Appalachian History Series – The Coal Camp Post Office at the Heart of a Company Town The Benham Post Office has never been the biggest building in town. It does not tower over the valley like the old tipples once did, and it does not have the imposing bulk of the commissary that now houses the Kentucky Coal Museum. What it has instead is persistence.

Repurposed Appalachia Series​ – The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum in Benham, Kentucky On a gray morning in the Tri-Cities, the old company store at Benham still anchors Main Street. Brick walls rise in neat lines against the slope of Black Mountain, and the wide storefront windows look out on a town that once lived by coal and corporate schedules.

Repurposed Appalachia Series​ – Benham Theater of Harlan County On the quiet streets of Benham, the brick facade of the old theater still faces Circle Park, its green ticket booth and canopy standing out against the red walls and the backdrop of Black Mountain.

Repurposed Appalachia Series​ – The Benham Schoolhouse Inn of Harlan County If you stand in the center of Benham and look toward the long brick facade of the old schoolhouse, it is easy to see what Wisconsin Steel and International Harvester were trying to build in the 1920s. The company did not just carve driftmouths into Black Mountain and lay tipple tracks along Looney Creek.

In my previous post, I shared my annual running stats which were generated in R using summary data from Garmin Connect. The code I use to generate these summaries was beginning to get a bit unwieldy, so I have now rebased it into a package.

We refactored the R-universe CI workflows to make it possible to run the exact same workflow from your own GitHub repository. This allows you to test or debug the build and check process on your R package, exactly as it will happen on R-universe, but without actually deploying to https://r-universe.dev.

The stability of spiral galaxies was a foundational motivation to invoke dark matter: a thin disk of self-gravitating stars is unstable unless embedded in a dark matter halo. Modified dynamics can also stabilize galactic disks.

NSF reorg, Science in 2050, 2025 LLM recap, R+Python, R Data Scientist, virtual cells, genomics in 2026, Claude Code course, AI and labor, how uv got so fast, Anthropic/biotech, papers+preprints

Repurposed Appalachia Series​ – From Depot Yard to Coal Miners Memorial Park in Benham, Kentucky Benham sits in a narrow valley beneath Black Mountain, the highest point in Kentucky. A century ago this was one of the most productive coal camps in the world, a company town built by Wisconsin Steel, a subsidiary of International Harvester.

Repurposed Appalachia Series​ – Benham City Hall of Harlan County In the middle of Benham, Kentucky, where Looney Creek bends through a narrow valley below Black Mountain, the city hall does not look like a grand marble temple of government. It is a compact red brick office building, one of a ring of matching structures that frame a small park. Coal trucks once rattled past just outside its doors.

Abandoned Appalachia Series – Newlee Iron Furnace at Cumberland Gap At the base of Cumberland Mountain, where Gap Creek cuts a narrow notch toward the little town of Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, a towering block of stone rises beside the water. Locals call it the Newlee Iron Furnace.