Importance: 7 | # | Tomas Pueyo: Humans evolved in the African highlands, where temperatures are stable throughout the year, and close to that of spring & fall in temperate regions. This is why we feel most comfortable there. Close to the equator, if we’re not in the mountains, the temperatures are too high for us. We can’t think or work properly because we overheat, and our sweat can’t cool us off because humidity is too high. We also suffer from many more diseases, more common in hot moist…

A warning sign on a cliff at Prospect Canyon in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The post Mountain Warning appeared first on 75CentralPhotography.

I knew I had a Google Maps API key in a Microsoft Github repository publicly viewable, so I’ve been meaning to rotate it. Since 2017. Procrastination, eh? But it didn’t really seem that urgent because I had a $10 spending limit on the key, so eh whatevs — I have more important things to do. Like washing my hair! Reading comics! I’m a busy man! After nine years, it finally happened: Somebody started using it and ran up a $6 bill, so I disabled the key (and I guess I now have to push a new…

Consider internal categories and in a finitely complete ambient category , and functors . Assume we have a natural transformation . To say that is a(n internal) natural isomorphism, in my 2012 paper in TAC I wrote “We say a natural transformation is a natural isomorphism if it has an inverse with respect to vertical composition”, that is to say, there is some natural transformation such that the vertical composition and . For any internal category internal to a finitely complete category we can…

A travel guide for those who find themselves whisked away to Queen Bess’ lands. Full of interesting titbits, and pairs beautifully with An Accidental History of Tudor England. My only real complaint is how superficial it is. I craved more depth, yearned for minutiae, longed for particulars. Alas, 'tis written in a light, engaging style with little room for deep dives. I’ll be reading more of this series, whilst looking for something with a little more heft. ★★★★☆

It’s time once more for another Saturday update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published a further eight papers, including one correction to an article already published, bringing the number in Volume 9 (2026) to 217 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 664. This is the third week running that we have published 7 new papers. I continue to include the posts made on our Mastodon account (on Fediscience); these announcements also contain a…

Forcing women to give birth knowing they won’t be bringing a baby home is pure cruelty. – Nancy Northup The Leading Players in the Field, Not (#574) While Western “feminists” burbled hagiographies of Gloria Steinem, Indian feminists had this to say: …Gloria Steinem[‘s]…deep and damaging impact on the movement for sex workers’ rights…is one of her most lasting legacies in Southasia…Steinem posited that prostitution – she refused to call it “sex work” – manifests an inherent power disparity…

Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup are a terrifying and terrific pairing in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Soho Place. The play is set at an after-party early in the morning at Martha (Anderson) and university professor George’s (Crudup) house, with a young married couple, Nick (Josh Dillon) and Honey (Phoebe Horn). But for Martha and George, conversation is a duel. Their words become weapons delivered as probes, pushes and outright attacks. There is intimacy in the fighting.…

This is a cat named Einstein not Einstein’s cat, but isn’t he gorgeous? You can see his person reflected in his eyes. Photo from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_(7996196819).jpg Two or three thousand years ago, Indo-European speakers who had turned back at the Khyber Pass decided that some of the gods of their fathers, the daevas, were malevolent spirits.1 Their relatives in the Indus Valley disagreed and so the languages and religions diverted. Twenty or thirty years ago, I…

What caught my eye this week. Weekend Reading – featuring the week’s best money and investing articles from around the web – can be read by any logged-in Monevator member. Alternatively please subscribe to our free email newsletter to get future editions direct to your inbox. The post Weekend reading: Make mine a triple, but what about the hangover? appeared first on Monevator.

I wrote recently, about macOS, “it’s hard when the operating system cedes its responsibilities to provide good design patterns,” and Mac developer Brent Simmons in a recent essay shares a parallel line of thinking about how unreliable and untenable designing with the basic macOS UI components has become: But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really? The app world is full of people who think…

Lazy AI-generated content is everywhere now. Unfortunately, AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini aren’t reliable for factual content, especially science content. AI chatbots don’t “know things” AI chatbots don’t simply report information from a database, and they haven’t “learned all of human knowledge”. This is a common misconception that’s perpetuated by AI companies – when people think AI chatbots ... Read more Source

Plus, Amiga Bill joins us for the news! The post Before Photoshop: How SEGA’s Sonic Artwork Was Made – The Retro Hour EP548 appeared first on Retro Hour Podcast.

Welcome to your weekly TTRPG newsletter! The most popular posts on the blog this week were Running Red Dragon’s Tale, Dolmenwood Resources for You, Close and Distant Playstyles, Prepping Myths in Mythic Bastionland, and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 5e. Like this newsletter? Subscribe to get it in your inbox every Saturday, and please share it with your friends! Table of Contents Discord DiscussionsBlog Posts to ReadProjects to Bookmark and Download:Play ReportsPaladin ProjectsPoem…

Review by Sandre the Giant Released: 1st May 2026 The fifth record from California’s progressive black metallers Ashen Horde comes on the heels of 2023’s excellent ‘Antimony’ record, but changes tack a little from their previous concept driven records into something a little more individualistic. ‘The Harvest’ has a loose theme about things ending, but Ashen Horde’s spectacularly eclectic influences are more the focus here, ranging from brutal, technical death through fiery black metal to 90s…

Learning to Solve Hard Problems in RL for LLMs by Never Giving Up discusses an approach for countering what the authors call the Matthew Effect, the tendency for the LLM to improve much more on easy problems that it is already good than harder problems that have a lower solve rate. Their approach is to allocate training time dynamically based on the difficulty of the problem. Background After an LLM has been pretrained on a large corpus of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data, it is common to…

Last month I posted 30-odd metaphors from Ross Macdonald. Now it’s Lorrie Moore’s turn. I just read her most recent novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, described accurately by one critic as “strange, tender, and gross”. I’m a horror fan; I don’t mind gross. It’s also beguiling and beautiful. Moore’s metaphors have a different quality to Macdonald’s. His are generally self-contained, like quips, with a physical immediacy. Hers are more surprising, more philosophical, and often more…

You would think that interactive mapping platforms are the perfect tool for building territory expansion games. However, I can think of very few good map conquest games.There are a few popular 'Risk'-type games, such as War.app, that involve claiming and conquering territories on a map. There have also been a few 'Monopoly'-type games, such as Upland, that involve buying and selling virtual real estate on an interactive map tied directly to actual addresses in major global cities.InkDom,…

In September I often write an update about some of the things I'm doing at school and outside of school, in case there's some ideas that might help other teachers. In my 2024 post September Routines I wrote about launching homework platforms, corridor etiquette and communicating with parents. We still do all these things. We're also still running Papers Society (which I first ran back as a

Each in TurnCaitlin was exactly as good a student as she remembered. The reason that she does not remember working is because she spent all of her time in the active pursuit of the knowledge that the degree promised to impart. She received three separate scholarships, all of them meagre in the scope of things, and now only remembers receiving one of them. She had her rent paid by her parents, who were wealthy. Like Ella, she had mostly antagonistic relationships with her tutors, with one…

Yesterday was busy. I put a bassline on a song that I wasn't sure about, and it ended up being just right especially sound-wise. I now have to use that sound on at leats one other song. I may re-play that one today.I went to interview Johny Brown of the Band of Holy Joy down at Resonance FM for the 'Postcard To Newcastle' part of the radio show pilot. Just like with Molly Tie, the chat round the edges was really interesting too.Trying to walk along the riverside to get to Waterloo station,…

M. John HarrisonSerpent's Tail Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscured. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything…

Books that complain about the state of universities, written by university members, are probably as old as the institution itself. And if there is one institution that needs – and should be able to provide – self-reflection, it is universities. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to comment on a new addition to this genre, Long Live the Ivory Tower, by historian Klaas van Berkel (currently only available in Dutch). It made me think, once more, about a question that I’ve long been chewing on: how…

Day 14 in Tokyo Kagayaki and Kayo lost again, making the yusho race a bigger party. Kagayaki still leads at 11-3 but Tamawashi and Kitanowaka join Kayo in the hunt at 10-4. At the other end, Ikarigata defeated Tochitaikai, earning his kachikoshi and making a case for promotion to Juryo. Plenty of guys are in … Continue reading Aki 2026: Day Fourteen

I’m back with TamaFi V2, a full rebuild of my open-source WiFi-aware virtual pet, and almost none of the original code survived the process. TamaFi started as a simple idea. A pocket pet that gets hungry from WiFi activity instead of a feed button. It worked, but the face was a sprite sheet, the reactions were instant and a little lifeless, and there was no companion app. This time, I had one goal: rebuild it into something that actually feels alive, on hardware that has real limits I had to…

These have got a very dentist waiting room feel to them. In my head they were artful abstracts, alas.19 words · 3 images

I checked, and this is the 606th weekly roundup of blog articles that I’ve published. Here’s the first one. Best of the blogs ▷ Nick Gerlich reflects on just how different “normal” is as you pass from region to region across the United States. For example: in chili, beans or no? It’s a deeply serious question in some places. Read A National Tapestry Nikon Df, 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6G AF Nikkor, 2026 Cameras and photography ▷ panamajack goes into Columbus, Ohio’s oldest neighborhood and documents its…

We’re nearly always told that January is a time for renewal, but for many of us, autumn marks the start of the new year, so it was with this in mind that I put together my list of the Top 10 perfumes for autumn 2026: scents that encourage a quiet, inward-looking rejuvenation. Here’s a link […] The post Top 10 Perfumes For Autumn 2026 – A Sense Of Renewal appeared first on .

Porridge und Avocado-Toast im T35 Breakfast Club in Kalamaja Mein Favorit zum Frühstücken in Kalamaja: Im T35 Breakfast Club gibt es Porridge, Frittata, Avocado-Toast, Kuchen und Gebäck. Ein schöner, kleiner Laden in meinem Lieblingsviertel der estnischen Hauptstadt. Ich war während meiner Tallinn-Reise mehrfach dort und verrate euch, was sich lohnt. Wenn ich auf meine Woche in Tallinn zurückblicke, gibt es ein paar Orte, bei denen ich nicht nur einmal vorbeigeschaut habe. Der T35 Breakfast…

I'm living in the mountains in a cabin situated just so that one can call it Germany. Of course, since it actually is very much in Germany, also if it's a mere 10 minutes on foot to the Austrian border, everything about this place can be very much considered German. Most of the visitors are German, all of my co-workers are German, the cabin belongs to the German Alpenverein, visitors speak all kinds of German dialects and yet: I can see home from up here. My Austrian German seems powerless in…