What can a single musical note teach us about attention? Beginning with the sound of a gong in a Peace Stupa, this is a personal meditation on listening, silence, creativity – and the worlds that can open when we pay attention to seemingly insignificant things. The post Meditations on a Single Note appeared first on Friedrich Zettl Fine Arts.

I decided to mess with the design for the Halloween season. I don't plan to do this for every season, obviously. My old style will return in November. Until then, I decided to have a little bit of fun. More little touches may appear as the whimsy catches me. I did a bit of digging for the old school Halloween images, so I thought I'd share the resources I used, as well as give them credit. Clker had a fun selection of free clip art The Graphics Fairy has a veritable library of public domain…

More proof that these companies knew what they were doing and did not care.

Source Archaeologists have discovered two remarkable mammoth ivory carvings in southwestern Germany: intricate miniatures that are about the size of your thumbnail and date back 40,000 years. One depicts a resting bird, possibly brooding over its eggs, with a clear shape and a carefully carved head, beak, and eyes. The other seems to have its wings partly outstretched, with a distinctive beak and feather markings visible. These fine figurines were found at the well-known Hohle Fels Cave, part…

Every Saturday we round up the best writing about beer from the past week. This time, we’ve got cheaper pints, Czech pubs and Belgian folk traditions. First, some interesting product launch news. Now, we don’t say that often, because press releases about new products rarely have an angle. But Red Willow’s announcement of a new cask ale range specifically designed to be affordable caught our attention because, as people used to like saying a few years ago, it’s “the quiet part out loud”:…

Source A point often forgotten. China is not a Han Chinese monolith.

Fabulous family dinner at Loretta, location of so many great family events.

Today was pretty stressful. I got to do my second round in person interview, which I felt went really well, but they said if I move on there will be another interview! I've never had this many interviews for one job before! It makes it so stressful, cause I now have to see if I make it to the next round, then I have to get ready for the next interview! That's so much suspense and waiting, it's the worst! When I got home my partner wanted to play more of our randomizer, but it took me ages to…

“What do they do, the singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers? They go there with empty hands, into the gap between. They come back with things in their hands.” Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 95.

Flora and I discussing the things we won't miss about advertising.

If you love the warm, nostalgic comfort of apple pie but don't always have the time (or energy) to make a full one, these Apple Pie Roll Ups are about to become your new favourite apple dessert! They capture everything we adore about classic apple pie -- buttery pastry, cinnamon-kissed apples, that irresistible sweet aroma -- but in a fun bite-sized form that's ready in minutes!They're quick. They're easy, and they deliver almost instant apple-pie gratification. Serve them warm with custard or…

Open House continues unabated this weekend. Here's where else I've been over the last week. Open House: Punchdrunk (Woolwich) The Immersive One Sometimes something utterly unexpected turns up on the Open House list, and so it was on Thursday evening when an invite to tour secret backstage facilities at Punchdrunk appeared entirely unannounced. I'll have that, I thought. And so it was I joined one of three very small groups invited for a backstage tour inside the immersive theatre company's…

Sorry, the post is on the brief side, and no headline theme. "Able to put something together" is not quite the same thing as "Back to full strength." TrumpWatch, Part I: The War Against the First Amendment Continues Previously, Donald Trump tried to ban the Associated Press from the White House (and from associated venues). Yesterday, he ostensibly expanded the list, blackballing CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Here is the announcement, from his own lips (well, his own fingertips): Click here for…

Make the “Add to Cart” button blue. Do not let Claude touch anything else.

A few weeks on from my last note and we’ve made more progress. Last week we started our first round of testing prototypes with users and had some interesting early signals on where to focus after the baselining exercise. One of our partner teams launched their new national service to great acclaim, and the performance metrics look good. This has meant they’re a little more available to chat with us, and we’ve had a couple of meetings. It helped us realise that we don’t have a concise summary of…

Thanks to Ava’s post, I discovered Pixel Area. It’s a cool project offering 10.000 “pixels” for the indiweb community. It’s a nice way to find other interesting blogs and websites. My pixel is located here.

Here we are at World’s End again, the the terminus end of a line from nowhere.An occasional passenger train runs, not to any kind of timetable, but simply on an ad-hock bases if enough people turn up wanting to travel to World’s End for some reason or another. Here we have one such train arriving with passengers (or customers as we refer to them today) consisting of 4 frog spotters and 2 peat bog fanciers looking for mummified bog men from the end of the last ice age and Nasal Nigel.Waving…

[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics community right now is that solving problems and generating proofs have always served as proxies for the true goal of mathematicians, which is to further human understanding. When proofs can be generated without that understanding, it undermines their value as a proxy. This immediately raises a question: What other…

When I was talking about this post with a friend, he asked a thought-provoking question. In the post, I’d argued that I believe it should be appropriate for mathematics to consider a solution to a problem to be illegitimate if mathematicians had arrived at it with help from a machine, device or instrument that wasn’t equitably accessible to all mathematicians. My friend asked if this was like how not all physicists can access the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and how not all biologists could…

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read. It was a novel written by an American and published about a decade ago. I read little contemporary fiction but the book’s setting interested me and I felt that I owed my son an honest effort. I petered out after seventy pages. I felt guilty about it but the novel was long and my tolerance was short. It’s not a bad book. In fact the novelist is gifted. He writes well and obviously…

she’s happy, really — miraculously she did not fall through the gap under the chair arm, the t-shirt was enough to hold her Win of the week: did a task I’ve been putting off for years 🙌 Sorted through my tubs of beading supplies from when I tried to sell handmade jewelry online in 2009 — separated out about 2/3 to donate or give away — plus I have a bunch of handmade jewelry to deconstruct to salvage nice beads from, so I actually did for all the easy stuff Looking forward to: reading some…

There’s an endless and growing corpus of live recordings of synthesizer music on YouTube by highly skilled and informed musicians, and I particularly enjoy this ongoing channel called Modular Ambient, named for the modular synthesizers that are the focus of each video. Whoever runs it sets up these inventive and deceptively simple generative (in the pre-LLM sense of the word) or otherwise ever-changing systems of varied sound sources and processing, and then records them for half a day…

Saturday 19th September 2026 After the South East, South West and South Wales, East Anglia, West Midlands, Potteries, South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside and last time’s seasonal adventure in East Yorkshire it’s now time for the first of the two bus route 99s in the North East as we enter the home straight in this year long oddesey exploring all Britain’s 25 bus routes numbered 99. And this one is the eighth of nine routes operated by an SME rather than one of the Groups. It’s…

I listened to a podcast where the podcaster interview entrepreneur about their success stories. The common theme of these successful entrepreneur is their obsessions over their business. One of the business owner said, he does not have an exit plan for his business. He would handover the driving seat to the next generation, but he will never quit working on the business. He would rather work until his last breath. So his exit plan is death. I am both scared and excited by what the person said.…

Okay, I’ve got a video coming out, but here are my early thoughts on Jev.The first thing to know is that it’s not a large language model. It doesn’t produce text, it outputs decisions.Processing...The decision types are (roughly) choice, score, and yes/no.It is roughly at the intelligence level of Sol or Opus for making these decisions.The question is: why are people so excited about this? A couple of reasons:The most important one is that so much of what we actually do in AI is making these…

The doges Deusdedit (742-755), Galla (755–756), Domenico Monegario (756–764), Maurizio Galbaio (764–787) and his son Giovanni (787–804), from the "Chronica per extensum descripta" (1340s) by Andrea Dandolo.

Maybe. But it's no Sea Lion is it?

Originally Published in Games Unplugged Webzine – December 27th, 2000 Spookshow is one of those games which has a really great concept – ghosts are real and they’re working as spies – which then utterly fails to develop that concept in any appreciable way. Adding to its sin, Spookshow seems eerily aware of its limitations: An oversized, double-spaced font dominates the entire presentation. A number of interesting elements which could have taken this sketchy concept and given its real legs are,…

I’m on a United flight from SFO to AUS and I switched on the free Wi-fi, courtesy of Starlink and started browsing. Five minutes in, I noticed something felt off. It didn’t feel like in-flight Wi-fi. It felt fast. Like, home Wi-fi fast. So I ran a quick test – Holy fucking shit! No wonder. Wow. Take a bow, Starlink! This is a phenomenal change. I’m publishing this post from my flight. My first in-flight post!