This is the good stuff.
Category: Uncategorised
With “mascara” and “dial”, I was hoping for “Songs from the Replacements’ ‘Tim'”. (On purpose, I hope…)
Connections
Puzzle #123
🟨🟨🟨🟦
🟪🟩🟦🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
Sorry, I can’t take your paper seriously if it uses LaTeX equation formatting for italics in text.
The good news is that The Mekons* sold out their London show tonight. The bad news is that they sold out before I remembered to get tickets…
(*Well, it’s only about 20% of the Mekons, but any fraction is good.)
20 years ago, I wrote a paper with the late, great Don Backer, making quantitative predictions of a background of gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes. Today, it looks like that background has been detected by the NANOGrav collaboration.
Introduced my kids to Star Trek via “The Trouble With Tribbles”.
(Having turned out to be a professional astrophysicist, I can’t overstate how important the original series of Trek was to me growing up in the 70s.)
It is the summer solstice so time for my annual reminiscence of seeing Sun Ra and Don Cherry celebrate the rising sun from Battery Park in Manhattan with @disquiet@post.lurk.org in 1989.
This year, my partner decided to celebrate with a 4:45am swim in the Thames which is even more Druidic.
Devastated to hear of the death of Nick Kaiser: collaborator, friend, mentor. He helped bring me to CITA in 1994 and we worked on two of my favourite papers, minor works in his influential oeuvre. Simultaneously one of the smartest & nicest people I’ve had the privilege to work with. RIP.
Is anyone else seeing a blank iOS @NYTimes widget like this? (It’s been this way about a week.) Even a handful of responses that it is still working for you would be useful…
Update: I’ve had a response from “NY Times Customer Care”:
We have reported this issue to our developers. They are working on a fix for this and we hope to get a fix out soon. Please keep an eye out for an update.
Update 2: … and now seems to be fixed as of this evening’s update…
At London’s Bush Hall for the wonderful Lloyd/Bean show, I was honoured to be able to chat for a few minutes with one of my rock’n’roll heroes, Jon Langford, about Chicago’s New City News, the Mekons, and express my thanks for many years of life-changing music.
Thanks to Lloyd/Bean (Robert/Janet) for their beautiful/chaotic set @BushHallMusic tonight.
I made scones for a picnic yesterday, cut into triangles from the dough before baking. I was told by my (English, otherwise complimentary) friends that they obviously couldn’t be scones because they weren’t round.
I assume the correct answer to “Do you want to get recognition for this review on Publons?“ is no? (Especially since it’s owned by the company that calculates the infamous “Impact Factor”…)
It’s hard to believe that the launch of @Planck from ESA’s Kourou Spaceport was 14 years ago. Good luck @ESA_JUICE!
RIP Harry Lorayne, expert at magic & memory. In my sordid youth as an aficionado of magic (Magic Camp!) Lorayne’s sleight-of-hand was my favorite. Best was “Triumph!” involving shuffling cards upside-down & rightside-up & yet pulling order (& the chosen card) out of chaos.
Sunak: Northern Ireland is ‘world’s most exciting economic zone’ by being in EU and UK.
Imagine what it would be like if the whole of the UK could have the benefits of being in the EU!
Among the skills I have failed to learn in my 20+ years living in the UK is washing the dishes with one of those little plastic basins sitting in the sink.
macOS question: is there an app which automatically rearranges desktop icons when I switch resolutions and/or displays? (I am aware of SwitchResX but it’s pretty heavyweight for this one use-case.)
I currently have a 2019 15″ MacBook Pro, and am upgrading from Intel to M2. Should I move up to 16″ or “down” to 14″ (which is smaller but still has more pixels than my current model, right?)?
My New Year’s resolution is to finish my book by October. There is also a contract which is somewhat more legally binding. Send encouragement.
Working title: “The Random Universe” — Cosmology. The scientific method. Probability. Epistemology.
If the US were a parliamentary democracy the government would be collapsing. (And the head of state might have to intervene.)
And we’re off. Tube conductor: “when things go up the creek they really go up the creek.”
“Corn meal and gunpowder, ham hocks and guitar strings…”
Spent a wonderful morning talking about “space” to three classes full of reception (kindergarten) kids. They are much less anxious about asking — and answering — questions than most of my university students.
Three hours until my first proper teaching lecture in almost three years.
Obscure macOS Ventura Q:
Is anyone else seeing the cryptic message
The extension com.apple.tips.TipsAppQuicklook-macOS does not implement file previews
when attempting to get a quicklook preview of some text files? For me, it happens with .tex and .css, among other types.
Update: (Slightly brittle?) fix!
The publishers who extort us for gold #openaccess fees (and the governments & funders who require it) know that we are posting our work on arxiv.org despite any supposed embargo, right?
I have the bad habit of ending conversations with students by asking “does that make sense?”
Only the best students are smart enough to answer “no”.