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La Storia di San Michele
Image: Villa San Michele[Written in 2003, as the first of a two-part story of a remarkable connection. Here's part two.] Axel Munthe In 1928, Axel Munthe, a Swedish physician living on the isle of...
View ArticleLeaving Barcelona
I’m leaving Barcelona on October 19th and have a bunch of stuff I need to get rid of before then. If you’re interested anything below, please let me know ASAP. You’ll need to come pick things up in the...
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The Grapes of Wrath & Occupy Wall Street
I’m reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. I can’t believe it took me so long to finally read it. It’s great. Below is a section I just ran across that I imagine will resonate strongly with...
View ArticleEmacs buffer mode histogram
Tonight I noticed that I had over 200 buffers open in emacs. I’ve been programming a lot in Python recently, so many of them are in Python mode. I wondered how many Python files I had open, and I...
View ArticleSOBGTR OCCC AILD FUNEX?
Suppose you had to pick a very small set of character strings that you, and only you, could identify without hesitation in a particular way. What would you choose? How small a set could you choose and...
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A simple way to calculate the day of the week for any day of a given year
Image: Jeremy ChurchThe other day I read a tweet about how someone was impressed that a friend had been able to tell them the day of the week given an arbitrary date. There are a bunch of general...
View ArticleDaylight robbery: Barclays skims €170 off a 5K EUR -> GBP transfer
Last month (on Jan 18, 2013) someone I’m doing some work for initiated a transfer of €5,000 into my UK bank account. According to xe.com the mid-market rate that day was 1.1937940679 euros per pound....
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Ten days in hospital
I’m about to check out of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge after a 10-day stay, 8 of them in isolation. The short story: I got a rash, and it took over my body. Below are some notes on what’s been...
View Article1793 viruses!
In case you missed it, I spent ten days in hospital this past May (2013). When they took the skin biopsy from my arm, I got them to take 2 samples. One of them, along with a throat and skin swab was...
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Learning jQuery Deferreds published
Nicholas Tollervey and I have written a book, Learning jQuery Deferreds, published by O’Reilly. If you’ve been a reader of this blog over the years, you may have noticed that I’m very fond of deferreds...
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Knog Milkman bike combination lock security flaw
[Note: This issue has been fixed by Knog – see final paragraph.] I have a Knog Milkman combination lock for my bike. It’s not supposed to be high security – it could be cut through very easily...
View ArticleTrump After the Inauguration
Try listening to William S. Burroughs reading his Roosevelt After the Inauguration piece and everywhere you hear “Roosevelt”, think “Trump”. Burroughs is probably highly NSFW, but Trump is even less...
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Everesting
Yesterday (Sept 3, 2016) I did an Everesting ride on my bike. As a concept, Everesting is dead simple. You pick a hill, any hill, and ride up it enough times to equal or exceed the vertical height gain...
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Thoughts ahead of the 2017 Transcontinental Race
Last Sunday I did my final training ride before the Transcontinental Race (TCR), which starts in Geraadsbergen (Belgium) at 10pm this Friday night, July 28, 2017. In February 2016 I happened across Joe...
View ArticleDo stuff on things, in parallel
Most people don’t really know how to use the tools they spend the most time using: the shell and their editor. It’s worth stopping once in a while to teach yourself new things. Sometimes you find...
View ArticleA BLAST puzzle
Re-posted from my internal Cambridge notebook. I have a strange situation. I have two almost identical BLAST databases (20170821 and 20170824). They both contain a certain subject sequence LC074724. I...
View ArticlePapers on ancient hepatitis B virus and human parvovirus B19
We just published two papers. Ancient hepatitis B viruses from the Bronze Age to the Medieval period in Nature, and Ancient human parvovirus B19 in Eurasia reveals its long-term association with humans...
View ArticleDaudin – a Python shell
A few nights ago I wrote daudin, a command-line shell based on Python. It allows you to easily mix UNIX and Python on the command line. Source code and documentation:...
View ArticleThe vikings had smallpox
In July 2020 we published a paper in Science on ancient smallpox viruses: Diverse variola virus (smallpox) strains were widespread in northern Europe in the Viking Age. That was a couple of years of...
View ArticleEstimating infectiousness throughout SARS-CoV-2 infection course
We had a paper in Science go online on May 25, 2021: Estimating infectiousness throughout SARS-CoV-2 infection course.
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