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Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-03-10T12:34:59.000Z

I'm sure we have all met a person like this:

People who have an AI habit use it by default. I have watched someone ask ChatGPT the weather for tomorrow rather than simply open the weather app. Another time, they asked AI the question even after I had shown them the website with the same information. It's a crutch.
— Ibster (@ibster.bsky.social) 9 March 2026 at 09:46

At a recent tech event, I bumped into an old friend and invited him out for dinner the next evening. He proudly showed my the AI bot he'd built which responded to WhatsApp messages. "Remind me at 7pm tomorrow to go to Chalmun's Cantina for dinner with Terry."

"OK boss! That's locked in! I'll remind you tomorrow. Enjoy your dinner!" the digital sycophant replied.

I was flabbergasted. There was a perfectly good calendar app on his phone. It has an easy to use interface. There are clearly demarcated boxen to fill in. A swish time-picker, calendar scroller, and notification reminder all built-in.

Our conversation reached an ideological impasse. I couldn't understand why he was burning tokens and wasting time with a chatbot. He didn't understand why I wasn't embracing the future.

I've noticed this with a lot of technology and I think I've come up with a three-part hypothesis.

First, some people don't care for structure. Whereas some of us carefully shelve our books in Dewey Decimal order, some people just chuck a book on any shelf it'll fit. You craft a detailed personal knowledge graph in Obsidian, I have a series of increasingly erratic text documents. My blog is fully semantic, yours is just div-soup.

We all have different things we care about. You'd be aghast that I don't track my calories and I can't stand the way you store all your files on the desktop. Yes, some systems are obviously superior to chaos, but for lots of people the tedium of organisation isn't worth the effort.

Secondly, talking isn't as hard work as writing. Speaking is faster than writing - hence the popularity of voice notes. Speaking requires less mental effort than writing - you don't have to worry about spelling or grammar. Similarly, forcing yourself to organise your thoughts in the structure demanded by a form can be tiring. My calendar has event title at the top, but I think in terms of time first. So voice-chatting with an AI requires substantially less effort on your part. Just lob some words at it and it'll do the structuring for you.

Which gets me to the third and, I think, most distasteful aspect. People want servants. The long standing joke about Silicon Valley products is they're all trying to recreate having a mum to look after you. Uber to drive you, Just-Eat to bring you cooked meals, Task Rabbit to wash your pants, Tinder to be a matchmaker.

Being raised on a diet of Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, and a hundred other lives-of-the-rich-and-famous shows does a number on you. Why don't I have a social secretary to arrange my day? Don't I deserve a tireless chambermaid? Where's the smart-arse butler who can cater to my every whim?

"Jeeves! Book me a taxi to the club. Usual time."

That's the dream, isn't it? Yes, you could mash some buttons in the taxi app or - heaven forfend! - call them yourself. But isn't it much more sophisticated to have a servant?

I'm guilty of this, of course. I yell at my Alexii to turn on the lights, pre-heat my bed, and remind me when dinner is ready. My doorbell alerts me when a visitor calls so I don't have to make the arduous trip to the front door. My kitchen robot washes my clothes - next year it'll be able to order more washing supplies when I run low. I can basically chuck stuff into the machine without thinking about it, and everything comes out perfectly clean.

Is it useful for me to know how to properly wash clothes? Probably not. Do I struggle when I visit a house which only has physical light switches? Not really. Are some people going to suffer if they outsource all their thinking to servant machines? I guess we'll see.

Pure Blog Is Now Feature Complete...ish - Kev Quirk

2026-03-10T11:50:00.000Z

I've just released v1.8.0 of Pure Blog, which was the final big feature I wanted to add¹. At this point, Pure Blog does all the things I would want a useful CMS to do, such as:

Storing content in plain markdown, just like an SSG.
Easy theme customisations.
Hooks for doing clever things when something happens.
Data files so I can loop through data to produce pages where I don't have to duplicate effort, like on my blogroll.
A couple of simple shortcodes to make my life easier.
Layout partials so I can customise certain parts of the site.
Custom routes so I can add little extra features, like a discover page, or the ability to visit a random post.
Caching because no-one wants a slow site².
Custom layouts and functions so I can go even deeper with my customisations without touching the core code base.

The result is a tool that works exactly how I want it to work. It's very simple to customise through the admin GUI, but there are also lots of advanced options available to more tech-savvy folk.

Someone reached out to me recently and told me that their non-technical grandfather is running Pure Blog with no issues. Equally, I've had developers reach out to say that they're enjoying the flexibility of Pure Blog too. This is exactly why I created Pure Blog - to create a tool that can be used by anyone.

My original plan was to just make a simple blogging platform, but I've ended up creating a performant platform that can be used for all kinds of sites, not just a blog.

Feature complete*

At this point I'm considering Pure Blog to be feature complete*. But there is an asterisk there, because you never know what the future holds. Right now it supports everything I want it to support, but my needs may change in the future. If they do, I'll develop more features.

In the meantime I'm going to enjoy what I've built by continuing to produce content in this lovely little CMS (even if I do say so myself). I know there's a few people using Pure Blog our there, so I hope you're enjoying it as much as I am.

If you want to try Pure Blog yourself, you can download the source code from here, and this post should get you up and running in just a few minutes.

One could argue that previous versions were just development releases, and this is really v1.0, but I've gone with the versioning I went with, and I can't be bothered changing that now. :-) ↩
This site scores a 96 on Google's Pagespeed Insights. Pretty impressive for a dynamic PHP-based site. ↩

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Found the map! started an anime and had a BBQ - W10 - Joel's Log Files

2026-03-09T21:10:00.000Z

This week in particular felt excruciatingly slow, work was busy all the time and I really couldn’t catch a break as often as other weeks due to my workmate going on vacation. However, I still managed to do a lot with the spare time I got, and my weekend was amazing as well, so I can’t complain at all.

🌐 Went to another Indieweb Event! I actually brought up the topic of the new Mastodon share button there and even made my implementation on the fly. It was a very short blogpost too to accompany it.
📦 Ordered (and returned) some phone cases. I was mildly interested on trying some cases that are only just the borders of the phone—I have a Nothing 3(a) by the way—so I found some metallic ones that I screw in place and such. Sadly, they are just too bulky, and the smooth surface of the aluminum is just too slippery for my liking. I returned it all by walking downtown!
🏷️ My first physical game was purchased… as I returned the phone cases, I actually picked up Pokémon Legends Z-A from the delivery office… yeah. In a way I feel alright since it was cheap and I don’t mind
📙 I purchased a physical book, since I recently learned that Denis Villeneuve is working on a movie for Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Redezvous with Rama after Michał revewed it, so I kind of wanted to get a copy for myself. I’ve been curious about visiting more of Clarke’s works, especially because Childhood’s End continues to be on my mind.
🥩 I went to a BBQ party! Some friends from church got together and we ate some good steak and sausages and the like. I also got a call from my sisters in the middle of it all, and we all had a good time chatting and enjoying the food, I was stuffed, but it was worth it.
🗺️ I found my Hollow Knight map! After a few weeks without success, I decided to check out every box in my physical Switch collection and finally, after opening up my Final Fantasy VII+VIII Twin Pack box, there it was! My Hollow Knight map was safe and sound and now it’s safely stored flattened alongside my poster of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.
🃏 Card games were played. We had a very nice match of Oh Hell! with my friends on Sunday! It had been a while but it’s still as fun as ever. We listened to the soundtrack of Plants vs Zombies while playing! after that we had a round of Spoons, and for that I put up the soundtrack of Q-UP, it was exhilarating.
✍️ I’m quite happy with my blogposts this week. I don’t often list or talk about the posts I do during the week—they are already there anyway—but I’m actually rather happy not just with the post, but the feedback and the conversations about them! So many suggestions for music on Bandcamp, inspiring some people to try and do a one-page notebook, etc!

Watching

🌎 Orb: On the Movements of the Earth - Watched up to episode 4. This anime takes place in the Middle Ages, when most of Humanity and the Catholic Church held the belief that Earth was the center of the universe. The rest is heresy and prohibited. We follow the journey of a young kid with a great future ahead of him, going to university at an early age to study theology. However, his love for astronomy will lead him to the heliocentric model and the search for truth, all to uncover the beauty of the space above. This is some top tier writing and plot, absolutely worth a watch I’d say. It deals with some complex topics rather interestingly, it almost made me cry already, so, beware.

Reading

Completed

👨‍🚀 Planetes by Makoto Yukimura. - This was absolutely wonderful to read. The art was incredible, the characters were so good. Filled with interesting dialogue, thought provoking moments, slice of life fun, and a lot of great hard science fiction concepts. I’ll probably have to write about this one on a separate post. I absolutely, highly recommend giving it a read.
🚀 Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey - I mentioned on my last weeknotesthat I’d try to finish this book by “next week”, and well, It only took me a day to fly through 20 more chapters. This was a great read, and I already published my review for it so, just go there. TL;DR: Read the series already.

Started

🌳 Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss. - Read up to 32%. This is a book by the same author of Hothouse, one of my absolute favorites, with an incredible setting and world-building in a matter of pages. Such excellence can be glimpsed in this novel as well, which was his first published book. The premise seems quite interesting already, although it definitely has some dated elements showing through. Nothing too unusual for the 50s though. The premise seems to have been played up countless times today, but I am happy to have not experienced any of those, I really enjoy the execution here so far anyway.
🛸 Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo by Gege Akutami - Read up to chapter 2. This is a new entry into the Jujutsu Kaisen universe set decades after the events of the original run. The protagonists are the grandchildren of some of the sorcerers we know and love, and the premise revolves around an alien civilization that has come to Earth, and share the same powers as sorcerers do. Unlike JJK, Gege only does the writing here, and so far it has been awesome, the art by Yuji Iwasake is still great as well! Looking forward to the rest.

Ongoing

⚔️ Kingdom by Hara Yasuhisa - Read up up to ch. 864. These past couple of chapters have focused on a conflict between archers. It’s a small arc within the war, but it actually got me tearing up when I read it this week. These characters are awesome, but the weight of it all, the emotion, the writing. It’s simply incredible stuff, and I didn’t even remember these characters existed like 10 chapters ago.

Gaming

🥐 CrossCode - Continued to play through this game and some incredible revelations have been made. I completed the sixth and seventh chapters after playing for almost five hours. Had some epic boss fights, action sequences and parkour sections here, not to mention the storytelling and character development have been top notch thus far. There was a twist to the plot that was done super well, and I am really looking forward to see how the rest of the game continues. Really good stuff.
👾 Into The Breach - I have had the itch to return to a solid tactics game and I thought I should revisit Into The Breach. I played it for 3 hours in a day. This is such a great game that gets my head gears turning like nothing else. One wrong move and things are over, even though I have all the info I need for victory, my brain ain’t big enough.
🐾 Grapple Dog - Didn’t play very much, but I still progressed through a few more levels of this platformer. It’s fun to move around on and completing all the levels in full is fun, I could go for them again and try to speedrun them too, but I wanna finish the game first.
🗡️ Caves of Qud - I tried the tutorial and this one seems to be super duper deep. I want to give it a fair shake though, and see what it has to offer, but I only played it like 30 minutes, so I still have a lot to learn.
🥊 Super Smash Bros Ultimate - Had a super quick match of things one before we had to leave, maybe next weekend!

Around the Web

Blogposts

Long Books Are Good For You - If you aren’t careful you will end up reading 500 pages in 3 days, or less.
About my book notes - It’s always fun when Derek Sivers shares some thoughts about his book notetaking, or about anything at all. Except that I only read fiction and I don’t take notes for those.
Handwriting a blog - I’ve done this before! and it’s pretty fun to see others doing it, I love the little drawins on the side too.
Mailcall - Axxuy wrote about sending actual physical mail to people. Writing letters is something I’ve been interested on trying for a while. I already own a letter to a friend who sent me some stuff overseas… One day.

YouTube

Wii Sports Resort - Intro - Move out of the way Final Fantasy VII! This is the best videogame opening sequence of all time. Just wow.
I Built a Tiny E-Reader - This is a fun open source project! a super tiny e-ink screen reader that I actually kind of want to build.
Playing around with my Xteink X4 and my experience was… Simple - This is a tiny cheap e-reader that seems to be forming a community around it. Sadly it seems KOReader will never run on it. Although its next iteration might.
How to defeat the backlog - I watched this video while I was searching for my Hollow Knight map, digging through my 70+ physical Switch games.
I Tried To Quit Spotify. It Cost $5,000 - It’s always cool to find the Innioasis Y1 in the wild! Well produced video too, but I disagreed with its conclusion a bit.

This is day 31 of #100DaysToOffload

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Book Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-03-09T12:34:47.000Z

Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged.

So, why is there a new version of the book out and is it worth reading again?

As the copyright page says:

Earlier versions of this material were previously published in serial form on the scp wiki under Creative Commons 3.0, and subsequently self-published by the author in ebook and paperback format. The work has been substantively revised and updated since.

As the FAQ makes clear, getting a "proper" publisher to put money into a CC project is unlikely. So many of the original elements have been rewritten and reworked. The writing, plotting, and characters have all been substantially improved. The ending, in particular, has become something quite special.

The story itself is still recursively memetic and a metacommentary on itself. The bug-eyed-monsters are mindbending and the good guys are all morally compromised. The concepts are gorgeously impossible and the pacing is exciting.

There's simply nothing like it.

The eBook is mostly well formatted. Excellent use of monospace fonts for reports, there are accessible redactions where suitable, and the images all have alt text. Weirdly, one "monster" is named వ - a character which failed to render correctly on my eBook. That gave it a rather sinister appearance! The ghosting of eInk made it look like there were faint words behind the various redactions which was delightfully spooky. An excellent book and a satisfying update.

However, it is worth noting that ███████ this book will ██████████ ██████████ ██████████████ and could lead to ████ █████████████ ██████████████. Although the retailer won't accept refunds on any book stained with █████████ █████████████████ ████ or ████ ██████████, it is possible to summon ██████ ████████████████████ ████████████ ███ ████ ███████████ in an emergency.

The Noble Path - Westenberg

2026-03-08T23:56:18.000Z

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an indie hacker in possession of a widget must be in want of a business model...

Every tool is a startup now.

Every script is a SaaS product.

Every neat little hack you cobbled together on a Sunday afternoon to solve your own problem is, according to the prevailing wisdom, an "MVP" waiting for its first round of funding.

The entire machinery of online discourse around building and creating has been so thoroughly captured by entrepreneurial "logic" that we've lost the language to describe what it feels like to simply make a thing that helps someone, give it away, and move on with your life.

I've been feeling this for a while now, and I suspect a lot of folks who have the itch to build feel it too, even if they haven't articulated it. You make a browser extension that fixes a tiny annoyance. You write a tool that reformats data in a way your colleages find useful. You build a small calculator for a niche problem that ten people on Earth actually have.

And the immediate, reflexive, near-Pavlovian response from the internet is:

Have you thought about monetizing this?

Gifts aren't pre-revenue products

Marcel Mauss published The Gift in 1925, and nearly a century later, the tech world still hasn't caught up with his central insight. Mauss studied indigenous societies across the Pacific Northwest and Polynesia and found that gift-giving operated as a complete system with its own logic, its own power dynamics, its own hierarchies, its own concept of value. Gifts created social bonds. They established reciprocty. They built trust in ways that market transactions can't.

The open-source software movement understood this intuitively. When Richard Stallman wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1985, his argument was moral: software should exist freely in the world. The modern internet runs on tools that people built and gave away: Linux, Apache, Python, the cryptographic libraries that keep your bank details from floating around in plaintext. These are gifts in the Maussian sense, and they built the foundation for an industry worth trillions of dollars.

But the gift economy of software has been absorbed into the entrepreneurial economy. Open source became a "go-to-market strategy." Free tools became "lead magnets." And now we live in a world where building something useful and giving it away for free is treated as either naive or as a clever long-game bottom-up business tactic. There's no conceptual space left for the third option: that you did it because you wanted to.

What the monks knew about useful work

The Rule of Saint Benedict, written around 530 AD, organized monastic life around a principle that sounds almost radical in the context of modern productivity culture: ora et labora, pray and work. The monks built things. They copied manuscripts, brewed beer, cultivated gardens, developed new agricultural techniques. Some of this work was consequential. Much of it was small and local and meant for their immediate community. None of it was oriented toward scale.

Work was understood as a form of devotion, valuable in itself rather than as a means to accumulate wealth or status. The monks built in private, for people they could see and know, finding meaning in the craft itself.

To transplant it:

Someone on a forum builds a tiny utility that converts between obscure file formats. Someone else writes a Tampermonkey script that removes an annoying popup from a website they use daily, then shares it because why wouldn't you. A developer at a nonprofit writes a data-cleaning tool for a specific kind of messy spreadsheet that everyone in their field has to deal with, posts it on GitHub, and walks away. Someone else publishes a tiny color-contrast checker that only people doing accessibility audits would ever need. These are Benedictine acts. They're labor undertaken for its own sake and for the immediate good of a knowable community, and they produce a satisfaction that no amount of MRR can replicate.

Scale poisons everything it touches

The startup ecosystem, and the broader culture of "building" that has grown up around it, operates on an implicit assumption that value scales linearly with reach. A tool that helps ten people is good. A tool that helps a thousand people is better. A tool that helps a hundred thousand is exciting. A tool that helps ten million is a unicorn, and you should probably quit your job to work on it full-time.

This logic is tempting, and in certain contexts it's perfectly sound. If you've discovered a real solution to a widespread problem, it would be odd not to try to bring it to more people. But the framework becomes toxic when it's applied universally, when every small creation gets fed into the same evaluative grinder and comes out measured against the yardstick of potential scale.

Because most good things don't scale.

Most good things are stubbornly local.

The best bread I've ever eaten came from a bakery in an Australian country town that didn't have a website and its originator couldn't have told you his "total addressable market" if you'd asked.

When we apply scale logic to everything, we end up devaluing the closeness to a real problem and the direct feedback loop between making a thing and watching someone use it.

Fun is a valid engineering requirement

Freud was wrong about a great many things (charitably), but his concept of the pleasure principle has aged well in the context of creative work. He argued that people are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and that much of what we call "civilization" is the process of learning to defer gratification in service of longer-term goals. The reality principle, he called it. Grow up, stop playing, get serious, build something real.

Modern productivity culture is the reality principle taken to an algorithmically appropriate extreme. Every hour must be optimized. Every project must serve a goal. Every creative act must be justified by its metrics and its contribution to some larger strategic objective. And this framework is so deeply embedded that even hobbyists feel guilty about building things for fun, as if fun were an insufficent justification for spending a Saturday afternoon writing code.

But fun is actually a good signal. When you're building a small tool because you find the problem interesting, or because the act of making it brings you real pleasure, you're operating in a mode that produces different (and, in my experience, better) results than when you're building to a spec or optimizing for a market. You make different design choices. You take different risks. You're willing to over-engineer a feature that delights three people and to under-engineer the parts that don't matter. The output has a character that venture-backed software, by structural necessity, can never have.

William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement was, at its core, an argument that industrialized production stripped work of its pleasure and products of their soul. Morris wanted to make beautiful things by hand, slowly, with care, in a way that honored both the maker and the user. He was fighting against the Victorian equivalent of "move fast and break things," and his economic program failed, but his aesthetic and moral intuitions hold up. There's something in a hand-built tool, physical or digital, that mass production can't touch.

When gifts become jobs you never applied for

The open-source world has been having its own reckoning with this tension for a decade now. High-profile maintainers burn out. Critical infrastructure projects turn out to be maintained by a single exhausted volunteer. Companies worth billions depend on libraries whose creators haven't been paid a cent. The discourse around "open-source sustainability" has generated an enormous volume of think pieces and not very many solutions.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that we're trying to solve the wrong equation. The burnout epidemic in open source goes beyond money (though money is part of it). It happens when something that started as a gift, something built for fun or out of real care, gets conscripted into an economy of obligation and expectation. You wrote a library because you needed it and thought others might too. Now ten thousand developers depend on it, and they file bug reports with the tone of customers who've been wronged, and suddenly your gift has become a job you never applied for and can't quit without feeling like you've betrayed people.

Better funding for open source would be nice, but the deeper issue is rebuilding the cultural permission to make things small and keep them small. To build a tool, share it, and explicitly say: this is a gift, not a product. I'll maintain it if I feel like it. I won't if I don't. You're welcome to fork it, improve it, ignore it, or throw it away.

Why the market can't have everything

Markets are excellent at allocating resources toward problems that affect large numbers of people who are willing and able to pay for solutions. Markets are terrible at addressing problems that are too small, too niche, too specific, too local to support a business model. If you have a problem shared by ten million affluent people, the market will solve it six times over with varying degrees of elegance // extraction. If you have a problem shared by two hundred researchers in a subdiscipline of marine biology, you're on your own.

This is the space where gift-economy building works. The long tail of human problems: the thousands of little frictions and annoyances and workflow inefficiencies that are too small for anyone to build a company around but too real for the people experiencing them to ignore. When someone builds a free tool to address one of these problems, they're serving a need that money was never going to serve.

And this work has positive externalities we consistently undercount. A free tool that saves a hundred people twenty minutes a week gives back more than three thousand hours of human time per year. A well-written tutorial that helps people avoid a common mistake reduces frustration across an entire community. A spreadsheet template that makes a confusing tax form navigable for freelancers is doing work that no government agency and no private company has bothered to do. A CLI script that batch-converts a weird legacy file format saves someone from losing an afternoon every month. None of this shows up in GDP figures or on growth charts. The value is real anyway.

The Noble Path

None of this is an argument against entrepreneurship or against charging money for software. eople should get paid for their work. Businesses that solve real problems at scale have value. I am neither a purist nor a luddite, and I'm certainly not interested in living a life of poverty and obscurity.

There is a Japanese concept, ikigai, that Western self-help influencers have repeatedly mangled and monetized into a mockery of a Venn diagram about finding your "purpose." But the original sense of the word is closer to "the thing that makes life worth living on a daily basis," and in the research conducted on centenarians in Okinawa, ikigai was rarely about grand professional achievement. It was about tending a garden. Talking to neighbors. Making small things that brought small joys. Waking up with something to do. The scale of the contribution didn't matter. What mattered was the directness of the connection between the effort and its effect.

I think what I'm arguing against is the monoculture. The idea that building-as-business is the only legitimate mode of making things, and that everything else is either a hobby (dismissive) or a pre-revenue startup (aspirational). I'm arguing for the recovery of a third category: building as gift, building as an expression of care for a specific community of people whose problems you understand because you're one of them.

If you've ever made something useful and felt a pang of guilt for not monetizing it, that guilt is a symptom of the monoculture. If you've ever hesitated to share a tool because it wasn't "polished enough" for a product launch, you've been contaminated by standards that don't apply to gifts. If you've ever described your own creative work as "a side project" with that apologetic minimizing doing all the heavy lifting, you've internalized a heirarchy of value that ranks market viability above human usefulness.

The Noble Path as I see it is to build a small, imperfect, deeply useful thing and give it away to the people who need it. Skip the landing page and the waitlist. A thing that works, offered freely, in the oldest and most human tradition of making things for each other.

The monks would understand.

What's the source of Einstein's "citizen of the world" quip? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-03-08T12:34:03.000Z

I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Let's see if we can find it!

1929-12-04

The earliest I can find is in the archives of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who published this snippet:

Is this likely to be true? What other evidence is there that Einstein was there and made those remarks?

1929-11-12

Flicking back a few weeks in the JTA archives is this evidence - "Sorbonne bestows degree on Einstein."

1929-11-09

There are also contemporary photos of the ceremony which are included in various press clippings.

Is there anything previous to 1929?

1922??

Alice Calaprice's Quotable Einstein has the quote but attributes it differently:

From an address to the French Philosophical Society at the Sorbonne, April 6, 1922. See also French press clipping, April 7, 1922, Einstein Archive 36-378; and Berliner Tageblatt, April 8, 1922, Einstein Archive 79-535

I wasn't able to find the French press clipping - but the German paper is available.

My German is rusty and that font is hard but I don't think it says anything similar to the above quote. I think the 1922 date is merely the confusion between two different visits to the Sorbonne - which is the same conclusion as Wikiquote editors came to

Contemporary reports

OK, so what other sources are there for the quote? The JTA says:

The local papers feature a summary of the brief address made by Prof. Albert Einstein […]

So I suppose they were just re-reporting what others had said. Let's take a look in some of those newspapers via Bibliothèque nationale de France who have an excellent archive of newspapers.

There's a rather detailed report from L'Œuvre - but that makes no mention of the anecdote.

Similarly, there are other interviews and contemporary commentary - but this remark goes unnoticed by all of them.

I read through several dozen French papers from November 1929 until early December. I couldn't find anything resembling the remark in any of them.

OK, what about the German press?

Again it is possible to search German newspapers for those specific dates - and there are plenty of contemporary reports.

Nothing about him being a Weltbürger that I could see.

Similarly, British newspapers don't make reference to the joke despite their endless coverage of him.

Google's shitty AI hallucinates the quote as appearing in The Saturday Evening Post.

While that issue does have an extensive interview with Einstein, there's nothing even vaguely similar to the sentiment about being a citizen of the world. Never trust an AI!

Is it likely?

Einstein is endlessly quotable - and had a good ear for a pithy turn of phrase. However, he was accompanied on this trip by the German Ambassador. Would it have been prudent for him to make such a politically charged joke in front of that audience?

Minced Oaths

Perhaps this is a mangled quotation? Einstein said something similar several years before the purported 1929 quote.

In Herman Bernstein's 1924 book "Celebrities of Our Time Interviews", there's the following quote:

That's much less pithy, but carries largely the same sentiment.

The original can be seen in the British Newspaper Archive of 1919

Dr. Einstein's Theory.

We publish to-day a translation of an article written for our readers by ALBERT EINSTEIN
[…] He adds that the different descriptions of him in England and Germany form an amusing example of relativity to the sentiments of the two countries. He is famous just now, and was described in our columns as a Swiss Jew, whereas in Germany he is called a German man of science. He suggests that were he suddenly to become a bête noire, the descriptions would be reversed, and he would be stigmatized here as a German man of science and in Germany as a Swiss Jew. We concede him his little jest.

However, do note that this is described as a translation. In his letter to Paul Ehrenfest on the 4th of December 1919, he says:

By the way, I myself participated in the cackling by writing a short article in the Times, in which I thanked our English colleagues, said a few things to characterize the theory, and at the end produced the following witticism: A simple application of the theory of relativity: today German newspapers are calling me a German man of science, the English, a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bete noire to the readerships, I should be a Swiss Jew for German newspapers and a German man of science for the English.'

See The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 9 The Berlin Years. I cannot find the original letter, but I assume Princeton's transcribers and translators are accurate.

Either way, that's two reputable sources which have Einstein expressing something similar. Perhaps the joke was repeated and refined by him as the years wore on? Perhaps an eager journalist took a half-remembered quote and gave it new life? Perhaps.

Where next?

Well, dear reader, that's where you come in! I've exhausted all my research prowess. If you can find a transcript of his remarks, or a report older than the JTA's of the 4th of December 1929 where Einstein talks about being a "citizen of the world", please drop a comment in the box!

Book Review: The Electronic Criminals by Robert Farr (1975) ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-03-07T12:34:04.000Z

What can a fifty-year-old book teach us about cybersecurity? Written just as computing was beginning to enter the mainstream, The Electronic Criminals takes us into a terrifying new world of crime!

Fraud over Telex! Ransomware of physical tapes! Stealing passwords and hacking into mainframes!

The books has a strong start, but gently runs out of steam because there simply weren't many electronic criminals in the mid-1970s! Instead, the book is over-stuffed with "Catch Me If You Can" tales of chequebook fraud, stolen aeroplane tickets, and regular blackmail and bribery. It isn't quite a how-to guide for the budding fraudster, but it isn't too far off.

Nevertheless, there are some amazing and mind-boggling computer crimes described:

Computer print-outs concealed the massive fraud and fakery. Tapes were programmed so that computers would reject incriminating data and accept and produce only what would support the conspiracy. Computers were also used in playing hide-and-seek with investigators by switching data damaging to the swindlers from one code to another, just a step ahead of the authorities.

One common refrain is that the law of 1975 hadn't caught up with the reality of modern crime. In the above case, the…

… investors decided to sue IBM for $4 billion, claiming that the company’s inability to manufacture a swindle-proof computer had contributed to their loss. Despite the fact that IBM had claimed their computers are virtually tamper proof, the case was thrown out of court. Obviously no one can be expected to be perfect, not even an IBM computer.

And in another:

In a recent case in France the accused was charged with sabotage. He had intentionally erased valuable information recorded on a magnetic tape by passing it through a strong magnetic field. However, since the tape itself was undamaged the court ruled that no offense had been committed. The jury was directed to issue a verdict of “not guilty.”

Many of the "electronic" crimes are able to be facilitated by poor physical processes:

Computer center near London, England: Unguarded side door hooked open to allow employees to step out for fresh air. Top secret military and industrial information was stored in the center’s files.

Anyone who has done an ISO 27001 audit knows that pain!

It isn't just computers and data-tapes that are discussed. There's rather a large section on phone-tapping and eavesdropping bugs. Rather terrifyingly, there's also a section on what we might now call "Deep Fakes":

On tape recordings, words can be rearranged and new words can be built up from an assortment of syllables. The process is somewhat like fitting together bits of a jigsaw puzzle. Simply by inserting or deleting “nots” in a taped voice recording, affirmatives can be changed to negatives and negatives to affirmatives. Words can be borrowed from one part of a tape and fitted into another so the entire meaning is changed. By the same techniques, inflections of words can be altered.

Oh, and drone warfare!

Today there are infrared cameras that can indeed see you in the dark, even portable TV cameras that can record pictures by moonlight, and radio-controlled miniature aircraft (some that can hover like helicopters) to carry these cameras to subjects that someone wants to photograph.

As with any good book on the subject, it spends plenty of time talking about how to defend oneself from these attacks and the downside of protection:

Another scheme, called “hand-shaking,” requires the inquirer seeking information from the computer to correctly answer a personal question, something known only to him, before he can find out what he wants to know. This slows down the running of a business. I remember sitting in the office of a man who has a computer terminal on his desk. In the middle of our conversation a question came up and he said: “Wait a minute. I'll get the answer from our computer.” He put the question in by typing on the keyboard. The terminal’s screen lit up and displayed another question: “In what month was your mother-in-law born?”

It also predicts the rise of music and film piracy; albeit by analogue means.

Rather pleasingly, it doesn't just limit itself to crimes committed in the USA. It acknowledges the pervasive nature of criminality and goes into some detail about cases in the UK, France, Germany, and Italy.

It is always fascinating to look back on our industry's history. Much like 1999's Information Warfare and Security by Dorothy E. Denning, we have to constantly go back to see what assumptions we have baked in to our processes.

I'll leave you with this rather chilling excerpt from the prologue:

Our world is still a fine place in which to live—a better one perhaps than any previous generation has enjoyed. But some of the people in it are causing serious problems. In 1974 many people experienced diminishing respect for persons in high places who acted as if they were above the law, and this led to a loss of respect for the concept of leadership itself. We should not confuse diminishing respect for a president with respect for the presidency, for example. Our society needs people in high places. It cannot function without leadership at every level, from the head of a household to the manager of a business to a chief of state.

What is missing in our society today is the necessary preparation and training for the responsibilities of authority in high places. If parents in the home and people in business and government never learned the lessons of fair play when they were growing up, we cannot expect them to know how to play fair when they reach high places. Consequently we all suffer every time “the boss” makes expedient judgments rather than proper moral decisions.

If coming generations are to be spared the tragic consequences of even more widespread corruption, the teaching of morality in the family and in the school ought to be as important to us as curbing inflation and other socioeconomic problems. Our children should be taught how to deal with everyday actions fairly and ethically. They should be exposed to those philosophical and ethical concepts, with practical examples that illustrate the alternatives of right and wrong so that they are better able to cope.

Sunsetting The 512kb Club - Kev Quirk

2026-03-07T09:17:00.000Z

All good things must come to an end, and today is that day for one of my projects, the 512kb Club.

I started the 512kb Club back in November 2020, so it's been around 5.5 years. It's become a drain and I'm ready to move on. As of today I won't be accepting any new submissions to the project. At the time of writing this, there are 25 PRs open for new submissions, I'll work through them, then will disable the ability to submit pull requests.

Over the years there have been nearly 2,000 pull requests, and there are currently around 950 sites listed on the 512kb Club. Pretty cool, but it's a lot of work to manage - there's reviewing new submissions (which is a steady stream of pull requests), cleaning up old sites, updating sites, etc. It's more than I have time to do.

I'm also trying to focus my time on other projects, like Pure Commons.

Want to take over?

It's sad to see this kind of project fall by the wayside, but life moves on. Having said that, if you think you want to take over 512kb Club, let's have a chat, there are some pre-requisites though:

We need to know each other. I'm not going to hand the project over to someone I don't know, sorry.
You probably need to be familiar with Jekyll and Git.

I'm probably going to get a lot of emails with offers to help (which is fantastic), but if we've never interacted before, I won't be moving forward with your kind offer.

After reading the above, if we know each other, and you're still interested, use the email button below and we can have a chat about you potentially taking over. By taking over, I will expect you to:

Take ownership of the 512kb.club domain, so you will be financially responsible for renewals.
Take ownership of the GitHub repo, so you will be responsible for all pull requests, issues and anything else Git related.
Be responsible for all hosting and maintenance of the project - the site is currently hosted on my personal Vercel account, which I will be deleting after handing off.
Be a good custodian of the 512kb Club and continue to maintain it in its current form.

If you're just looking to take over and use it as a means to slap ads on it, and live off the land, I'd rather it go to landfill, and will just take the site down. That's why I only want someone I know and trust to take it over.

I think I've made my point now. 🙃

What will happen if someone doesn't take over?

If there's no-one prepared to take over, I plan to do one final export of the source from Jekyll, then upload that to my web server, where it will live until I decide to no longer renew the domain.

I'll also update the site with a message stating that the project has been sunset and there will be no more submissions.

If you don't wanna see that happen, please get in touch.

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How I got into Bandcamp (and my Bandcamp Friday purchases) - Joel's Log Files

2026-03-06T15:10:00.000Z

Music is quite nice I think, and I enjoy listening to it very much. However I must admit I didn’t actually start to support artists directly until I discovered Bandcamp.

Everything started when I got a great little videogame known as Hades for the Nintendo Switch! It came with a neat surprise, a code to redeem the official soundtrack on Bandcamp! I love to get stuff for free, so I made an account there and claimed the album for myself!

Since then, I’ve decided to support creators there whenever I can, I won’t deny I still get some music from other sources, but if I can find it in Bandcamp, I will definitely get it from there—as long as I find the price to be fair, of course.

My first purchase ever was the whole soundtrack of 1000xRESIST, because it’s some of the best music ever, and right after that? Well, the score for Hollow Knight and Silksong of course, because they’re some of the best music ever.

One of my favorite finds also has to be Natsu Summer. I love City Pop, and I love what Ryusenkei has done—Tokyo Sniper is such wonderful album—and when I saw these albums on Bandcamp I simply had to get them. I’ve struggled to find other original City Pop artists on the platform—I don’t really care about the remixes that mess with the tempo and such—so, if you know artists that make original music with that style, definitely let me know.

Now that Bandcamp Friday is upon us, I thought I’d share some of the stuff I plan to buy right after I publish this blog!

Fixer’s Song [darkmode] EP by sunsetvisitor - This song from the original game was remixed for the release trailer for other consoles (it was on Switch and PC only at first) and I think it is amazing! However, please play the game itself. I am begging you. - It’s on sale on Steam right now…
Q-UP OST by kariomart - Probably my most random pick, this is a videogame soundtrack for a game I haven’t even played, but I have heard so much praise for it from Brendon Bigley that I was very interested. I checked out a couple songs and yep, it’s amazing, buying. It feels like elevator music but hyped up to the extreme and I love it.
Into The Breach Soundtrack by Ben Prunty - This is from a game I really like, although I really have to return to it one of these days. Still, the soundtrack is pretty chill and it makes for great background music while focusing on work or writing blogposts like this one!
Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid by dracula9antichapel - This artist has many other arranged tracks from old games I love, and I really enjoy them. I may snatch up the rest of them as they are free to get, but I’ll definitely send a couple bucks. These are from 2017 or so. I have to admit, I feel iffy about modern remixes because it could be made with AI. I highly appreciate the work put into these arrangements and I’ll be happy if you know real artists doing stuff like this nowadays as well.

Feel free to check my Bandcamp profile, if you want to see some other stuff I bought before. I gotta reiterate about my request for more City Pop style music! If you know some artists who sell their work on Bandcamp (or in other sites that offer DRM-free music), I’d be happy to check them out!

This is day 29 of #100DaysToOffload

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Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs - Werd I/O

2026-03-06T14:24:45.000Z

[Kate Blackwood in Cornell Chronicle]

The results of this study into corporate BS isn’t going to surprise anyone who’s spent much time in an office. The researchers generated meaningless corporate gobbledegook and tested how workers rated its business-savviness.

“Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

[…] Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.”

The Cornell report labels this as a paradox, I guess because these people disproportionately liked their supervisors but were also bad at their jobs. I don’t see that as a paradox at all: my bias is that people who think for themselves and are more distrustful of hierarchy are, to be honest, smarter.

I love this sentence:

“Researching BS also points out the importance of critical thinking for everyone, inside the workplace and out. “

Well, yes.

[Link]

Firmware Update for the Treedix TRX5-0816 Cable Tester - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-03-06T12:34:43.000Z

Last year I reviewed the Treedix USB Cable Tester - a handy device for testing the capabilities of all your USB cables. I noted that it had a few minor bugs and contacted the manufacturer to see if there was an update.

For some reason, lots of Chinese manufacturers don't like publishing updates on their websites. Instead they supplied me with a link to a Google Drive containing an instruction PDF and an small .exe with the 2.4.06 update - no love for us Linux freaks. I've locally linked them if you want to install.

Through online chatter, I thought the latest version was v4.0, but Treedix said:

Your device is currently running software version 2.3 and can be updated to the latest available version, v2.4.06. However, please note that version v4.0 includes minor hardware updates. Due to hardware incompatibility, existing devices cannot be upgraded to v4.0 via software.

So, do be careful running this update. Make sure it is for the right version of the device. If in doubt, contact Treedix directly.

Upgrading was easy.

Switch on the Treedix by flicking the switch up.
Plug a USB-C cable into the charging port of the Treedix.
Connect the other end of the USB cable to your computer.
On your computer, open the .exe.
On the Treedix, hold down the function button.
While holding down the function button, flick the Treedix switch to off.
The upgrade program should detect the device.
On your computer, click "Upgrade"
Wait until complete before disconnecting and restarting the Treedix.

There are no release notes, but it does now appear to correctly read some of the more advanced eMarkers.

Artemis changelog #8 - James' Coffee Blog

2026-03-06T11:41:34.000Z

I have been working on a few new features for Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain. You can read a summary of what’s new below.

Organise subscriptions with folders

You can now create folders in Artemis. This feature is designed to help you organise websites you follow into separate pages in your reader.

To add an author to a folder, go to the Edit page for an author, then scroll down to the “Folder” option:

Set a name for the folder to which you want to add the author. Then, save your changes.

You will then see a new “folders:” label in your reader with an “all” folder (the default folder) that lists all of your subscriptions, and the new folder you created.

Notes: Folder names are automatically converted to lowercase. You can only add one folder per author. To delete a folder, you will need to remove the folder name from all authors in the folder. I may work on improvements to this experience in the future.

Hide YouTube Shorts

You can now hide YouTube Shorts on a per-author basis. This is ideal if you only want to follow the long-form videos published by a YouTube channel rather than Shorts.

To hide YouTube Shorts for an author, go to the Edit page for an author and toggle the checkbox next to the option “Should YouTube Shorts by this author be hidden from your reader?”:

Thanks to Ava and Suliman for providing the inspiration for these features!

_Ava_ _Suliman_

How Many Holes Does a Straw Have? - Kev Quirk

2026-03-06T09:04:00.000Z

I was recently listening to an episode of The Rest Is Science, specifically the episode The Evolution Of The Butthole. As always, Hannah and Michael put on a great show and I came away thinking about its contents.

In it, they asked how many holes does a straw have? And my default response was something like:

Why they have 2 holes, silly! One at each end.

You probably don't need it, dear reader, but here's a handy-dandy diagram of what I'm talking about...2 holes, right?

Then Michael asked "okay, how many holes does a doughnut have?"

Bah! More simple questions! A doughnut obviously has 1 hole, right? RIGHT?!

Here's another diagram (look, I know you're a clever person, and you don't need a diagram of a bloody straw, or a doughnut, but we're going with it, okay).

We're all on the same page here, right folks? A straw clearly has 2 holes, and a doughnut obviously has 1.

This is where it gets interesting. Michael now flips script, and quite frankly, blows my fucking mind. He said:

But isn't a straw just an elongated doughnut?

What. The. Actual. Fuck?

A straw is just an elongated doughnut (albeit not as tasty). So does a straw have 1 hole? Does a doughnut have 2 holes? I don't know. I'm questioning my life decisions at this point. It's all too hard.

Can any of you tell me how many holes a straw (or a doughnut) has?

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Ash Fetchum - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-03-06T08:41:23.000Z

As I mentioned in this post I set up Forgejo recently to move away from GitHub but one of the things that worried me was backups. I know I shouldn't blindly trust GitHub to not lose my data but it seems an unlikely situation so I've never done anything about it really. I trust myself less than that.

Of course I have backups of the server, which backs up the repositories, but I wanted a solution that meant I also had the code locally to then send to my offsite backup.

I currently have code in three code forges: GitHub, Source Tube (which is Forgejo), and my Forgejo instance. My first instinct was to make a script that goes into every folder in my developer directory on my computer and fetches the changes but that wouldn't work if I made a new repository on one of the services. The ideal solution is to go through every repository on each of those services and fetch the latest changes to my machine. So I built Ash Fetchum and this logo that I'm very proud of (along with the name).

Ash Fetchum work by connecting to the GitHub or Forgejo API, fetches every repository, then cloning or fetching that repository to the defined location on your local machine, in my case /repo-backups. The readme has instructions on how to set it up and it should be relatively straight forward as long as you get the token permissions correct.

It also has a "manual" mode where you can give it an array of repository remotes to keep up to date. I'm using this as bodge-job replacement for some GitHub pages deployments that I want to move away from GitHub but it could easily be used for a more defined set of repositories to backup.

View Ash Fetchum on KnightForge.

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester - Werd I/O

2026-03-05T22:44:14.000Z

[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

Worth knowing if you think of Proton Mail as being a blanket security solution: in this case it was compelled to provide payment information for an account to the Swiss authorities, who then, via a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, handed it over to the FBI. As a result, the FBI were able to determine the identity of the account owner, an activist who does not appear to have been charged with a crime.

This is also kind of a weasely statement:

“Edward Shone, head of communications for Proton AG, the company behind Proton Mail, told 404 Media in an email: “We want to first clarify that Proton did not provide any information to the FBI, the information was obtained from the Swiss justice department via MLAT. Proton only provides the limited information that we have when issued with a legally binding order from Swiss authorities, which can only happen after all Swiss legal checks are passed. This is an important distinction because Proton operates exclusively under Swiss law.” Functionally, though, the material was provided to the FBI.”

Not every Proton Mail account is paid. But adding payment information can effectively deanonymize a user. Compare and contrast to, say, Mullvad, which allows payments to be made fully anonymously.

[Link]

Back to Alfred - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-03-05T19:36:21.000Z

In 2024 I switched to Raycast from Alfred. I'd been a long time Alfred user but I was tempted by Raycast's shiny UI and better integration with things like Reminders. Turns out I never used the reminders integration or most of the other features Raycast has that are unique.

I had spent time converting some of my workflows to Alfred extensions to varying success. The stricter nature of how Raycast extensions are built is good for Raycast but doesn't help me, a person who just wants to write a script or two and make things do other things. It was far too much effort to make new extensions or fix broken ones (like my Safari one that broke very quickly and I never fixed).

Raycast has always been pushing their AI stuff but it's mostly been out of the way and was basically "plug in your API key to chat to your ~~ai girlfriend~~ favourite model". Except now they're getting into the slop game so I'm out.

I had to write a script to convert my Raycast snippets to Alfreds format which you can find here.

So I'm back on Alfred. It has it's own problems, like aging workflows that don't work scattered around the internet but the gallery does help somewhat with that. I wish it there was a better submission process instead of "post in the forum" and to be honest I'm not in a rush to add more of my own plugins to the gallery, I'll just keep them on my own repo for now. Which is the last thing to do: I need to get setup again with my workflows, get my backup scripts working, and move them over to KnightForge. They'll still be on this page going forward though.

BBC says ‘irreversible’ trends mean it will not survive without major overhaul - Werd I/O

2026-03-05T14:23:17.000Z

[Michael Savage in the Guardian]

I hold three potentially-conflicting opinions about the BBC at once:

The license fee is a regressive tax that is punitive for lower-income people and needs to be overhauled
While it’s supposed to be independent and representative, its news coverage has sometimes fallen short of this standard
It is a treasure and must be protected at all costs

Every British household that watches live content is supposed to pay £169.50 (around $225) a year. That’s more than many streaming services — although you arguably get a lot more for your money, considering the plethora of local coverage, stations, and other programs that the BBC supports. It doesn’t represent all of its income, but it accounts for most of it.

“In its opening response to government talks over its future, the corporation said 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, but fewer than 80% of households contributed to the license fee.”

Because more households are moving to on-demand instead of live — except, perhaps, for sports and some rare but high-profile events — license fee revenue has fallen. It’s interesting to think about what it would take to reform this funding structure to preserve public service broadcasting in the UK.

There’s also an elephant in the room, which is the intentional gutting of public service broadcasting here in the US. How could the British ecosystem be inoculated — or at least strengthened — against that kind of threat from a future government?

I’m not sure that turning it into a “Netflix for British TV” is the right answer. What might it look like to take a more open approach and turn the BBC into something that doesn’t copy any private company’s business model but is something truly new that meets public service media needs in the 21st century? Could it be more of an operating system that supports new experimentation and different kinds of media? How might it be more radically collaborative and representative in ways that private broadcasters aren’t able to achieve? There’s a lot to talk about.

[Link]

Take two - James' Coffee Blog

2026-03-05T14:17:32.000Z

Trafalgar Square is a special place. The architecture and views are breathtaking. The National Gallery, the church of St. Martins in the Fields, Canada House, and more, all surround the Square. From the right place you can look down Whitehall and see Big Ben.

In the heart of the Square is the National Gallery, a huge, Neoclassical building. I have visited the gallery a few times and only last weekend, on my most recent visit, did I start to feel oriented in the gallery. I love that feeling of getting lost in an art gallery; of wandering around and exploring and building a map of where things are. I also love the feeling of looking back and realising it is getting easier to find your way because you have visited a place a few times before.

I studied the architecture of the new Sainsbury Wing in the V&A course I did last year. [1]

Visiting now, following my studies, I came to see the building. with a new perspective. My first perspective is as it always is when I see beautiful architecture: wow. Then I thought “I studied the new building!” I started to appreciate the architecture more.

I noticed the columns that I had until then only studied on the screen. I find myself looking at columns in architecture more. I now know the difference between an Ionic and Corinthian column; learning about architecture feels like learning languages of design.

Inside the gallery, I noticed a few paintings I had seen before only on a computer screen. That’s Hay Wain by John Constable! I thought with excitement as I noticed the painting. The gallery is also home to Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, a painting I first learned about through a blog post. I studied the painting with great excitement. What can I see that I don’t remember from looking at it first? Many details stood out: the bridge feels darker in the real painting; there is a person in a boat in the bottom left of the image. The boat is tiny in comparison to the scale of the bridges.

I went to the National Gallery with new perspectives: of architecture, of seeing paintings I had only until then seen on a computer screen.

When I visited the Rembrandt room I said to myself I thought I knew Rembrandt’s work. I had seen paintings by him before, understood that he used dark backgrounds to highlight the subject of the painting. But I knew so little: of Rembrandt’s difficult life, of his changing artistic style over the years, of how expressions were his subject.

On reflection, studying a work of art involves a lot of “take twos”: of looking and looking again to gain a better understanding of a painting, either in one sitting (looking around a work and coming back to different features) or across multiple sittings. Impressions of art change with time, too: with knowledge of the artist, the time period in which the work was painted, growing knowledge of how others painted similar subject matters, my own new experiences since I last saw the painting, and the context in which a painting is seen (location, digital vs. physical).

As I learn more, I know more of what to look out for in a work of art. I am learning to distinguish details that are significant in painting: how colour is used, perspective, theme, brush-stroke, symbols. I recently learned that anchors are the symbol of hope in some paintings.

I will soon be starting my first art history block in school where I’ll be learning how to use a visual analysis toolkit to analyse a painting. I am excited to learn and apply what I learn when I visit galleries in the future.

In a lecture this week we were asked to say what we saw in a painting as a light introduction to visual analysis. One person noted the presence of a dog under a table. The lecturer then said they had looked at the painting many times through the course of their teaching and never noticed the dog. This makes me think about how we all see different things, and how much there is to see even in art we already know.

This is my (very late) submission for the June 2025 IndieWeb Carnival on the topic “Take Two.”

[1]: The Sainsbury Wing has a storied, tumultuous history; then-Prince Charles publicly criticised one of the proposals for a redesign in May 1984. Today, the Sainsbury Wing houses a wonderful collection of medieval art.

Rain, Steam, and Speed learned about through a blog post _June 2025 IndieWeb Carnival on the topic “Take Two.”_ 1]: [The Sainsbury Wing has a storied, tumultuous history

The Safety Levers - Werd I/O

2026-03-05T14:01:16.000Z

[Corey Ford at Point C]

Another really good framework from Corey. Leading with vulnerability gives the people on your team permission to be vulnerable too.

“When leaders frame work as execution, they imply the answer is already known. When they frame it as learning, they acknowledge uncertainty is part of the work.

[…] When leaders project certainty, dissent feels risky. When leaders acknowledge fallibility, speaking up becomes contribution, not challenge.”

Modeling uncertainty, learning, and humility allows everyone to be in growth mode vs approaching their work with a fixed mindset. But it has to be done with intention: uncertainty that doesn’t also come with norms around experimentation, feedback, and accountability just feels like instability.

I’m still growing here myself: in my world, everything is a prototype that can be challenged, experimented with, and iterated on. But providing the clear, structured lanes for people to experiment is crucial — and that intentional structure can be one of the first things to go when things get busy or fraught. Structures and norms only matter if they guide us through every situation and if they’re for everyone.

[Link]

Museum memories - James' Coffee Blog

2026-03-05T13:29:16.000Z

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival on the topic “Museum memories”.

When I was 10 or so – maybe younger; childhood can be hazy – my grandparents took me to the National Museum of Flight in Scotland for a day. My memory starts as many of my earlier museum memories do: with the joy I felt having lunch in the museum cafe. I then start to think about the day and realise I remember the trip vividly: the hangars, the planes, walking across the airfield, going inside a decommissioned plane.

The National Museum of Flight is on a different scale to other museums because of its subject matter: flight. Planes are huge. They were especially huge for young me who would look up in awe at the vehicles. This was the closest I had ever been to planes.

I feel that same sense of awe now in art galleries when I look at grand paintings: the scale of the thing in front of me can be so grand – or indeed small and extensively detailed – that, for a moment, I can’t help but think “wow!” That feeling never gets old.

On that day, we walked around a lot, exploring the different planes. As I think back I realise museums are playgrounds for curiosity; places to imagine. One exhibit I remember in particular depth was a Concorde plane that you could go inside. I didn’t know the significance of Concorde at the time, but the experience was nevertheless amazing. Indeed, you don’t need to understand all the history around something in a museum to appreciate what you see.

I appreciated that the museum was outside. I suspect that I was probably tired toward the end of the trip; the car journey, walking around a lot, it all would have been tiring. Although I don’t remember exactly, we may have got fish and chips for dinner that day on the way back; I remember other such trips where fish and chips was the meal to end the day.

I just looked at the map and saw that the National Museum of Flight is near East Linton. East Linton was home to an office of 4J Studios, the creators of Minecraft Xbox Edition. I don’t know if it was on this day or on another trip but I do remember seeing the sign that we were going through East Linton and thinking wow, Minecraft [Xbox Edition] is [partially] made here! The journey can be as exciting as the destination.

Although my memory is hazy and I may have mashed together a few memories together, the museum itself remains vivid. I had a lot of fun that day: going into a Concorde plane, walking across the airfield, having a nice lunch. I look back and wonder if I was in awe that day; a day before I probably would have known what “awe” meant.

_Museum memories_