The WSJ is really not performing a public interest function here. It's an idiotic concept for an article. www.wsj.com/business/the...

I find this persuasive, on a first reading. higheredstrategy.com/in-praise-of...

Computer graphics motivates a model of the volumetric distribution of the aurora: "Unlike the general volume ren­dering problem, an auroral display is emissive and can be factored into a height-dependent energy deposition function, and a 2D electron flux map." www.researchgate.net/publication/...

"Television is 100 years old today. Although there are other places that can plausibly claim to be TV's birthplace, [...] most people agree that the decisive moment was a demonstration given to journalists in Frith Street [London] on 26th January 1926." diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2026/01/tv10...

There are error correcting codes, and then there's "fixity data", which, as far as I can see, promises only to tell you when the object has been corrupted. blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/20...

Imagine how much they’d be lying about what happened without all the videos showing it from multiple angles.

I've finally managed to rewrite this Ken Perlin Java applet in JS. cs.nyu.edu/~perlin/expe... Not sure where or if I will publish this.

The Road To Point Reyes (Rob Cook with Alvy Ray Smith, Loren Carpenter, Tom Porter, Bill Reeves, and David Salesin; 1983)

In the process of cooking a meal from a newspaper recipe. It has this ridiculous billing: "The meatballs are total flavour bombs with all sorts of tastes vying for your attention once you pop one in your mouth."

A recently deceased friend had an image of this palazzo in their flat, years ago. I was able to tell them about its reputation, which delighted them, though their mother, a world expert on Venice's architecture, thought the web page I shared was merely "racy" www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

"A complex system, once set in motion, is hard to change. Its inertia is greater than the sum of all moving parts. And a city is a complex system."

This is a Dutch joke, apparently "A rectangle walks in a bar and orders a drink. An attractive circle sits on a bar stool next to the rectangle. ‘Hey Circle, want to get primitive?’ The Circle looks the rectangle slowly up and down and says: ‘Sorry, you’re not my type.’"

A nice Asimov-inspired Jef Raskin quote that I think applies to autosave, something taken for granted now: "A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.'

I learned something new about hooks. In the Common Lisp metaobject protocol, there's :before and :after (like Emacs Lisp's pre and post hooks) but there's also :around, which is interposition. To call the function you've wrapped, you use call-next-function, just like using RTLD_NEXT with LD_PRELOAD.

Haskell is a great language for this little program. tio.run##bZBfb4IwFMX...

The structure of this flight is completely clear from this UI. When the altitude is increasing, the glider heading changes constantly as the aircraft circles in a thermal. When the altitude is decreasing, it's because the glider is making progress toward the east. www.weglide.org/flight/978820

Evergreen Comix.

Some lovely Apiocrinites crinoid fossils on Canon Street. Jurassic Massangis Limestone. More at www.londonpavementgeology.co.uk/location-det...

This isn't AI, but my main reaction to these outputs is that a human artist knows what's significant: it's normal to see paintings where a face seems finished and detail elsewhere is much looser. In a portrait, this is essential, but artists almost always prioritise. tangled.org/luthenwald.t...

Yikes, spot the deliberate mistake

Rebracketing is definitely a part of the early Autechre title aesthetic. "Overand" could be from "over•and•out"; "windwind" and "teartear" consist of words doubled and glued. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebrack... The album title "Amber" suggests amb•er to me, partly because of amb•ient.

I'm aware of a fun piece of biographical trivia about Bálint Virág and it's semi-secret. I'm usually not into keeping secrets, but let's see if I can hold onto this one.

www.nobelpeaceprize.org/press/press-... What if you dissolve one of them in aqua regia? Is that an approved action?

Absolute trash from the Guardian to promote a Cory Doctorow piece without attaching his name to the link. He is not a serious guy and has gradually become more objectionable. Even before you get to the article, there's a mixed metaphor: AI is "asbestos in the walls" but it apparently has "roots"?

If Denmark can get farmers to agree to dropping their nitrates derogation, adopting a carbon tax on meat, government promotion of plant-based diets and rewilding a fifth of the country - why can't Ireland? www.irishtimes.com/science/2026...

Magali Reus is a smart sculptor IMO www.frieze.com/article/maga...

Some photos of an Alvaro Siza church, taken by a pair of non-specialists (I mean, people who are neither architects nor architectural photographers) www.durden-leal.com/photography/...

HN comment: "The comparison to artisanal furniture really lands because we do spend way too much time on the basics. It would be nice to just assemble the pieces we need and move on to the interesting work." and someone replies "Just to be sure... What is the interesting work you talk about?" Quite.

This piece has the title "Landscape Architecture Suffers from a Lack of Self-Conscience" and then says that landscape architecture doesn't have "a real consciousness of its own doing". Is this just a bad translation? Is he talking about self-concept or disciplinarity? landezine.com/michael-jako...

Went to see the Turner watercolours at @nationalgalleryirl.bsky.social today. I think this might be the best of the set: an amazing picture of a rain shower that's somehow better in the flesh than in this image.

"I’d rather risk an ugly surprise than rely on things I know I can do. The whole business of spotting; the small area of color in a big canvas; how edges meet; how accidents are controlled; all this fascinates me, though it is often where I am most facile and most seducible by my own talent." (1965)

A Matterhorn of whipped butter. Another butter variant with a simple recipe. It's 'plastic' and sculptural which makes it pretentious I suppose. Reminds me of a newish architecture history book about Faux Mountains (Michael Jakob) The photo is by Rasmus Weng Karlsen.

Sounds like the short-tempered republican Conor O Brien was an inept naval architect, surprising nobody, or at least satisfying some "With her eight tons of inside ballast, Saoirse proved to be very stiff, which contributed to her first accident – a broken mast" www.stexboat.com/books/circum...

Oh for ways to achieve dignity and excellence without getting involved with prestige.

Bill Henson, Untitled #20, 2003.

I realise I'm just a freak, but living in a multicultural city is the best thing of all time, it's just the best possible human experience and i can not understand why anyone on earth would be like "weve got to destroy this"

Waiting for someone to write a pulpy self-help / pop psych book called "Good Grief"

"in [the fog] there is something substantial and satisfying ... the taste of it, when dashed with a due seasoning of seacoal smoke, is far from insipid. It is also meat and drink: something between egg-flip and omelètte soufflèe, but much more digestible than either." honearchive.org/etexts/edb/d...

This is fun: a book cover shows a painting of a room with yellow wallpaper.

Is "Check Yes Juliet" about verifying that Juliet is not a robot?

This was a good garden www.thurgauerzeitung.ch/ostschweiz/f...

It seems rare for the answer to a problem to be an integral number of radians. It happens with the Karlsruhe metric. The constraint is that you can only move radially or along concentric arcs. The switchover between two possible types of shortest path happens when the change in angle is 2 radians.

This lecture, and the one that follows it, make a very good introduction to the converging-diverging nozzle. youtu.be/J-b7YkriJr0

Felicity Cloake's versions of popular dishes are usually on the money, but in the case of brandy butter, the Ballymaloe recipe seems simple and flawless: "3 oz butter, 3 oz icing sugar, 2–6 tablespoons brandy" (See www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle... and www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...)

'He ... tells me of his irritation when people comment on the sheer tidiness of the whole place. “It’s porcelain,” he says with passionate emphasis. Dust and dirt are the enemy.' I don't know, seems like fastidious guy just doesn't like when people point it out www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Snap

Red brick in the sun. East Garfield Park, Chicago. A couple of mysteries here, too.

The alabaster bit is great, but the wood isn't bad either. Engrossing www.historichouses.org/house/burton...