There’s a lovely resource that I suspect most non-physicists don’t know about. It’s called the Particle Data Group, and its interactive site PDGLive. If you want to know the most up-to-date information on a subatomic particle, PDGLive has your back. From their home page, you can click on familiar particles like photons (), electrons () or gluons and find the best info experiments have provided on properties like their mass and charge. It’s a great place to get an authoritative number for any…

I will be in Lausanne from Monday October 26th late afternoon until Thursday October 29th early morning. I will be in Lausanne for an event by the Swiss Data Alliance. If you care to meet-up let me know. I will fly in and out of Geneva, so on the day of arrival a meet-up in Geneva is possible too.

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Hello, loves! I propose to blather a bit this morning, starting with some ‘AI’-related ideas and then going I know not where. Triggers Jessica Kerr—jessitron—recently published an article that caught my attention: Who are we Now. Jessica is unquestionably a better programmer than I am, thinks very deeply about important matters, and has been digging deeply into the use of current ‘AI’ agents. You should read that article, before you read this and perhaps instead. Here is a quote that I want to…

This site is my quiet space on the internet. I write about topics I enjoy (see writing non-fiction) and try to avoid controversy. I don't want to overthink things, spend hours editing for perfection, or feel the need to stick to normal writing conventions. I just want to organize what's on my mind and clear some space in the old noggin. But, from time to time (like this week), something I write strikes a chord, sounds an alarm, or rattles a cage. And, suddenly this isn't such a quiet space. I…

I will be in Oslo from Tuesday October 13th early afternoon until Friday October 16th early evening. I will be in Oslo for a CEN/CENELEC JTC25 plenary meeting (European data space standardisation work). I may have time on at least one half day, and two of the evenings if you want to meet up.

It's getting close to Halloween, but I'm historically really really bad at keeping focus, so imagine this was released like. 2 weeks from now, OK? OK. So! World of Darkness. Used to be my favorite punching bag, read it, now I have a weird sort of respect for it. I still don't really think its a great system, but I can really appreciate a lot of what it does, especially in the newer Chronicles line, and hell I'm one of the few people defending Vampire V6 nowadays! Now, World of Darkness is very…

My computer welcomed me this morning with this picture on my desktop. It brings back a lot of good memories of walking from my fraternity house on the edge of campus to Marvin Hall early in the morning. This was my viewpoint from those walks to and from campus each day. KU (University of Kansas) is a beautiful campus and I loved walking around it in the six years I spent there (5 year architecture degree in 6). This picture just conjures up so many good memories of my time on “The Hill.” I am…

[This problem isn’t going away.] Today in perverse incentives, coastal property owners are incentivized by their insurance to let their homes fall into the sea, rather than proactively tearing them down. McDaniel says he can’t afford to move the house, which would be his first choice, or to demolish it. The house has a flood insurance policy that will pay out $250,000 if it collapses, plus up to $100,000 for lost belongings. “If it’s teetering, you’ve got to sit and wait for it to fall in the…

Just finished testing the gain levels on the H1n. It's very good at grabbing everything around it, which will work great when filming the boiling water and such. The current mic I am using is a mini boom mic connected to my phone to get targeted sound. The only issue is that it's mono and not ultra amazing. Yesterday the pop filter came in for the H1n so I was able to go out this morning and try and record some ambient and targeted sounds. There is way more meat in the audio now but I am still…

It’s been a busy week, but not as busy as last week, mostly because Monday was a holiday and I got some rest. Uma was away over the weekend with her Atte to celebrate. Belated Ganesha Chaturthi, if you celebrate. As a kid, my parents celebrated only Gouri Habba; Ganeshana Habba was there just to end the Gouri Habba. We kind of never celebrated Ganesha Habba at home; it was mostly on the streets. It wasn’t as aggressive as it is today. Kaalu Soup near GKVK I did a long walk/run with friends on…

The relationship between keyboard manufacturers and standards bodies in various countries is so complex I barely understand a snippet of it. The most famous example must be the 1990s PowerBooks, which had a beige variant for Germany and Germany only, to conform with local laws that prescribed and enforced specific color and contrast combinations for keyboards, in order to avoid glare and attendant ergonomic problems for terminal operators in the decades before. (It wasn’t just Apple. ThinkPads…

My eyes momentarily misread something as “Manipulati”, and I accidentally fell into my new favorite word for propagandists, influencers, and other ne’er-do-wells.

Here is a modular dungeon node to connect to others, with potential connectors left exposed for the GM. Since I showed my brainstorming process before, I'll skip doing it for this week and get right to the good stuff. This next dungeon patch is set in the dungeon seed called the Spires, which is basically like this level from Dungeon Meshi. Each area is a Ewok treehouse-like platform connected by rope bridge hallways. The skeletal trees glow with ghostly mushrooms.1. Fairy TollA crossroads…

Today’s soundtrack: Two-Hour Mix of the Jazz in Haruki Murakami Novels. A fantastic playlist. Very accessible for those not normally into jazz.

A couple of nights ago, I went to see the opening night of the new Komische Oper production of Aribert Reimann’s opera Lear, directed by Barrie Kosky and staged in the Oper’s temporary location in a hangar at Tempelhof Airport. I reviewed it for Bachtrack, and you can find that review at this link. On Substack are some s further reflections on the opera and its staging, along with storms, tone-rows, Romanticism, bombardment, and howling. An excerpt here:Reimann’s is “music that admonishes”,…

NASA/SDO Images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight the appearance of the Sun at solar minimum (left, Dec. 2019) versus solar maximum (right, May 2024). The Sun is such a constant in our lives that it can be difficult to imagine our star ever changing. But the Sun can be quite variable. There are times when its magnetic field is turbulent and generates many sunspots and other times when it is quiet and dormant. Since the 1800s we’ve known that these active and passive periods follow…

I was excited when a Facebook friend, Don McLeese, posted this photo: As I well knew, “anti-clockwise” (or “anticlockwise”) is the British equivalent of U.S. “counter-clockwise” (with various hyphenation alternatives). The difference has been apparently in place since both words emerged: “anti-” in 1879 and “counter-” in 1882, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. All of the OED‘s examples of the first are British, and all of the second, American. Naturally, I asked Don where he saw this.…

This article tells the last part of the story of Lemmings. For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore Amiga, its Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis brought it to no fewer than 23 other platforms, from natural habitats like…

Yesterday Taylor announced that Jev support landed in the 1.x branch of the Laravel AI SDK. We started using it that same day for spam detection in There There. Let's take a look at what Jev is and how you can use it. How Jev is different from an LLM Jev is made by TypeSafe. An LLM generates text: you ask it something, it writes an answer, and if you want structured data back you have to ask for it and hope. Jev doesn't generate anything. You give it some state and a question, and it gives you…

The authors of the following paper examine community response (fracture?) related to Stack Overflow’s decision to utilize user-generated content in their effort to commercialize AI product offerings. We examine how Stack Overflow’s AI initiatives impact its open source knowledge community. Motivated by visible community fracture, such as a moderator strike and content vandalism, we use netnography with trace data to follow contributor reactions to AI venture announcements. Productivity Gain,…

Monkeying in the Design Mines Farmhands pledging $1 or more over on patreon got to read this a week early! Howdy, Farmhands! The Donkey Kong Hexcrawl comes from a relatively simple desire to role play within the setting and tone of the Donkey Kong Country series. I grew up with these games and want to imagine myself running around in that world. It doesn't really have to be any deeper than that- Gadda wants to pretend to be Monkey instead of Elf this week. But since I intend to do so with Other…

Yes! Comics! And for music, I’ve been listening to my albums chronologically on and off for almost a year now — starting with the late 60s, and I’m now up to 1993, I think… It’s kinda fascinating how certain years were more or less exciting musically. 1993 is probably some kind of low point? At least I bought a bunch of not very thrilling albums that year, apparently. The Lemonheads: Come On Feel the Lemonheads 12:04: Chissakobee by Minetaro Mochizuki/Shugoro Yamamoto (Abrams) This is very… I…

I am a little frustrated that it took me so long to get this one out. I wrote all the “list” content on Monday. My process for writing these notes is to start with the list because they are an easy entry point, especially on slower weeks where I don’t have as much to talk about (or don’t remember all that I did that week). I have not been maintaining the discipline of a daily log to keep track of what I work on. It is much easier to write these posts when I have those notes to remind me or…

I thought about dropping an addendum into my last post to say just how overwhelmed I am, in the best possible way, by the way all of you in the front-end community have shown up to show support, both for me and for CSS-Tricks. I started to do that but then felt a new post is more appropriate. You all deserve more than a tacked-on “thanks” because all the love that’s rolled in the past few days is proof of something I’ve hoped hasn’t been lost for some time: The front-end community is still a…

Gerhard Richter, Pane of Glass / Glasscheibe, GR 876-7, 2002, 150 x 150 cm, image via gerhard-richter.com [rip] Gerhard Richter, Antelio Glass, fka Pane of Glass, CR 876-7, glass and steel, sold at Sotheby’s in 2025 for GBP 292,100 I’m ready to look at Gerhard Richter mirrors all day, but I confess, I’d forgotten completely about his Panes of Glass. Not the sculptural ones, like the iconic 4 Panes of Glass (1967) set into pivoting steel frames. But the singles. There’s a group of nine [?] works…

Hey I ran my second marathon this last weekend. I wrote about my first one. It was hard (btw people liked that post). I made my race plan, kept to it while resisting temptation, got round without stopping to walk and without calf cramps (that was the goal), and got a new personal best: chip time 3:37:54. I want to talk about being hollow. I’ve written poetry to running in the New Forest. What a treat to do a marathon there. A line of horses at a hard gallop across the open heath, racing to…

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Oleh, mentioning that they added me to a new website/project called Pixel Area, it is a 100x100 field of pixels, each of which can link to the blog or personal website of whoever claims it first. My spider senses tingled, because the email’s writing felt cold and distant, as if it was generated/translated by an LLM. However, the website looked legit, fun, and it was a genuinely interesting idea. Despite this, the footer featured links to a…

The blatant and conspicuous use of AI images on the website meant I didn’t have to ask an LLM to assess the likelihood that these articles were written by (or significantly generated by) an AI tool, though I did anyway. That analysis actually called out a pretty astute point: The most probative clue is the site-wide convergence of form and voice across nominally different writers, not em-dashes, vocabulary, sentence length, or any AI detector score. A human editor imposing a very rigid house…