Ulrich Wüst Greifenhagener Brücke, 1984

C S Forester's The Good Shepherd starts by observing the absence of a distinct horizon at sea, which is what Joseph Conrad did in Heart of Darkness. Then he claims that the deep aphotic zone is darker than any man made tunnel, and the pressure on the sea-bed higher than any man made pressure. Nope!

h/t @robertfreundlaw.bsky.social holy shit, an accurate legal critique of LLMs. LLMs don't reason because they're just stitching together plausible-looking sentences indifferent to the content

Goodbye to Stoppard. The opening sequence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is far from any effect possible on the stage: Two horsemen in a rocky wasteland (like a Bruegel?); then the camera, panning with the horses hooves, spots a coin on the path. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f6g...

These books were printed in duotone, which is a long-established high-quality process for reproducing photographs. The 2007 Jonathan Olley one was printed in Verona by (I believe) ebs-bortolazzi.com. The 1962 Paul Strand book was printed by Druckhaus Einheit, Leipzig, East Germany(!).

William Alexander, Planetarium, the Principal Present Given to the Emperor of China, 1793 Watercolour, British Library, WD 961 f.42.

"Yourcenar was unabashedly learned and indefatigably patrician – a writer who once accused her publishers of ‘insolent carelessness’ for failing to maintain a list that was sufficiently literary to accommodate her books." lol this can't be how the conversation went down

‘The collection goes some way to demonstrating the breadth of Yourcenar’s mind; and some way, too, to demonstrating her particular gift for summoning the past out of itself’ – Tim Smith-Laing reviews a new edition of essays on Piranesi, Dürer, Michelangelo et al. by Marguerite Yourcenar

I see a blog post with this subheading: "(Partial, incorrect) Implementation in Haskell" Disappointed that they didn't go for the hat-trick by making up syntax for nonexistent compiler features as well, as Conor McBride has been known to do.

The essence of the civilised ideal conservative average male: likes things the way they are because they can't imagine them being different. "[John] Evelyn was inquisitive and observant, but had little powers of clear and precise thought and of synthesis." royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

The sculpture has finally been acknowledged by the council! www.dublincityartsoffice.ie/programmes-p... I hope my previous posts aren't too severe.

A document ID that's got padding characters in it: past time to retire these, surely, if only in favour of a delimiter like the hyphen en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibcode

This is an interesting section through St Paul's. I don't know where it was published.

"Nothing can possibly go wrong now," cried the Humbug happily and as soon as he'd said it he leaped from the car, as if stuck by a pin, and sailed all the way to the little island.

I'm doing research into the experience of planetariums. It has led me to this page from a romance novel which seems funny – not a difficult read, shall we say

Tieranatomisches Theater, Berlin tieranatomisches-theater.de/en/the-build...

Milo stood on tiptoe, leaned over into the cannon's mouth, and parted his lips. The small sound dropped silently to the bottom and everything was ready. In another moment the fuse was lit and sputtering.

“It is possible to imagine a world that in a gradual yet also sudden way is moving away from all of its acquired conditions of truth, sense, and value.” (Jean-Luc Nancy)

"I’m just extremely busy. I have multiple multiple projects going." This quote made me think of the list monad

"You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you." (Thomas Bernhard) 🥰

When the tab bar fills up and I have to open another Chrome window instead, I always tell myself "it's nothing, each browser window is a flyweight". I wish I knew whether this was true (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyweig...)

Timeline cleanse

When your website is essentially broadcasting public data... www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...

There's something to the idea of AI (or mechanistic processes in general) getting into a rut. "The Gestalt psychologists of Germany during the early twentieth century distinguished between reproductive and productive thinking (Wertheimer, 1959)." Does that choice of words betray sexism, though?

"the planetarium dome must be perceived by every person in the audience as pristine, luminous, and remote" unframed.lacma.org/2014/02/13/u...

You can see a dumbbell-style planetarium projector gyrating in this newsreel. www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0o9...

The priorities of planetarium designers were such that the first projector could simulate the precession of the equinoxes, but only the view from the latitude of Munich. Planetary motions were handled by a stack of projectors on the ecliptic axis, and the "star ball" was mounted on that axis too.

Selected articles from the last few decades of the International Planetarium Society's "Planetarian": no discussion of calculations or mechanisms and a lot of religious topics. The audience is seemingly a very specialised group of science communicators. www.ips-planetarium.org/page/plntrna...

A few pics from the recent storm (Photos: Sicco Rood).

The Pope weighs in on the "logic of algorithms" www.vatican.va/content/leo-... Opposing the probable (boring, managerial, speculative) to the possible (exciting, artistic, creative) is something people do, but I haven't seen it theorized extensively.

Over on X, Andrej Karpathy has been leading a discussion about quantitatively defining "slop". The relevant techbro ignorance here is of social science. Surely slop is objectionable because of the role it plays (and, by the way, not the intention of the producer!). It doesn't have an essence.

Browser fingerprinting is a counterintuitive phenomenon. I wonder whether the right model for the browser would have virtualized away all of these identifying features. (Alan Kay: "what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.") web.archive.org/web/20141218...

'The basic oxygen process developed outside of the traditional "big steel" environment. It was developed and refined by a single man, Swiss engineer Robert Durrer.' Sounds admirable (how did he do it?) but unfortunately it's a bit of a milkshake duck situation: he started work on it in Nazi Germany.

The Rotation of Domes articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1883Sid...

"In cases where the blast furnace is fitted with a two bell charging system, approximately 1.5 % of the BF gas is lost every time the furnace is charged." This is an airlock arrangement...

Dag Alveng Racing, Nürnburgring, 2011 shootgallery.no/artworks/116... Correct exposure!

Lüneburg II by Lyonel Feininger, 1933 https://botfrens.com/collections/212/contents/137444

"To get into DIT [architecture], I had to do an interview and aptitude test and ... they offered me a place in third year, which meant skipping first and second year — they were very impressed that I had an engineering degree." Those guys are cuckoo. Engineering is barely relevant to architecture.

Plan of the Alhambra

"Remark 6.7.2. There is always a bit of confusion as to whether it is necessary to say something about the set of sections of a sheaf over the empty set ∅⊂X. It is necessary, and we already did if you read the definition right." stacks.math.columbia.edu/tag/006S Chiding people for being confused?

This is incredible

Solvej Balle's massive "On the Calculation of Volume" apparently doesn't contain or even mention any non-trivial techniques for that task. No Pappus's centroid theorem, as used by those working with pots, then en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pappus%...

ՒՓ adventure.com/armenian-alp...

Toshio Shibata Imbari City, Ehime Prefecture 2007 www.laurencemillergallery.com/exhibitions/...