Introduction Ever wondered how your brain manages to tell your hand to grab that slice of pizza before your roommate does?

The last week before the winter break Serious Request took place. We started an action around WikiPathways and we collected 877 euro for the MetaKids Foundation. In total there were 2612 actions, many of which brought in a lot more. We ended up in position 928.

The Hyperfixed Podcast had a lovely episode recently about tape measures. It started from “why does my tape measure seem to always be off a little bit” and went all the way to the inherent limitations of physical measurement at small scales. In there is an awesome quote by Adam Savage, “I had always had faith in the sanctity and solidity of numbers… and when I got into this… I realized there’s no such thing as a measurement.

This post continues the series summarizing our ApJ paper on high redshift galaxies. To keep it finite, I will focus here on the growth of stellar mass. The earlier post discussed what we expect in theory. This depends both on mass assembly (slow in LCDM, fast in MOND), how the assembled mass is converted into stars, and how those stars shine in light we can detect.

In 2022 I had my first experience with the ISAAC database by the Dutch NWO research funding organization. ISAAC is where you apply for funding and where grants get tracked. As such, research output is recorded in this database.

When he first began his excavations at what is today Hisarlik in modern-day Türkiye, Heinrich Schliemann set out to find a single city – the city of Homer’s Iliad, a city many actually felt lay in the realms of fiction rather than any map he could lay his hands on. By the time excavations were over, Schliemann would find not one but nine cities, all built on top of each other. ¹ In that, he found something relatively common – cities

Happy New Year! I’m still catching up on papers from my late 2024 backlog.

A small map-extract of Venado Tuerto over four time points in 2024, showing the addition of buildings and POI. tl;dr: One can now create >2 frames in the OSM comparison GIF. And the MyBinder version can download OSM history files , no local up/downloads needed.

Good morning, Today is the first Friday of 2025. I spent the New Year’s holiday in a backcountry hut with friends and family, reflecting on 2024 and what I’m hoping for in 2025. One of the things I’m most excited about in 2025 is to explore this intersection of technology and humanity more through the lens of science fiction. I hope you’ll indulge me for an extra TCIP edition this week to share.

How do you design user-friendly APIs in Rust? The answer is easy: you use them! Let’s build a simple Rust CLI tool using what I call the “magic function” approach.

In this living document, I will document reactions to uses of homomorphic encryption by members of the public. By “member of the public,” I mean people who may be technical, but are not directly involved in the development or deployment of homomorphic encryption systems. This includes journalists, bloggers, aggregator comment threads, and social media posts.