News
26/7/2025 14:19 Makie v0.24: “We’re excited to announce the release of Makie v0.24, a major milestone that represents one of the most significant internal improvements to the plotting ecosystem in the past five years.”
23/7/2025 12:01 Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction: The bad research and reporting that led to panicky discarding of plastic spatulas is shown to have even more defects.
20/7/2025 11:46 New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes: Really interesting exploration of color vision. Follow the author’s advice and watch the video.
18/7/2025 9:52 Seattle Philosophy Club Discusses Einstein’s Tutor: I am honored to learn that the Seattle Philosophy Club will be discussing my book this evening.
16/7/2025 12:00 Alaska’s Nazi Creek renamed after 80 years, following advocacy by son of WWII veteran: In 2012 I wrote about a town in New Hampshire that had finally, after almost a century, decided to change the name of their “Jew Pond” to something less embarrassing. Today we learn of a town in Alaska that has reached the difficult decision to change the name of their “Nazi Creek” to something a bit more innocuous.
11/7/2025 9:13 It’s Time to Let Go of “African American”: Some good writing in John McWhorter’s rumination about the hoary euphemism: “Again and again we create new terms hoping to get past negative associations with the old ones…But after a while the negative associations settle like a cloud of gnats on the new terms as well, and then it’s time to find a further euphemism.”
7/7/2025 10:28 StaticCompiler - Generating small binaries: Useful notes on using StaticCompiler to generate small binaries from Julia code.
21/6/2025 13:08 Circular, angular, misterioso, Charlotte Zwerin’s film on Thelonious Monk is now on Blu-ray: Charlotte Zwerin’s 1988 documentary, “Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser,” is out on a new Criterion Collection Blu-ray. I used to own a laserdisc of this fascinating, revelatory and disturbing film. The new pressing, a 4k “digital restoration” with “uncompressed monaural soundtrack”, includes a new introduction by the filmmaker and new interviews and essays.
14/6/2025 11:38 Book Review: Einstein’s Tutor by Lee Phillips: My book is reviewed (“fascinating”) in the current edition of Physics Education (paywalled). 
05/06/2025 16:33 The Importance of Free Software to Science: My article in LWN about how free software is necessary for security, reproducibility, document preservation, and the health of science in general.
2/6/2025 11:14 Beware of fast-math: Compiler optimizations that make your programs run faster can wreak all kinds of havoc. Some of the havoc is surprising, potentially affecting other programs running on your computer.
2/6/2025 11:09 After 25 Years, Linux Format Magazine is No More: This is sad for me. Linux Format published my 2019 article introducing the Julia language.
27/5/2025 19:54 How chaotic is chaos? How some AI for Science / SciML papers are overstating accuracy claims: Instructive and fascinating article by Christopher Rackauckas, the main developer of the amazing Julia package DifferentialEquations. The shadowing lemma is the most interesting thing I’ve learned about this week!
25/5/2025 13:13 Keeping the pointer out of the way in dwm: Adding this one line to
dwm.c makes my computer easier to use.
23/5/2025 14:58 AG’s investigation finds FCPS in violation of Virginia Human Rights Act: The Trump administration is moving to protect immigrant families from racial discrimination by the Fairfax County School Board. Although this doesn’t make this administration any less odious, it does remind us that the world is not simple.
23/5/2025 10:34 Tools: Jeremy Keith with some good insights on the nature of large language models as tools.
20/5/2025 8:52 I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here’s what it taught me: This is an important article that should be read by any scientist who is tempted to try to use “AI” in research.
17/5/2025 10:56 How CO2 warms Earth through the greenhouse effect and why CO2 is not ‘saturated’ in Earth’s atmosphere: Clear, detailed, and well-illustrated explanation of the physics of the greenhouse effect; debunks the misinformation about CO₂ saturation.
13/5/2025 9:44 The Height Enigma: Exceptionally clear tutorial about how “height” works in CSS.
6/5/2025 10:21 From a linguist: Do you use the document preparation system LaTeX and want to be sure how to pronounce it correctly? We all do! But it’s not so simple.
