Sometime around mid-November, Voyager 1 will cross the one light-day mark. That means the signal from a spacecraft we launched in September of 1977 now takes a full 24 hours to reach us at the speed of light. It launched before the original Star Wars was in theaters, before the IBM PC existed, before most people alive today were born, and it has been running continuously for 49 years. And in roughly 60 days, it will officially be one light-day from Earth. The number sounds manageable until you…

This is a work of fiction. In more ways than one. Such a sad fate for an unwitting species, this emergence of a ‘self’, what we humans absurdly call ‘consciousness’ . (as if our delusion of ‘knowing’ made us smarter or better than other animals that have no need for it). As if ‘we’ can ‘know’ what is true and real, afflicted as we are with our self’s false sense of separation, control, and responsibility. This is the hermetic tragedy of the self, this mad sense of owning and being in control of…

It’s been a while, but here are some good bites collected from the ad-free, open-source social network known as the fediverse: You’d be surprised what a tool like 7zip can do, besides opening all possible types of archive files. Opening EXT partitions from USB drives on Windows, for example. Or reading VHDX files. This post links to an interesting video of a talk from the Dutch techie Felienne about programming and AI. It’s a good one, offering a different perspective, IMO (Youtube link). Well,…

This blog post is the thirty-sixth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.The 51st World Science Fiction Convention had a more robust media presence than many of its predecessors had.Special effects legend Stan Winston showed up to promote the upcoming adaptation of Interview With The Vampire. Rockne S. Obannon was on hand to show clips from his new series Seaquest DSV. There were presentations from that autumn’s hot…

× Jeremy Stern’s profile of Mark Zuckerberg in Colossus explains why Meta’s AI strategy could work even without having the best model. I agree with much of his argument. It also helps separate two questions that are often conflated: how useful AI becomes and how much pricing power model developers retain. I’ve written about this in AI Models Are the New Rebar and AI Models as Standalone P&Ls. A model can remain useful after competitors reproduce its capabilities. The premium customers will pay…

Above all, Trump learned one very big thing from Cohn: that the veneer of morality in the American upper class is very thin. Cohn proved conclusively that there is no limit to its tolerance for corruption. Trump got that message—and so did Jeffrey Epstein. —Fintan O’Toole, “Devils in America,"The New York Review of Books, Oct. 8, 2026, 12.

ECTOCOMP is a yearly interactive fiction game jam celebrating the month of Halloween. It looks like a chill jam and has a very good AI policy (it’s not allowed), so give it a look on Itch.io. There’s even a category for folks who want to speed write a game in four hours or less if you’re someone like me who cannot devote lots of time to a game jam.

• 4-star hikes • 3 mile options • Moderate | Gain 670 to 810 feet • Troy, NH | Monadnock Region . Mount Monadnock views from North Mountain. Gap Mountain gives hikers two choices to reach the top, with routes approaching from both the north and the south. The two trails are nearly identical in length and elevation gain, and both offer a fantastic experience. We suggest choosing whichever trailhead is closest to you. On either path you can expect a mostly shaded woodland walk, capped off with a…

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is a special time for the city, one I didn’t appreciate until I moved away from it. This year, I did my homework and found a movie I wanted to watch: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s adaptation of Look Back, a one-shot graphic novel originally written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto. While it was my first time coming across the story, its meta-creativity premise exploring friendship and rivalry appealed to me. There is an excellent summary of the plot in…

Here. Another of the things I worked on this summer is available: Fritz Lang’s SCARLET STREET. A fun video essay to do. Masters of Cinema are making much of the fact that I got Alexander Payne to voice Darryl F. Zanuck — he was surprised enough to be asked that he went along with the […]

Un giorno a casoLe campane delle cinque meno un quarto sono tornate a suonareQuelle campane un po' stonateChe ascoltavo sempre dalla finestra apertaI pomeriggi d'estateOppure dal giardino, con te che soffiavi le bolleSeduta su quel sasso sotto gli alberiQuei pomeriggi mi mancanoO forse non sono quei pomeriggi a mancarmiForse sei tu che mi manchiMi manca il tuo profumo, rose e cipriaMi manca il tuo trucco perfettoAnche per andare al mercato il giovedìO a fare la spesa un altro giornoMi manca…

Note: This review, as with all content I write on this site, is my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of others, including the American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI), the cutlery trade group that I advise on legal matters.In the Renaissance there was an intellectual tradition of writing apologetics. One of the most famous of these writings, the Pensees, by Blaise Pascal lays out Pascal’s Wager (which, notably, does not prove the existence of God, but instead reasons for holding such a…

A recent post on Hacking OpenAI and a bug bounty of $6,500 reminded me of an old problem. A security company was able to hack into private OpenAI repositories, but only got a small bounty. A company with a valuation of $852 billion paid a few pennies to researchers. In comparison, such data could be sold for hundreds of thousands on the black market. For those who don't know, a bug bounty program is a way for companies to pay white-hat hackers (security researchers) to find vulnerabilities in…

Horses kicking up their hooves in a corral in North Kohala. This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘Antlers, Horns & Hooves.’ See more responses here. There aren’t any antlers to be seen around here, but there are horns and hooves aplenty! Captions on the photos as usual. Horns and colored tags! Horns and beard. Horns and hooves. Wavy. Curly. Just a little bit menacing!

I think it’s important to show an interest in your children’s hobbies. Gigabyte has recently developed a fascination with large insects, and I cherish the quality time we spend together watching them.

Ao contrário do que muitos acham – e até mesmo do que eu falo às vezes – eu gosto de viajar. Quando digo que eu não gosto de viajar, quero dizer andar de avião, isso eu odeio mesmo. Mas viagens são experiências fora da própria zona de conforto, do conhecido, do automático. Às vezes isso é bom, e às vezes, ruim. O resultado de uma viagem não é uma questão binária de gostar ou não, mas de uma confluência de centenas de fatores, que vão desde transporte até comida, companhia, clima e humor, entre…

I read an article in the Irish version of The Times about the band U2 being together for 50 years now, dating back to their first gathering as a group in drummer Larry Mullen’s kitchen, on September 25, 1976. They were literal kids then — all of them still in school — and years away from releasing their first recordings, much less becoming the globe-spanning rock icons they would eventually become, and certainly the biggest rock group Ireland ever produced. But all things have to start…

International Observe the Moon Night with TinyYears ago, in what is still one of my favorite AstroBlog articles, The Good Tasco, I talked about my second Tasco telescope, an 11TE 4.5-inch reflector, which was indeed a good one. The first? Not so much, muchachos. That was a rather execrable 3-inch Newtonian I was given in 1965—it did get me started, though. Anyhow, some thirty five years after the 11TE, another Tasco fell into my hands. Would the third Tasco be the charm or not? Number three…

I made a painting once.

Mentions of the menopause in British daily papers increased seven-fold between 2001 and 2021 and have, I’m sure, increased still further since. The word occurs almost every day on the radio, whereas it was rarely mentioned 50 years ago. In his magnificent history of medicine, which was published in 1999, the historian Roy Porter uses the menopause to illustrate the many ways that such a phenomenon can be viewed. Before he concentrates on the menopause he writes: “What has been styled,…

Here in the Midwest, the most iconic semi-local transit infrastructure is, naturally, the Chicago El, and specifically the Loop.While the El is not entirely above ground (the Red and Blue lines go underground through downtown), the name and the brand are both about the elevated lines. This contrasts strongly, of course, with a city like London, where the most significant and iconic intracity rail network is literally called the Underground (though, as we'll discuss below, the DLR is often…

As a young man in the 1950s in a small village in Togo, West Africa, Tété-Michel Kpomassie was bitten by a snake while climbing a tree for coconuts. His father took him to a local snake cult to have him cured, and then planned to have him initiated as a priest of the cult. Kpomassie had other ideas. While recuperating from the bite he picked up a book about the Inuit of Greenland from the Jesuit

Envy is far more common than we admit, because it rarely shows up looking like envy. It's in the backhanded remark about someone else. It's in the way people vent about the latest Apple product online. It's in the cruelty strangers throw at each other on social media. It's in the whining to friends. It's in praise dressed up with self-pity. It's in calling someone else "lucky" the moment they succeed. It's in the tightness in your chest when someone with less status or money than you pulls…

A couple of years before COVID, I was with a friend getting the house they were buying inspected, and afterwards we were asking the inspector some questions about what he had found. He was an older gentleman, and it was obvious that "this wasn't [his] first rodeo," and he had a lot of experience and knowledge in his field. When we were done, I was standing outside the inspector's truck talking to him before he left, and while I don't remember exactly what he said, it dawned on me that he was a…

It must be that time again. #ango #zen #buddhism #zenbuddhism #spirituality #religion #fallango

In native gardening, the most effective way to prevent unwanted plants (aka weeds) from growing is to crowd them out with plants you do want. Rather than well-space plants with large gaps of mulch, you packed plants densely together, just like you’d find in nature. Without the space to take root, weeds are (mostly) kept at bay. This is a metaphor about life and social change. I spend a lot of time fighting against social injustice. It’s important to fight back against bad things, like it’s…

Developer: CapcomPublisher: CapcomYear: 1988Genre: PlatformerSystem: NES Inspired by Jeff Gerstmann’s NES games ranking, I played through all of Mega Man 2 for the first time in about 10 years or so. I was a little surprised it had been that long since it’s my favorite NES game (and still is) but that’s the date for the achievement on the Mega Man Legacy Collection and I don’t think I’ve completed it since then. There’s no hot takes in this one, I still love it and agree with all the opinions…

Gerhard Richter, Untitled [sic], 2001, oil, ink and graphite on paper, inscribed, “Dear Marian, have a great and happy new year/ All best, Gerhard and family,” either 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 in. or 22.2 x 21 cm, but not both, at Christie’s Now this is the Marian’s Richter I want to see. A squeegee New Year’s card signed from “Gerhard and family.” “All best, Gerhard and family”: Thomas Struth, The Richter Family I, 2002, 1356 x 1942 mm sheet, c-print facemounted on acrylic, ed. 10, I think? collection:…

We begin the week with a fetch quest: I ran around the office delivering a gift and later trying to track down a package, which it turned out had just been delivered to the wrong department. But as a result: Now everything on my is the same colour. Great! Had a great time at Oimachi Tracks, as promised the view was excellent. Sitting under a canopy in the falling rain brings back memories, it is one of my favourite sounds. On a fly-by visit to the Apple Store to procure a spare part, one of the…