It took me a few days to remember where I had seen that font before, but — is that the same font as on the Knives Out poster? The color almost matches as well. 🙂

I released a new version of XEphem with several long-awaited fixes and updates — a vintage astronomy application first released in 1990. This was the first release since the death of its original author and maintainer, Elwood Downey, in late January.

xephem.github.io/XEphem/Site/...

Do you have any gauge on how toxic the folks at their conferences are? I have heard unhappy stories of how people treat each other in certain academic sub-fields; and also of conversations always harrowed by the fear that, if you talk openly of your research, it will be stolen and others get credit.

Looking forward to historians releasing an _Annotated Albion’s Seed_ someday, so the lay reader has footnotes to mark the problems. I can think of a dozen vivid passages that I would be secretly hoping would hold up; and a dozen others that I’d be hoping were spurious. Those poor backcountry cats.

If Galadriel at 8,000+ years old is 32-year-old Cate Blanchett, then Arwen, at only 2,778 years old, would need an actress who’s—um—10 years old? Gads.

But I’ve always pictured Elves growing to adulthood in decades, then staying that way forever. I’ll bet there’s textual evidence it’s not gradual!

Wait—not the “Atomic Foundations of Chemistry”, but, the other way around? Would be fascinated to hear if there was a textbook, and, which one. Quantum effects are notoriously difficult to deduce from, say, oxygen combusion.

(And was there an alternative to Mathematical Physics? Like—vibe-based?)

Except that—isn't the whole point of the novel that the British government has canceled most of the intelligence operations against Russia, hoping to achieve "cooperation" and "detente" with the Soviets instead?

(I just happen to be reading it for the first time myself, so correct me if I'm wrong!)

(And, thanks for the interesting thread! I have two or three times read Arensberg’s “The Irish Countryman” for its dense portrait of rural life in a land that’s “full”, where farms can’t be further subdivided; your book looks like it would be an interesting “prequel”, covering the era before.)

At the Rising of the Moon: The Peasantry and Ireland from the Tudor Conquest to the fall of Landlordism paperback.

That link, alas, leads to a “404 - Not Found” — looks like a stray digit ‘1’ got tacked on to the end? For folks wanting to follow up, here’s a corrected link:

www.kennys.ie/shop/at-the-...

But I will certainly grant that religious fervor might be a *result* of a headline like this. The public, hinging on the word ‘intelligence’, will imagine an actual machine mind, that wants to save human lives. In fact, the computer has no idea it’s searching drugs; it’s just running a program.

So I would chalk the unfortunate headline up to, not religious fervor, but the unfortunate use of an overly broad term: ‘AI’, which the reporter knows will mean ‘LLM’ to most readers, being used over-broadly to also include useful computer functions like drug search procedures.

In fairness, the ‘AI’ in the subtitle doesn’t seem to mean ‘LLM’ — they aren’t asking Claude ‘design an antibiotic’ or something. They’re doing things like searching through millions of chemical compounds, just like computers successfully win at chess by searching thousands of future moves.

French intellectual and activist Bernard-Henri Lévi @bernard-henri-levy.com:

"Of course we’re not ready. And thank God we have the Ukrainians. Thank God that in Europe there is an army that knows how to fight. Thank God there is an army in Europe capable of holding the line.

Perhaps they read all the verses as about the Union Army. In which case the “watch-fires” verse is a pleasant quiet interlude: the only verse which is *not* about battle itself, but about the quiet night in between.

The other verses? All battle. “Terrible swift sword…trumpet…die to make men free.”

An interesting question! Sauron was able to control what Denethor saw. But could he reach through the stone and also control Denethor's mind—how he interpreted the visions? I’d assumed only the former.

‘He was too great to be subdued…he saw…only those things which that Power permitted him to see.’

What a beautiful photo! The article made me hope immediately that, in the Lord of the Rings, the ravine that the Road descends just before reaching the Ford of Bruinen was, in fact, a holloway.

But, alas, no—the text says it’s merely a ‘cutting’.

I still hope it looked mostly just like that photo.

If you haven't ready any Megan Kate Nelson, then I’ll happily recommend her finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, _The Three-Cornered War_.

(Or: it’s fun to hear the author read _We Had a Little Real Estate Problem_, if you haven't read it yet: the history of Native Americans in comedy.)

Can confirm!

In the opening sentences, it seemed to be telling me that "Italy is a part of Europe", but now, two dozen chapters in, its Latin sentences—with subordinate clauses—are explaining that pasturing sheep was more profitable in Italy, because Africa was driving down the cost of grain.

‘You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.’

As though AI were now in its Medieval Period of splaying limbs and arbitrary joints, waiting for some future AI Michelangelo to finally come along and do some decent anatomy. “How knees work.”

That’s a neat idea to better foreground New York’s role in the Revolution!

Does the site include a map of its route somewhere? Or, if I'm curious about the route, will I need to look up each of the destinations in turn on Google Maps?

But I’ve never tried to design real-world burns for an intercept orbit, or anything else. Not, alas, my field. From what I understand, your interest here is how much fuel and time it would take for one satellite to be diverted to collide with another? 2/2

I have adjusted orbits before in Kerbal Space Program, and it surprised me how often my intuition was unhelpful in trying to design a burn. (Thus, I suppose, the Armstrong quote in First Man, "It's backwards from what they teach you as a pilot, but if you work the math, it follows.") 1/

The first test of an implosion nuclear bomb was almost a full month earlier than Nagasaki: the Trinity test at the White Sands Proving Ground.

PyCon Lithuania Special - Brandon Rhodes YouTube video by Tomas Peluritis

Thank you to Tomas Peluritis for having me on his “Uncle Data Postcast” last month! We recorded it in-person in Lithuania, the day before I gave my keynote at PyConLT in Vilnius. Here's the recording, for anyone interested:

youtube.com/watch?v=nO9Vxa-Ggxg

That sounds familiar! In his recent book "The Cutting-Off Way", Wayne E. Lee describes a Native hunter killing a deer, then returning home and lighting a pipe — his part is done. He calmly informs his wife of where he felled it. She and her friends head into the woods to dress and process it.

Today the Company will depart. Bilbo gives Frodo his sword Sting and—secretly—his magnificent Dwarvish mail-coat of pure mithril. The old hobbit sings softly.

‘I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see…’

My November talk from @code_dive_pl is up! I use code from my Skyfield astronomy library as a springboard for talking about both the history of astronomy, and about trade-offs in API design. Enjoy!

‘The History of a Science Hidden in Astronomy Code’
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bZS...