The "Machinal Bypass," when AI becomes a shortcut around the work that makes us human, and why some tasks should feel a little hard.

Chet Gottfried got in touch after he read Yet more lying necks: Backwards Birds edition, nearly two months ago now, with some more of his photos. Here they are, with his permission: What’s going on here? As I wrote the Chet, “Interesting that this degree of twisting is common in raptors.

This year we had a familiar argument in my household about when the Christmas tree should go up. My other half insists that it should be a late arrival, just a few days before Christmas ideally, whereas I would prefer to have the month of December as a lead up and infused with festive spirit, etc. In the end, because my mother was coming to visit, we decided that it would go up around the 14th or so of December.

The geocomp x project provides open-source, open-access resources for learning and teaching about geocomputation in multiple programming languages. The year 2025 was special for the project, marked by various milestones and progress. This post summarizes the key updates from 2025, outlines the current work in progress, and speaks on how you can support the project.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On clear days the road up from downtown Norton curls through hardwoods, past picnic pull offs and salamander habitat, until the pavement narrows and the world drops away. At Flag Rock Overlook, three thousand feet above the streets and parking lots, you can see the whole Powell Valley cupped below High Knob.

Appalachian History Stand on the lawn of the Casey County courthouse in Liberty and you are surrounded by memory in bronze and cast aluminum. The 1888 Romanesque Revival courthouse towers over a World War I doughboy statue and several Kentucky Historical Society markers that celebrate the First Kentucky Cavalry and its colonels Frank Wolford and Silas Adams.

Appalachian History On the courthouse lawn at Sandy Hook, two weathered highway markers tell a story that began before Elliott County even existed. One, titled “A Masterful Retreat,” remembers a starving Union column that slipped out of Cumberland Gap in September 1862 and marched two hundred mountain miles to the Ohio River.

If a title is posed as a question, the answer is usually No. There has been a little bit of noise that dark matter might have been detected near the center of the Milky Way. The chatter seems to have died down quickly, for, as usual, this claim is greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the claim isn’t … Continue reading Has dark matter been detected in the Milky Way?

In this post we will introduce the concept of statistical power and we are going to use R to perform a power analysis through simulation. I know what power analysis is! Just show me the code! Table of Contents Introduction – what is power? In science, we often want to assess the effect of a certain factor or set of factors on an outcome.

Appalachian History On a narrow strip of land between the Cumberland River and Pine Mountain, the town we now call Pineville began life as Cumberland Ford. Long before anyone heard rifle fire from the heights of Cumberland Gap, this ford was a traffic jam of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Appalachian History Central Kentucky’s limestone ridges and creek bottoms did not look like a battlefield in 1861. Garrard County was a farm country of hemp, cattle, and small towns. Yet within a few months of Fort Sumter, the crossroads around Lancaster, Bryantsville, and the Kentucky River became one of the most heavily traveled military corridors in the interior South.