Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however incremental, as the dawn of a new revolution – but in this case, their cries of wolf may … Read more
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine published an article with the headline ‘This Teenager Invented a Low-Cost Tool to Spot Elephant Poachers in Real Time’ on August 4. It’s a straightforward … Read more
And the promise of one distant supernova remnant.
About a week ago, I wrote to ICANN asking for a list of all the .com domains that were still available. After I received the file a few days later, I used two pieces of code to extract all the single-word entries on the list and subsequently all the words that were listed in a … Read more
From ‘Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them’, The New York Times, August 23, 2022: Dr. Esteller also suggested that there could be links between facial features and behavioral patterns, and that the study’s findings might one day aid forensic science by providing a glimpse of the faces of criminal … Read more
I need to go on the record about a source of mild irritation that seems to resurface in periodic fashion: the recent Current Affairs article about the “dangerous populist science of Yuval Noah Harari”. It’s an excellent article; however, I’m irritated by the fact that it awakened so many more people (at least in my circles) to … Read more
The effects of wind on buildings are relatively more popular than the effects of tall buildings on the wind itself.
At the Ajman Museum (in the UAE), there is on display a traditional architectural design called barjeel, to cool homes and other small places of human occupation. It is essentially a cooling tower, also called a windcatcher, with the room to be cooled at the bottom. At the top, which is open, there is a … Read more
Why do you write? is a very difficult question to answer, so when an answer presents itself, you treasure it.