°F, while fuller reds belong somewhere in the 60-65°F range. Note that it’s best not to serve Cabernet at the 72°F “room temperature” of the average American…

16-09-26 Another macro safari in Warriston Cemetery. Giant Polypore - huge fungusAlthough there was an occasional butterfly about (admirals and speckled woods mostly) I decided to put the macro lens on and concentrate on the insects on the yellow flowers just in front of the crypts. There was a decent showing of them although not much exotic - mostly hoverflies, drone flies and bees.Phaonia angelicaegeese fly past overheadmaking distant honking callsprobably pinkfoot or greylaglast photo taken…

My wife asked me for a tool tote. She bought a blow pack of 'apartment tools' and said that it was too confusing. But obviously all of those tools tossed together in a tote magically unconfuses a heap of tools. I have learned not to try and decipher her reasoning on some things. I started on the tote this AM.ta daLook at what the idiot couldn't see. I thought of this last night just before I hit the rack. It just popped into the brain bucket and I verified it first thing in the shop this…

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), Letters of Obscure Men XV (tr. Francis Griffin Stokes): For every one should cleave to his own business, and none should put his sickle into another man's corn. Because a cobbler is a cobbler, and a tailor is a tailor, and a smith is a smith; and it would go ill with a tailor who tried to make shoes and slippers. Quia unusquisque debet manere in facultate sua, et non debet mittere falcem in messem alterius. Quia sutor est sutor et sartor est sartor, et faber est…

13:23 - Free things to do in Switzerland: make tea in a thermos, go outside, find a seat, and enjoy the view. 🍵

Sometimes it’s worth sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to resolve it. It builds tolerance. And it gives your mind time to patiently work through a gnarly problem, instead of grabbing the first simple solve that won’t hold up over time.

Twenty years of listening to Amorphis, and I finally caught them live.

As a solicitor, each year, I need to make a statement of solicitor competence. Aside from the regulatory requirement, I want to do a great job for my clients: it is a source of my own personal, professional pride. Similarly, most of my work comes from word of mouth referrals so, simply from a grubby money-making point of view, doing a good job just makes sense. The requirement, at a high level, is pretty obvious: the ability to perform the roles and tasks required by one’s job to the expected…

I've been frustrated by the fact that we can't install rigid ducting in the floor trusses, because you have to do that as you're setting the trusses, and we didn't know that at the time. I also didn't have an HVAC contractor at that time either. I was chatting with Mom on Sunday and expressing my frustration, because it turns out that the only solution is to build a chase down the top of the south wall of the basement to enclose the main duct trunk. More work, plus it's just an unwelcome…

As you may have already been aware, I recently took a trip to Singapore for a couple of weeks. While I’m still “recovering” from the holiday (yes, you really do need another holiday to recover from the holiday) and things are still not quite unpacked or processed, I can at least start with this small side-quest which turned into a bit of a triple-review. 9esim V0 eSIM Adapter If you’re travelling, no doubt, you’ve heard of eSIMs – essentially all of the “identity” in a SIM card but delivered to…

I've been trying something a little different with my TrimUI Brick Hammer lately. Rather than doing what I normally do with a retro handheld and filling a microSD card with far more games than I'll ever realistically play, I've limited myself to three games per system. That's it. The rest of the card is for music.There isn't any particularly scientific reasoning behind three. I just like what it does to the experience. Instead of opening a system and being greeted by hundreds or thousands of…