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.
Appalachian History Series – The Oldest House in Bell County: Rev. John C. Colson’s Brick Home on Yellow Creek If you drive up North 19th Street in Middlesboro, traffic hums past a modest brick house set back behind a yard and a low slope. The building does not announce itself loudly. Its lines are simple, two stories of brick with later stucco and porch alterations that make it easy to mistake for an ordinary early twentieth century home.
Abandoned Appalachia Series – The Twin Tunnels of Typo and Yerkes of Perry County On the north side of Hazard, the North Fork of the Kentucky River bends through a narrow valley where the slopes are so steep that the railroad disappears straight into the rock. Trains slip in and out of the hills, light fading to black and back again in a few seconds.
How much time do you spend performing various activities? In 2022, I spent 506 hours answering email, or 63 full work-day’s worth of time. At that point, my reading for pleasure had dropped to virtually nil and I just thought: this is not how I want to spend my time. After a radical reorganization of my life and work, I wanted to see how well I have done this year.