Tabula Rasa: Volume Six A project meant not to end.

New volume of John McPhee's Tabula Rasa just dropped. Perfect way for me to start the week. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Aphex Twin - Avril 14th Harp cover by Tamara Young YouTube video by Tamara Young

A couple of days late, Happy Avril 14th. youtu.be/pnjRWdOomp8

Introducing ggauto: automating better charts – Nicola Rennie The ggauto package is an opinionated ggplot2 extension package that aims to help people make better charts by default. This blog post explains why it exists and how it works.

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉

An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊

Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu...

#DataViz

Carthage (Live) by Hayden Pedigo on Apple Music Song · 2024 · Duration 7:08

Saying goodbye to my 30s and hello to my 40s with this set from Hayden Pedigo.

Played the demo of Flock Around last night with @ianmwright86.bsky.social and had an absolute blast. Cannot wait for the full game!

Haha, do you mostly agree? Every time Matthew and I have done a weekend road trip, one of us brings it up. But we're probably still bad at following it.

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

My Ghosts Go Ghost by By Storm & Injury Reserve on Apple Music Album · 2026 · 9 Songs

By Storm - My Ghosts Go Ghost
Strong early contender for album of the year. Haunting and beautiful. I need to go back and listen to more Injury Reserve.
music.apple.com/us/album/my-...

The @NWS has an awesome dashboard for finding pretty much any weather data for thousands of locations.

weather.gov/forecastpoints

You should bookmark it!

#ncwx #wx #wxsky #weather

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

a surreal painting by Cinta Vidal of the interior of a home in which furnishings and scenes take place both on the floor and upside-down on the ceiling

a surreal painting by Cinta Vidal of the interior of a home in which furnishings and scenes take place both on the floor and upside-down on the ceiling

In 'Inward,' Cinta Vidal folds time and space in a collection of perspective-bending paintings.

www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/11/cint...

In our first SLR original of 2026, writer Boen Wang returns with a deeply personal and historical examination of the Chinatowns of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the two cities that have shaped his life. Why did one thrive while the other barely survived?
sundaylongread.com/2026/01/23/p...

Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over “heroes”

📚 #WritingCommunity #BookSky #SciFi

shreevatsa.net/post/douglas...

And if you want more detail on why I left iNat, I wrote about that too: kueda.net/blog/2026/01...

How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very From emancipation to women’s suffrage, civil rights and BLM, mass movement has shaped the arc of US history

In case you need a positive reminder:
How effective is protesting? According to historians and political scientists: very www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Yo La Tengo having a bespoke Connections for their Hanukkah shows—by the legit Connections editor—is delightful

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :)

The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used

> neal.fun/size-of-life/

How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices A Guardian investigation reveals Dollar General and Family Dollar stores often fail to honor their shelf prices – charging more at checkout for everything from frying pans to Frosted Flakes

MY LATEST: Chain dollar stores promise big savings—but the low prices listed on the shelves often don’t materialize at checkout. As the cost of living soars, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it. An investigation for @theguardian.com with @jocelynzuck.bsky.social.

rogershaw.vercel.app

LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful.

Read this personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi’s head of ML:

blog.kagi.com/llms

Na Kim, in the Abstract I love this self-portrait by Na Kim. It’s somehow bold and subtle? Wow.

I love this self-portrait by Na Kim. It’s somehow bold *and* subtle? Wow. [kottke.org]

I need to remind myself to not let perfect be the enemy of good. I don't need to be so serious about future-proofing straight away. Getting off the ground with the basics is the most important part. Posting publicly to hold myself accountable.

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

Just came across this concept of the Digital Garden, a personal site where you capture your thoughts and information, and continue to edit, iterate, build, and connect on them, breaking the trappings of linear scrolling. Love this, and want to start growing my own. maggieappleton.com/garden-history

People care deeply about iNaturalist, and have a knee-jerk reaction when they see the words 'AI' and 'Google'. I am not a fan of AI or Google whatsoever, and I've been an iNat evangelist for over 12 years. But I see nothing to be concerned about here. Especially since it will almost certainly fail.

Re: Google getting data, again this is using all the same data that is already being used for ID suggestions (image, location, date(?), ID), and nothing more. All iNat photos are available for this under the Creative Commons. And surely Google have already scraped these anyway? ->

The project will be attempting to run those sets of images through an image-to-text transcriber. Like, "This photo shows a person running through a meadow", except with highly-similar taxa. I am 99% sure this will fail, because AI is a stochastic parrot. And that's fine, iNat will ditch it then. ->

There is not enough published material about taxa identification, on iNat or anywhere else, to train an AI model. I am 99.9% certain that this model will solely be analyzing images, which is already being done for the ID suggestions. As everyone has already seen, those suggestions are imperfect. ->

Re: iNaturalist, reading the blowback, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This isn't replacing the community of experts. It's taking the ID suggestions that already exist, and trying to add text. That will have to be based on attempts at image analysis, not on taxonomic literature. Thread below.

List of all the NBA, ABA and WNBA Players Born on February 29 | Basketball-Reference.com Get the list of all the NBA, ABA and WNBA Players Born on February 29 on Basketball-Reference.com

I think this explains Haliburton’s sorcery. www.basketball-reference.com/friv/birthda...