Geoff Manaugh’s speculative landscape and architecture blog BLDG BLOG has reopened its doors. Always worth reading.

I invite you to watch this highly instructional film on dating from 1949.

The Internet Archive is a real treasure trove.

I have recently submitted a paper based on some work I have been doing at my job at the Embodied Cognition Lab at Lancaster University. In it, we look at a large set of linguistic distributional models commonly used in cognitive psychology, evaluating each on a benchmark behavioural dataset.

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I absolutely love this photo of space shuttle Endeavor, low over an LA city street. Yep, even though it looks like an exquisite Simon Stålenhag painting of an alternative 1970s America, this is actually a real event.

Not so long ago I had a paper published in Vision Research. It’s on some work I did some years ago with my friend and collaborator Andrew Thwaites. In it we look at the entrainment of magnetoencephalographic activity in early visual cortex to colour information in visual stimulus using two competing computational models of colour. In other words, when and where people’s brainwaves directly track the colour of moving images they were seeing on a screen, using two theories about how colour could be represented in the brain.

The paper is in Elsevier’s “open archive”, which hopefully means you can read it for free. If not, hit me up.

I don’t talk about my work too much here, but if you’re interested you can read more about what I do on my more professional website.

I made a tool to convert a podcast’s RSS feed into a webpage on which episodes can be easily streamed.

When you visit the page, you’ll see a box in which to paste the RSS feed’s URL:

Stick in a feed’s RSS URL, and you get all available episodes in a list, reverse chronologically by release date:

Titles are links taken from the feed’s metadata. Images are hotlinked from the host. Click-to-listen links bring up an embedded player:

The feed is stored in the page’s URL, so it should be sharable. Currently no way to identify a given episode, but you should be able to do that with the episode title links, which should go back to the source.

Source code is released to the CC0 public domain, and can be found on Codeberg, where you can also report bugs or help me make it better.

If you use it, let me know!

If you’ve made a multi-scene Hype document which is hosted online as a web page, you can link directly to a named scene in that document using this handy script:

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A nice surprise to read yesterday that Ed Brayton is back on the air with a relaunch of his old radio show Culture Wars Radio.

[I am a long-time fan of Ed’s writing and particularly his radio shows. (So much so that I mirror episodes of his old shows to make sure they remain available.) Intelligent, informed, non-partisan discussion of American politics and law, particularly constitutional law. This time he has a co-host, former professor of constitutional law Dan Ray. The first episode is a discussion of the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, and a bit about Trump’s legal troubles.

I’m super pleased to hear Ed on the radio again.

Check out the podcast via iTunes, or subscribe to the feed directly. It looks like Ed is supporting production of the show through Patreon, so go take a look there too.

Hey!

I just had a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology. It’s on some work I did with the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University. In it, we used a machine model of speech recognition to map phonetic sensitivities in human auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography neuroimaging data.

The paper is open-access, so you can read it here.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the kind of research I do over at my “professional” website.