I got a tipoff about Clouded Yellow (Colias croceus) on a lucerne/alfalfa and clover field in Aldreth a couple of days ago. Many dozens of them, apparently. I had a look a couple of days ago, but it was cloudy and windy and we only saw maybe a couple of dozen. A day later with better conditions, perhaps 50 or so (female helice form seen). But, I did a proper walk around the perimeter of the fields on 25th September (with permission from the farmer) and counted 108 as well as many dozens of…

Jensen Huang accidentally called for shutting down OpenAI and intentionally called for spending vastly more on safety. This is why we say that some podcasts are self-recommending. Here we go. As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. Section titles are from the transcript whenever possible, to aid in…

Oh wow, I suddenly want to buy this place now!... Before I start, I want to clarify that I'm mostly writing about second hand stuff and resell where real images of items and their condition are important. I've been seeing a trend on e-commerce sites and the like where falsified images of items listed for sale are being used to conceal their true condition. This is unlike using stock photos of a product which are immediately obvious and easily visually filtered out. Rather, these are images of…

NOX Mobility, the new private night train company, showcased their first test carriage at Innotrans this week and opened ticket sales for their first route - 23rd March 2027 trains are to run on the Hamburg - München route, 3 times a week. Their press release here.This being the rail industry, and this being Germany, there is obviously still the danger that something might go wrong, but NOX most definitely has a solid plan and this is definitely not bullshit - it should happen.

A little hands-on drawing goes a long way today

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Ankur Thakkar’s novel Blow Yourself Up is a provocative and compelling debut. The Chicago Review of Books wrote of the book: “Blow Yourself Up is a love story for our modern times, exploring…

We've been talking lately about Emperor Justinian I and the Eastern Roman Empire trying to reunite with the Western Roman Empire in the Gothic Wars. Ostrogoths had taken over much of Italy, and Justinian wanted the west back under his control. He failed, but not for lack of trying. Also, he had many more things on his imperial plate.Although he could not hold Italy, the red line seen in the illustration shows the extent of the area in which he had influence, not just control.Despite operating…

📷 241/365 - Prague Charles bridge reflection.

Despite the predictions that no one would ever put build data centers in space, Google is starting on Thursday. Google’s prototype satellite will be one of 130 payloads on SpaceX’s Transporter 18 mission on October 1. The server will follow a dawn-dusk orbit, a special case of a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), following the terminator line between daylight on dark on the earth below. A dawn-dusk orbit allows the satellite’s solar panels to stay in nearly continuous daylight, while also being in a…

As always, I love Nghi Vo’s magical realism version of China. The cleric Chih and their mission to document all the knowledge reminds me somewhat of Sazed from the first Mistborn trilogy, another favorite character of mine. This time she’s in the Riverlands, which seems to be a kind of asian version of the American wild west (at least as depicted in movies and tv shows). It also introduces (I think…I don’t remember seeing it before) some wuxia into the Singing Hills series.Full post

As previously mentioned, when you hear someone like Amodei or Coxon talking about the dangers of AI, listen carefully. They'll probably say a lot about artificial general intelligence and recursive self-improvement and little to nothing about things like this. Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen writing for CNN: The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting…

When the person writing about him or herself has moved out of the self, thus incorporating an external gaze, a strange kind of objectivity arises, something which at one and the same time belongs to the inner and the outer, and this objectivity makes it possible to move around in oneself as if it belonged to another, and then we have come full circle for that movement requires empathy. Karl Ove Knausgaard - Summer

Debris from a house collapse into the ocean at Rodanthe, NC, May 2024 (photo from Wikimedia) 25 September 2026 The road to Rodanthe, North Carolina on the Outer Banks is closed today because storm waves have breached the road near the Pea Island Visitors Center. The waves are from a Nor’easter 300 miles out to sea. It’s not a hurricane. Maximum wind gusts are 45-50 mph. Here’s what the ocean is doing in Rodanthe. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jennifer Koontz…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any Icelandic volcano in possession of magma must be in want of an eruption. However little known the feelings and innards of such a volcano may be, any volcano in the neighbourhood, no matter how inactive looking, is considered the rightful property of VC. What a fine thing…

13:26 - My birthday falls on the same day as Mid-Autumn Festival. I'm gonna try to buy moon cakes today so I can share it with my friends!

Welcome to this week's Link Dump! There are no strangers here; only cat friends you haven't met yet.Feeling melancholy? Try ostrich liver!In 2024, something left a very weird crater on the Moon.More deadly amusement parks.A very unsuccessful hermit.A new cat species has been discovered. A darn cute one, too.Europe's first treatise on cheese.A sorcerer's magical diary.Why some funerals were not rushed.The latest in the search for Noah's Ark.The folklore of Harvest Moons.An aristocratic…

Two kinds of formal semantics for negation can help us understand puzzles in the psychology of reasoning: the Australian Plan semantics, which generalises the account of negation found in frame semantics for intuitionistic logic, relevant and substructural logics; and negation-as-failure, found in logic programming and default logic. We provide a framework where the two kinds of negation coexist, mapping them to the celebrated distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. We use the…

i haven't at all been inclined to write, be it here, or in my journal, or emailing friends. things are kind of both happening and not. i have many ideas but only working in little aborted bursts. some snapshot updates: tried "the grail method" for journaling and it seems to be working really well (link below) i keep re-calculating how many pages i can use for what in next year's planner, depending on what notebook i'll end up getting/making. now i'm confused whether i can fit "grail" style…

Wake to find the rain and wind gone. The fog lingers. I've got to haul out in two days. I could easily be back at the boatyard on Herrick Bay by this evening. Instead I'll split the trip home into two shorter days. Today I hope to reach somewhere up around the Southeast Harbor area on the east side of Deer Isle.Anchor up and under power 9:15. Time to spare so I head towards Stonington, might as well start off the day with a pastry. The fog is thick and I navigate through Merchants Row with…

A friend of mine expects to receive a modest windfall from an inheritance. Their now-deceased relative was sufficiently twice-removed to make the money both unexpected and also unencumbered with emotional baggage. (Notwithstanding my envious side-eye…) “Well, I’d put it in a pension,” I said. Just because the money had effectively fallen out of the sky, that doesn’t mean they should flush it down the toilet. “Of course,” I continued, “I am not your financial advisor. Everyone’s situation is…

Told you the seats would be worth the wait. STOOLS! Mushroom-y stools! And they're red, to make them stand out. Admittedly the passenger ghosts on the wall are disappointing but still, how great are they? All of the M3 stations have them and they're ace.When you step out of Porto Romana station it becomes obvious why this one got to keep the name and the mainline one had to change. This is what you see straight away.The gate dates from 1596 and was one of the entry points through the city…

I’ve been slowly working through Rafa, the Netflix documentary on Nadal. As a casual tennis fan, I’ve always admired his fighting spirit, but the documentary brings home just how much he suffered to get there. He played almost his entire career with Müller-Weiss syndrome, a degenerative condition in his left foot, since being diagnosed in 2005. It’s the kind of chronic injury that would have ended most careers early. He played through it anyway, for two decades, and became one of the greatest…

At the end of August, the results came out for a general resolution on the use of generative AI (LLMs) in Debian. Option 5 won: “Responsible use of generative AI.” The outcome — you can probably guess — left a lot of people unhappy. This week, it was the KDE project’s turn to end up in the crossfire while trying to propose a policy on the use (or non-use) of AI in its code. Tempers flared when ~the internet discovered that one of the talks at Akademy, the project’s annual event, proposed “a…

WorkManager is Android Jetpack’s first party solution to long-running background work. It takes care of dealing with the idiosyncrasies and differences between Android versions, and gives you a very simple API that lets you focus on what needs to happen instead of the how. It’s very well designed, and as someone who’s had to deal with JobScheduler and AlarmManager years ago for this class of problems, it’s a boon. That said, debugging WorkManager is somewhat cumbersome (ref). This also had the…

Rapido trains UK have announced they are to produce the London Brighton and South Coast (LBSC) D2 0-4-2 tanks in 00 gauge along with two exclusive versions for Kernow Model Rail Centre. William Stroudley followed his successful A1 Terrier class with the equally successful D1 0-4-2 tanks Built over thirteen years, the first, “Sydenham”, appropriately bearing the number ‘1’, appeared in November 1873 whilst the last, the 125th, was not built until December 1886. Initially built at Brighton, Some…

Central Park has always had various forms of food concessions, ranging from high to low. Most people are aware of Tavern on the Green, a pricey restaurant, on the west side of the park near 68th Street; most people are not aware that the core of its building is the sheepfold for the adjacent Sheep Meadow. After the sheep were forcibly removed from the park in 1934, the building was converted. About the same time, the restaurant called the Central Park Casino, operating out of a converted…

Jay Maisel with his Nikon D3s and 28-300mm lens, his favorite kit. (Click to enlarge)Photo by Randy Duchaine (Fair Use)In my last post I extolled the talent and success of one of the 20th and 21st centuries’ best photographers. Maisel made it clear that he was not a technical guy, didn’t know much about gear and technique and that he relied upon his eye and visceral feeling when he made photographs. I brought forth information from three YouTube videos, one of which was his last known interview…

I had hoped to post this review back in July; alas, my brain made a different decision, and for the second time this year, I found myself unable to read new-to-me books, or to write about…well, anything. Things are looking up for the moment, so here I am, back with my Game Changers/Heated Rivalry nonsense. Beware: clinical depression; suicide of a loved one in the past; parent suffering from Alzheimer’s, in the past; death of parents, in the past; homophobia; swearing; quite a bit of explicit…

Two scheduled agents turn my meetings, inbox and calendar into one daily note that keeps me focused and knows who I owe what. Here's the setup and every prompt.

When I started The Simple Catholic, I simply wanted to share my love for the Catholic faith and help make its beauty a little easier for others to understand. Over the years, God has opened doors for this little corner of the internet in ways that I never could have anticipated. That is why I … Continue reading The Simple Catholic Recognized as a Top Catholic Blog in 2026 The post The Simple Catholic Recognized as a Top Catholic Blog in 2026 first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post The…