@terryboon.bsky.social
Games & stories; maths & language; technology & risk; and thoughtful politics & law. Living in London, UK. Views my own, not representative of employer or anyone else, & reposts and follows are not endorsements. Also on Mastodon: @terryboon@hachyderm.io
This is the best product review I’ve read: samhenri.gold/blog/2026031...
It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in the MacBook Neo or not; this is the kind of essay that makes you think about the potential of technology and the joys of exploration.
That should of course be "why I find *other* charts more helpful"!
"Why you should avoid radar charts in data visualization" by @eagereyes.org gives a nice explanation of why I often find charts more helpful: observablehq.com/blog/avoid-r...
"They weren’t just sneakers — they were a signal."
Forget em dashes and the sudden ubiquity of "quietly" as a modifier. The real giveaway a text is AI-assisted? Cadence.
My newsletter, out now.
Greg: What was the wording on the task?
Alex: Make Achilles invulnerable by dipping him in the Styx. Most invulnerable Achilles wins.
Greg: Dip the baby. The whole baby. They’re not going to hang onto a heel or anything stupid like that.
Alex: First, let’s see Thetis’ attempt.
Visited my Google Scholar page just when it hit an important milestone!
This is later than middle ages, but it reminds me of one very eye opening but of history for me.
Years back, I had just bought the best laptop I had ever owned. I’d saved up for it, as it had cost a fair amount, but I was LIVING out of it. (This will make sense, I promise)
Hadn't heard of these "common books" - sounds like, but rather more practical than, commonplace books of 17th/18th century where thinkers (famously, Locke) recorded theories & copied interesting content for a "personalized encyclopedia of quotations" (Steven Johnson, "Where Good Ideas Come From").
More on slide rules (from paper cut-outs to 3D printing), and some of the unexpectedly sophisticated maths in this 1971 children's puzzle book, is now in my new Eclectic Stacks blog post: www.eclecticstacks.com/post/slide-r...
#heartday #myfavorite
Now thinking about Tennyson's "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all" in terms of statistical Type I and Type II errors...
I am ready and waiting for the call...
"Slide rules - anyone still use them?" on Hacker News reminded me of children's maths/puzzle book "Nut-Crackers" (1971) I once had, with cut-out paper slide rule at the back. And I now spot it was an early book (the first?) from subsequently prolific mathematician & writer Ian Stewart!
As a former mathematician, I also like this exchange in Arcadia between Valentine and literary academic Bernard:
B: I'm sorry - did you say trivial?
V: It's a technical term.
B: Not where I come from, it isn't.
(And a nice article on 'trivial' in maths: shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/o...)
For roast potatoes, most of the literature encourages only brief parboiling. But I took inspiration from @ishankolhatkar.com (www.ishankolhatkar.com/food/roastpo...), boiling them until nearly falling apart, before drying and adding to *hot* oil - for a good result, worth trying again!
(In case anyone surprisingly reads my posts for cooking advice, I picked the "high heat first, then turn it down" approach to roast the pork belly, & that - & rubbing the crackling with crushed fennel seeds along with the salt - did the trick. But other methods might have done well too, of course!)
Planning a dinner, reminded of the old saying on clocks & time - as I found a man with one recipe book may know how to roast pork belly, but a man with two may never be sure. (High heat first for the crackling, then low for the rest? Or the other way round? Or low heat all the way for *5 hours*?)
With the best CGI an Acorn BBC Master can conjure up?
My own copy of The British General Election of 2024 arrived today - and the back cover recalls the surprising, rainy May afternoon which started it all.
Could an unknown player really take down one of the world's best and win $1million?
This is on offer in the Australian Open's One Point Slam (OPS) tomorrow (14 Jan)
But what is the competition, and does an amateur really stand a chance of winning?
kityates.substack.co...
1/9
We have an update on Charlie’s newfound love of printing.
The retirement of the MetroCard at midnight tonight is bittersweet for me. In 1983, as a young lawyer, I took a year's leave of absence from my law firm to serve as special counsel to Richard Ravitch, chairman of the NY MTA. He gave me the task of leading a study ...
I'd seen that 3G networks are being / have already been switched off in the UK. But I hadn't previously realised the older 2G network, probably what that phone wants, might (depending on provider) be around a few years longer. www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-b...
Yesterday @bootsmcgoot.bsky.social and I saw some techbro giving “30 pieces of advice for people under 30” over on Twitter and it was all grind culture bullshit. As adults of 38 and 43 respectively, we compiled 30 pieces of advice that people under 30 won’t have heard before:
remember having a /~name folder on a server a guy you knew had hooked up at uni and you could host websites from it and stuff?
i miss that
Yes, I remember saving HTML files (no CGI allowed, no PHP!) in ~/public_html on the university's server - and remembering the then-cryptic-looking chmod invocation to set the permissions and publish them to the world. (Useful experience for a few hobby projects over the years!)
Just starting a running thread for “once famous figures now slipping into recondite knowledge now that they’ve died and society moves on” to come back to as and when I remember
=1 Peter Cook and/or Dudley Moore
I didn't know either, now learned it was prohibited only relatively recently by Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004, introduced (as a Government-supported Private Member's Bill) apparently after some chains tried/considered Christmas openings in early 2000s. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...
Reminded of hypothesis in "You and Your Research" (Hamming): researchers who closed their office door were less interrupted & more productive on their focus in short-term, those who left it open stayed more aware of what's happening & big in the field so did more *important* work over their career
I’ve been hyperfixated on Batman ‘66 lately. Here’s an incomplete list of reasons why this is my favorite show.