An excellent In Our Time episode on Sir John Soane brought me up short. Guests talked about Joseph Gandy, a talented draughtsman and artist who worked closely with Soane to turn Soane’s architectural drawings into realistic depictions. Gandy and Soane both had a taste for the aesthetics of ruins. One of Soane’s greatest commissions was for a new Bank of England. Gandy transformed the architectural drawings into realistic paintings, one of which showed the Bank as a ruin, a thousand years in the future.

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Leisureguy on Mastodon updated his post on Nordic walking and that proved the stimulus I needed to take up sticks again. I had a good workout yesterday, and as we discussed the topic, knowing that he used an Apple Watch, as do I, I asked which activity he used to record Nordic walks. Because of course Apple doesn’t believe people need to record their Nordic walks.

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Is it possible that corn (maize) farmers in the US eastern corn belt are collectively giving up on $99 million a year ($1.98 billion in lifetime benefits) by paying too much for seed? That seems to be one possible conclusion of a paper just published in Science.

A large team led by Christian Kr...

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One of the nice things about following people online is that sometimes they give you an entirely new reason to follow them. So it was with Fractal Kitty. I came for strangely wonderful crochet and then discovered her journaling habits and processes, which made me think about mine.

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A couple of days ago I had a very frustrating experience trying to export my Notes and Highlights from a book I had been reading in Apple’s Books. Long story short, it was difficult, they were in a weird random order, and some were missing. A disaster. This matters a lot to me, because I don’t like...

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