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Cultivated (lab-grown) meat has emerged from science fiction into a genuine commercial product. The promise of sustainable, animal-free meat has captured the interest of governments concerned with national food security in a time of rapid and unpredictable climate change. Supported by a rapidly developing $3Bn industry, cultivated meat is now available for limited public consumption.
However, public opinion on cultivated meat is strongly polarised. Since most people haven’t yet tried cultivated meat, preconceptions have instead been formed by its depictions in science fiction which may be either inspiringly utopian or more commonly, starkly dystopian. Real culture-grown products are being introduced to a consumer base with expectations based on imagined realities.
In this article I will introduce some of the technology that underpins the production of cultivated meat, and how its origins in the biopharmaceutical industry present both opportunities and challenges for manufacturing appetising food. How far does the reality of cultivated meat match the science fiction representation? Can scientists and storytellers work together towards a shared utopian vision of this Future Food?
A new era: the Post-burger
On Monday 5th August 2013, Dutch pharmacologist Mark Post unveiled the world’s first cultivated beef burger at a press conference in London, thus launching a new era in food. The burger was cooked and eaten, and whilst being described as ‘close to meat, but not as juicy’ and costing around $325,000 nevertheless inspired a boom in investment that saw the creation of over a hundred start-ups and university spin outs, plus a handful of very well-capitalized companies in the USA, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands (Mead, 2013; Gregory-Manning & Post, 2024). Since 2013 it is widely estimated that over $3.1 billion has been invested into cultivated meat enterprises, with a peak in 2021 (GFI, 2023). New consumer markets are opening up following regulatory approvals in Singapore, China, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Israel and the UK as governments recognise the value of a diversified ‘Alternative Proteins’ ecosystem in enhancing food security in response to growing population challenges and climate change.
Yet the concept of ‘synthetic’ meat has been in the public consciousness for generations. Since first being articulated in fiction in 1897 (as a gift from the Martians in Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz), social and technological revolutions have triggered particular bursts of literary creativity in the 1930s, 1950’s and 1960s, corresponding to increasingly mechanised intensive farming practices and the overall boom of technological progress in the 20th century, not least of which was in biomedicine and laboratory cell culture. In a 1931 essay on the future of science, Winston Churchill wrote:
‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Nor need the pleasures of the table be banished. That gloomy Utopia of tabloid meals need never be invaded. The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products, and any changes will be so gradual as to escape observation.’
Churchill’s predictions and the early optimism of fin de siècle authors in humankind’s salvation through science are admittedly taking some time to realise, yet the technology required to bring cultivated meat to fruition is being developed at pace.
Muscle formation starts with the proliferation of cells, which ultimately merge into long muscle fibres.
Whilst Post’s showcase burger in 2013 was created using this process, others have questioned the full-scale feasibility of the approach and sought to identify alternatives that might be easier to engineer. If the complex process of muscle synthesis ultimately results simply in fibres rich in animal protein, perhaps there are easier ways to simulate this. Since the product will be cooked as food, does it need to have the biological authenticity of true muscle?
One of the most common alternatives to true muscle cells for making cultivated ‘meats’ is in fact obtained from the connective tissue of muscle. When grown in culture, these connective tissue cells naturally form sheets, balls, and fibres, rich in collagen and proteins, yet without the characteristic cellular structure of muscle. As an achievable and scalable solution this has proven to be a successful approach for several companies, but does it meet the consumer expectation of cultivated meat? Since these cells are typically taken from animal skin biopsies, they could perhaps be more accurately described as cultivated scabs, rather than cultivated meat (Pasitka et al, 2023).
Another question is what animal’s cells to culture. Throughout human history, livestock agriculture has focussed on a very few species which were domesticated from wild animals over thousands of years. The choice of meat-giving animal in most cultures has therefore been limited by the availability of suitable animals and by the ability of the regional landscape and environment to support husbandry. Selective breeding over millennia has given rise to thousands of breeds of sheep, cows, pigs, and poultry suited to the needs of civilisations, and more recently to satisfy the efficiency requirements of intensive farming. This has given rise to some spectacular statistics: chickens are now one of the most populous animals in the world, with over 26 billion at any given moment (200 million are killed for food each day), and domesticated mammals (including cows, pigs, and sheep) form around 630 million tonnes of Earth’s biomass – compared to just 22 million tonnes for all wild land mammals (Roser, 2023; Greenspoon et al, 2023).
Such a limited focus on just a few species raises many concerns around environmental sustainability and the effects of pandemic diseases on livestock, but also provokes the following question: If we don’t have to farm the whole animal, why limit our choice to these core species? Perhaps other animals which are hard to farm traditionally have characteristics better suited to ‘cellular agriculture’ or cultivated meat farming, for example large carnivores such as lions, or species which take a long time to reach maturity, such as tortoises. Perhaps there are species that can provide even better food products when just their cells are cultured, leading to truly unique foods that could not be produced through traditional livestock farming (Kateman, 2022). H. Beam Piper presents this idea in the novel Four-Day Planet (1961), in which not only familiar livestock was available through carniculture, but also exotic alien species and unconventional food formats.
‘…the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we wanted was grown – Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan zhoumy meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest…. “You can get all the paté de foie gras you want here,” I said. “We have a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing in one of our vats.”
Four-Day Planet (1961) by H. Beam Piper
There has been a notable divergence in industry approaches to this concept. Whilst many have noted that consumer acceptance of cultivated meat relies on engaging a level of familiarity, others have sought to create a distinct boundary and develop cultivated meats which do not immediately meet preconceptions. The thinking goes that since most meat-eaters already have firmly established ideas of the ‘perfect’ steak, or even an emotive childhood memory of a beef burger, people will naturally compare novel foods to these core expectations, often unfavourably (Baum et al, 2021). In contrast, a tender cultivated crocodile medallion, for instance, doesn’t have the same high bar for comparison, and in many respects the cultivated version might generate a more palatable product than anything cut from a gristly wild animal.
With this change in mindset comes a surge in unlocked potential, opening 65,000 species of vertebrates for cellular cultivation. Are there species that have uniquely appealing properties, yet aren’t conventionally farmable? The African wild antelope kudu and the domesticated donkey have been identified as uniquely delicious, and yet for very different reasons are unlikely to make mainstream supermarket aisles as culled meats – yet cellular cultivation makes these a viable prospect (Pang, 2018). Companies such as Wild Bio in South Africa are developing a catalogued cell bank of native antelope and wildlife species, prized as rural bush meat but generally unavailable elsewhere in the world.
With improved genomic sequencing it may even be possible to resurrect (or engineer) cells from extinct species, as trialled by Australian cultivated meat company Vow with their ‘Mammoth Meatball’ in 2022 containing a short sequence of mammoth DNA (Carrington, 2023). Even some dinosaur structural proteins have been sequenced, not quite enough yet to make Jurassic Park (1993) a reality, but perhaps enough to introduce Tyrannosaurus collagen into chicken cell cultures (Asara et al, 2007).
Nurturing life in vitro
Regardless of the cell type chosen to form the cultivated meat, all cells require similar environments to grow – a warm, germ-free space with fresh nutrients and a method to remove metabolic waste. In living organisms, systems throughout the entire body provide these functions: the stomach and intestines turn food into simpler building blocks for new tissue growth, and the liver and kidneys filter out and excrete waste. Everything is connected by a vascular system of arteries, veins, and capillaries such that virtually no cell is more than a few millimetres from a source of nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood.
In lab-grown meat, each of these physiological processes must be provided artificially. This seemingly overwhelming task presents another opportunity for reflection – how can the many complex processes of biology be reduced to generate the ‘meat’ we want without re-creating a synthetic life support system as complex as a whole body? It is useful here to consider which systems we almost certainly don’t need to grow muscle. Firstly, although muscle has nerves running through it that provide a stimulus for contraction, we probably don’t need a whole nervous system or a brain. Sensory organs such as eyes and ears are also totally redundant. Basic nutrients such as glucose, vitamins and amino acids can be produced chemically (often at huge scale for our dietary food supplements) and provided directly in growth media, so a gastrointestinal system for digestion isn’t needed either. Waste can be controlled by simply discarding old growth media and replacing it with fresh solution, obviating the need for filtration by the liver and kidneys.
In fact, when reduced to the basic requirements for muscle growth, much of the body’s physiological processes can be eliminated or replaced. Essential requirements to sustain life still include an oxygen supply and an ever-refreshing nutrient fluid, but beyond that there is the potential to reinvent the artificial growth environment in any way that can be imagined.
‘He swung open her door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped.
It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.
Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak.
The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
The bioreactor
Artificial growth environments, or bioreactors, have existed for millennia. Since humans first determined that foods could be fermented to preserve them, improve their qualities, and generate alcohol, civilisations have experimented with vessels in which complex biological growth can be controlled. These first bioreactors were entirely for microbial cells and required fairly simple technology, but many of the fundamental principles still underpin modern bioreactor technology. Indeed, many bioreactor designs for cultivated meat are effectively identical to those used for microbial fermentation due to the simple fact that specialised ‘meat bioreactors’ have not yet been invented. Much of the bioreactor infrastructure that exists at the scale needed to produce cultivated meat has simply been taken from the biopharmaceutical industry by cultivated meat companies desperate to upscale their manufacturing process.
Inevitably, this necessitates some compromises. Biopharma doesn’t produce complex structured muscle tissue and hasn’t ever needed to develop the technology to do so. Therefore, currently only single cells or very small aggregates of tissue can be produced using these bioreactors.
Nevertheless, this ‘fermentation tank’ approach to growing cellular biomass has enabled the cultivated meat industry to unblock a series of scaling challenges that were widely considered impossible even a decade ago. The cost of cell culture media used to be eye-wateringly expensive, since all previous applications were small scale and generally for high-value biomedical research. Rationalisation has resulted in culture media costs decreasing by several orders of magnitude, from over £1,000 per litre to a few pence. A decade ago, it took $325,000 and a team of scientists to grow a 100g beef burger, whereas some modern companies are producing kilograms of biomass daily for a fraction of the cost.
However, this biomass is still harvested as a cell paste, and prompts a question that divides opinion: is this meat? Can a pâté-like product with no tissue structure, whilst entirely made from animal cells, satisfy consumer expectations for cultivated meat?
Cut and paste
‘I’m a goo man. I have factories all over the country. I have trucks right now loaded with goo that can be here within the week. The goo I speak of can be made into anything.’
Let Them Eat Goo, South Park S23E04
Many people think not. In fact, the typically pejorative term ‘ultra-processed food’ seems to perfectly describe cultivated meat in its current form – a manufactured paste. A 2019 episode of South Park (‘Let them eat goo’) satirises the concept of meat-alternatives, albeit in this example as a plant-based substitute, yet with striking similarities to the harvested cultivated meat cell paste. Other parallels within the cultural zeitgeist may be drawn, notably with the film Soylent Green (1973), infamously featuring the mass public consumption of an amorphous meat-alternative that is ultimately revealed to be produced from dead human bodies. There are many other examples in dystopian science fiction of pastes, slimes, and slurries as either a government-issued basic staple food, or as the basic nutritional option for a post-apocalyptic human race. For example, in The Matrix (1999), food in the Real World is described as ‘a single-celled protein, vitamin, mineral, and amino acid colloid’, which the characters compare to runny eggs at best and a bowl of snot or puke at worst. In the same movie, it is described how dead humans are recycled post-mortem by the machines into a liquid food that is intravenously infused into the unwitting living, whilst even the simulation of a real beef steak is considered to be worth fatally betraying your friends and humanity for. This commentary on the negative associations of untextured, formless foodstuffs for humans is almost universal throughout speculative fiction, and a significant consideration for unstructured cultivated meat entering the market.
The ’form factor’ that novel foods are presented in is therefore important. It has been found that a majority of people have varying degrees of food neophobia – an aversion to entirely new types of food. When given the choice people’s selection habits gravitate to the familiar (Bryant & Barnett, 2018). This is perhaps biologically understandable, since our evolutionary ancestors would have faced significant risks of poisoning or disease by the uninhibited consumption of foods which deviate from the established diet.
There may also be an underlying belief that non-solid foods are for infants, the elderly, or the very ill, whereas healthy adults predominantly consume solid foods that require chewing. There are notable exceptions to this general trend, such as soups, stews, and pâté such as foie gras at the luxury end of consumption. So not all pastes are unpalatable, but to change dietary habits en masse and encourage widespread uptake of cultivated meat, it seems that structured solid formats are preferred.
‘The food slot gave him flat reddish-brown bricks. Six times he dialled a brick, took a bite and dropped the brick into the intake hopper. Each brick tasted different, and they all tasted good.
At least he would not get bored with eating. Not soon, anyway.’
Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven
Tissue engineering
‘“These clumps of cells are spaced evenly — or, as we call it, seeded — throughout the culture medium. The solution is very carefully controlled; it changes from hour to hour as various enzymes, activators, charges of oxygen and so forth are added. The result is that in some six days the isolated clumps of cells grow to a solid, delicious mass, weighing many tons, of Juicimeet. And incidentally, when you leave each of you will be given a neat cellophane wrapped package of Juicibeef so that you can experience for yourselves, if you haven’t already done so, how delicious it is. We recommended it for broiling, grilling, roasting, or as kebabs.
“Juicimeet is subject to a continuous process of selection. In each batch, some cells respond better to the nutrient solution than do others. It is from these superior cells that the new batch is grown. Juicimeet — ” under the gauze mask he beamed at them — “becomes better all the time.”
Lazarus (1955) Margaret St. Clair
Cultivated meat is an industry only a decade old and has moved with surprising speed to develop food products using technology never intended for this purpose. Innovators have entered this field from a wide range of disciplines, but from a technological perspective they can be separated into two distinct camps: bioprocess scientists and tissue engineers.
Bioprocess scientists have so far led much of the initiative for cultivated meat, rapidly converting technologies from their original applications in biopharmaceutical synthesis, microbial fermentation, and ultra-processed food manufacturing into strategies for producing animal cells at unprecedented scales. None of these technologies has ever developed the need to create a meat-like tissue, however, so there is a natural limit to how far these existing bioprocess-based solutions alone can engineer a compelling meat-like tissue.
Tissue engineering began as a field within biomedicine in the mid-1980’s when scientific researchers began considering the future of human organ transplantation and tissue grafts. It was reasoned that our knowledge of cell biology and materials science was becoming sufficiently advanced that replacement body parts could be grown in the laboratory to reduce the reliance on donor tissues. Whilst the full potential of tissue engineering has yet to be realised as a widespread alternative to organ donation, substantial progress has been made in constructing simple 3D living tissues that are commonly used to study biological and pathological processes in the laboratory.
In tissue engineering, cells are cultured in a biomaterial scaffold which provides the basic structure over which cells can lay down a secreted protein matrix and form a realistic version of a natural piece of tissue. For biomedical applications this approach works well, but for cultivated meat there are significant challenges, particularly around the suitability of scaffolds, which must be edible and compatible with the end goal of providing a desirable food product (Bomkamp et al, 2022).
For many applications, these functions are served by hydrogels – gelatinous and highly hydrated substances derived from natural sources such as algae. Common hydrogels include ingredients familiar to many home cooks, such as agar and carrageenan, which are used as thickeners and to make vegan jellies. When mixed with animal cells they can be used to create three-dimensional spheres, strands, and sheets that gradually fill up with living, growing muscle tissue. Hydrogels are very versatile and can even be mixed with cells and extruded through a fine nozzle to ‘print’ complex 3D structures (Soleymani et al, 2024). Aleph Farms (Israel) have been developing this process for several years and have shown they are able to dual print beef muscle and fat into marbled steak-like products (Ianovici et al, 2022).
Very advanced bioprinting has several representational instances in science fiction, for example the restoration of Leeloo’s body from a single cell and a ‘tissue processor’ in Fifth Element (1997). Food prepared in this way has some similarities to the types of synthesised meat seen in science fiction. Before the Star Trek replicator (first seen in The Next Generation), original episodes made inferences to a ‘food synthesizer’ which, although making limited appearances in the series, appears to make food in coloured cubes and other shapes (‘The Conscience of the King’, 1966).
Above and beyond: Extraterrestrial cultivated meat
One of the greatest potential markets for cultivated meat may be in space. Several space agencies have dedicated research and funding to the challenges of growing food in flight in an effort to mitigate the problems of uploading full crew provisions. The upload mass cost and inflight storage requirements for long duration spaceflight missions and the establishment of colonies on the moon and Mars are considerable. The nutritional deterioration of food over time, the risks of spoilage, and crew psychology are additional considerations that become more severe with increasing mission duration. Substantial progress has been made in hydroponic plant agriculture in microgravity, suggesting that astronauts will in future be able to grow much of their own food in-flight, providing freshly synthesised vitamins and micronutrients to supplement their otherwise monotonous diet of freeze-dried rations (NASA). But will all astronauts become vegan?
‘”Where would they get a real steer?”
“There are some around for story props in the various entertainment media, that sort of thing. A few of the outback planets where they haven’t the technology for pseudoflesh still raise cattle for food.”’
Whipping Star (1969) by Frank Herbert
It is highly unlikely that we will be sending livestock on any upcoming spaceflight missions. Mars will not be stocked with cows, pigs, and chickens. Aquaculture might be economically realistic off Earth, and potentially mycoculture could produce textured mushrooms and fermented mycoproteins (such as Quorn), but for freshly synthesised animal protein the only real option appears to be some form of cultivated meat.
Science fiction has identified this as a rich source of material for speculating on how spacefaring humanity will grow food. In The Expanse series of Novels (2011-21) by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing as James S. A. Corey), vat-grown meat is specifically mentioned as being consumed as a general staple, particularly in resource-poor regions of the solar system such as the (asteroid) Belt. In the novel series vat-grown meat is depicted as a supplement to basic dried food (plant-based kibble), yet inferior to authentic animal-derived meat (associated with the bourgeois inner planets). In the TV series adaptation ‘okra-infused tank-grown ribs’ (Episode S01E08 “Salvage”) are mentioned, indicating a curious level of consideration for restaurant marketing language to make the cultivated meat appealing to a consumer. In contrast to much science fiction, The Expanse is generally considered to present food of the future in relatively appealing ways, with home-style family recipes being cherished and served with eagerness.
The cultural negotiation of Alternative Meat
The term ‘cultivated meat’ was proposed in 2015 by Isha Datar and an online community consultation at US-based New Harvest. The online poll for a new umbrella term was in response to intense pushback from the livestock farming community against the use of ‘clean meat’, which was deemed derogatory to ‘dirty’ farmed animal meat. Other terms, such as cultured meat, lab-grown meat, even immaculate meat have been proposed and interchangeably used, but always with a sizeable degree of public rejection.
There has also been some regulatory rejection of these terms, particularly around the conserved use of meat in these labels. Should cultivated and farmed products both carry the same name? Several companies have sought to avoid the m-word entirely, launching products as a brand such as Qualia and Forged Gras (Vow, Australia 2024), and Chick Bites (Meatly, UK 2025), whilst others are more embracing of non-traditional labelling, for example GOOD Meat 3 (Good Meat USA, 2022). There is an opportunity for speculative writers to help with this cultural navigation and develop new terms that surmount the word meat.
ChickieNobs, presented by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake (2003) goes some way to showing how parallels in branding and marketing can be made between cultivated meat and retail strategies for processed meats by fast food companies. Chicken ‘nuggets’ were invented (but never patented) in the 1950s by Robert C. Baker as a way to maximise the untextured meat reclaimed from a carcass (Baker et al, 1966). Much like cultivated meat, consumers overlook the process (which can be off-putting) and focus instead on the taste and marketing, leading to the estimated global consumption of 34 million McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets per day.
“What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy.
“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one.”
Oryx and Crake (2003) Margaret Atwood
Cultivating the appeal
Speculative fiction typically presents cultivated meat as an inferior alternative to animal meat -either as a cheaper substitute for the poorer classes, or as the only option in dystopian society (Castle, 2022).
The origin of real cultivated meat in biomedicine, tissue engineering and pharmaceuticals manufacturing has given us a technological legacy of stainless steel, chemical reagents, clean rooms, and lab-coats that is perhaps not entirely appealing as a food-producing system. Much of our relationship with food comes from heritage – relishing the foods of our childhood, proudly defending regional specialities, and embarking on gastronomic tours of foreign cultures. Our emotional responses to food are also fed by the evocative traditional methods used to create them. Cured meats, yeasted breads and cultured cheeses involve carefully controlled microbial monoculture and significant amounts of chemistry, yet the culinary storytelling around artisanal foods is markedly different to the biotechnology-produced cultivated meat.
Modern factories for cured meats, cheese, and bread are now of course mainly stainless-steel clean rooms, but this is probably not the image that consumers associate with a product, and is certainly not evident in the heritage-centred branding of most commercial producers. With a growing rejection of mass-produced, ultra-processed food and the migration of middle-class shoppers to the ‘slow food’ movement, there is an opportunity for cultivated meat to embrace shifting consumer attitudes and represent cultivated meat scientists as artisans.
Direct domestic production of cultivated meat may also be possible in the near future. Could involving the consumer as central to the production process make cultivated meat as emotionally appealing as other home-grown produce?
‘…large laboratories in every city had produced synthetic food and meats, grown in large test tubes. The method was adequate in every way to the needs of the populace, but the manner of distribution was still antiquated. Hubler perfected a small but complete production laboratory, not much larger than the electric refrigerators of the past century. His product in its preparation was entirely automatic and practically foolproof. It would generate, day by day, and year by year, a complete and attractive food supply for a family of two. It not only created the food, but there was an auxiliary machine which prepared it for the table in any form desired by the consumer. All that was necessary was the selection of one of the twenty-five menus and the pressing of the proper buttons.’
Unto us a Child is Born (1933) by David H. Kelle
Collaborative projects between scientists and designers are helping to navigate the cultural landscape of novel foods. These interdisciplinary projects provide both groups the opportunity to approach their research from a very different perspective.
For example, the ‘Acre cure’ design project explores a conceptual product set 10–15 years in the future, imagining how lab-grown meat might be introduced and accepted in our daily lives. Through design, branding, and cultural familiarity, the project aims to normalise lab-grown meat as part of everyday life (Tom Darwin, University of Northumbria). The concept has similarities with the domestic ‘meat makers’ in the Terra Ignota quartet by Ada Palmer (2016-21) which grow 3D printed meat from stored genetic patterns fed by nutrient pouches purchased by the consumer. The overall process is described as something like a bread maker appliance, requiring several hours (although more realistically days) to grow the food.
In some instances then it seems that cultivated meat can be acceptable if it is a product that can be nurtured, personalised, and perhaps even be personified. Our agrarian heritage has led us to embrace domestication and husbandry to the point that we anthropomorphise farmyard animals and name our sourdough starters. In The End of the Line by James Schmitz (1951) the three biologists in the crew tend to Albert II, ‘as close a thing to a self-restoring six-foot sirloin steak as ever had been developed’. Albert II is personified and carefully nurtured. ‘He’ is seemingly appreciated by the crew who recognise the nutritive value but accept the limitations as an unoriginal staple ingredient by this point in their lives, but potentially improved with local accompaniments. Despite the 1951 publication date, the depiction of cultivated meat personified as Albert II is strikingly similar to our current biomanufacturing processes.
‘Chemical balances, temperatures, radiations, flows of stimulant, and nutritive currents—all had to be just so; and his notions of what was just so were subject to change without notice. If they weren’t catered to regardless, he languished and within the week perversely died. …At Cusat’s suggestion, [they] trimmed Albert around the edges. Finding himself growing lighter, he suddenly began to absorb nourishment again at a very satisfactory rate.
“That did it, I guess,” Cusat said, pleased. He glanced at the small pile of filets they’d sliced off. “Might as well have a barbecue now.”’
–The End of the Line (1951) by James Schmitz
Conclusions: Food of the Future
The progress of cultivated meat from proof of concept in 2013 to commercial reality in 2025 has been rapid, fuelled by the desire for a sustainable global protein revolution. Adapting pre-existing biomedical technology has enabled this nascent industry to rapidly bootstrap itself to Minimal Viable Product stage, but it is clear that whole new areas of science and engineering need to be created to realise the true authentic vision of cultivated meat.
What these technologies will look like and the food formats they will produce is still unclear, yet it is evident that storytelling will be equally crucial in their gaining widespread consumer acceptance. Throughout the examples used in this article in may be observed that embedding the cultivation of meat at the centre of the story correlates with a more positive representation. The nurturing of the cultivated meat by characters in the story is reminiscent of the bond between nomadic herders and their livestock – a mutual (if imbalanced) life-sustaining partnership.
Humans are a farming species. We are often happiest when actively involved with cultivating our own food and caring for the animals that give us sustenance. This central human desire to nurture life perhaps provides a useful lens for exploring how science and fiction can come together to navigate the growing impact of cultivated meat.
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James Henstock is Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom. His research involves creating lab-grown tissues for research in regenerative medicine. Between 2021-2023 he was also senior scientist at cultivated meat company Vow in Australia. James also works with the European Space Agency to design the in-flight bioscience equipment needed to enable crewed exploration of the solar system.
I had a run-off-my-feet day, but I love the newly revealed cover for Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and shortly forthcoming from Psychopomp, in whose liminal mosaic is reprinted my queer, maritime, ice-dreaming story "Twice Every Day Returning." I am looking forward to that table of contents for myself. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of isis: British Airways' "May We Haveth One's Attention" (2024) may be the most charming safety video I have seen since the legendary "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012). My only excuse for missing it last year is that I can't remember sleeping that month.
4. I discovered the inimitably named Blackbeard's Tea Party some years ago with the furious drumbeat of their "Ford o' Kabul River" and then almost immediately lost track of them again, but as they seem to have come out since with the whaling EP Leviathan! (2018) and the nightmare siren song of "Mother Carey," we're still good. Since they closed their first album with "Chicken on a Raft," I am delighted that their recorded repertoire now also includes "Roll and Go."
5. I meant last week to link the Divine Comedy's "Invisible Thread" (2025), especially since it was my father who found it after I had sent him another song from the same album.
Her memory for a blessing, Darleane Hoffman who studied transuranic elements and still got to die at ninety-eight. She was not unstable.
What's on the shield? Barking and Dagenham: two keys on a sword; two croziers on a lily; well smack in full sail; cogwheel Barnet: paschal lamb carrying cross standard; two roses; Saxon crown Bexley: wavy stripes; oak tree, cogwheel Brent: cross-topped orb; two swords; two seaxes Bromley: cinquefoil; 15 acorns Camden: mitre; three shells City of London: sword Croydon: cross flory; two swords; two keys Ealing: three Saxon crowns; oak tree on grassy mount Enfield: enfield; wavy bars Greenwich: cannon barrel; lion's face; two hour glasses; two stars Hackney: Maltese cross; two oak trees; three bells Hammersmith and Fulham: two hammers on a horseshoe; two swords on a mitre Haringey: eight lightning rays Harrow: flaming torch; organ stop; quill pen; wooded mount Havering: ruby ring Hillingdon: four wreaths; eagle clutching fleur-de-lis and cogwheel Hounslow: two wings; sword; wavy lines; rampant lion Islington: two ringlets; crescent; open book on Maltese cross Kensington and Chelsea: three crowns; mitre Kingston upon Thames: three salmon Lambeth: cross; two stars; mitre on crozier; 15 gold roundels Lewisham: two crowned lions; sailing ship Merton: eagle; two keys on a sword; lion; Harrington knot Newham: sailing ship; crozier; two hammers Redbridge: four leopards' faces; three martlets; oak tree with acorns Richmond upon Thames: chained portcullis; eight fleurs-de-Lys Southwark: sailing ship; red rose; four cinquefoils; wellhead Sutton: two keys on two discs; two oak sprigs; biplane aeroplane in flight; rising Sun Tower Hamlets: fire tongs; mulberry sprig; weaver's shuttle; sailing boat Waltham Forest: three oak trees; crown; stag's head Wandsworth: teardrops Westminster: two roses; five martlets; cross flory; two wolves' heads; Madonna and child
22 objects in borough crests
Curfew tower of Barking Abbey, two-bladed airscrew, white horse of Kent, elephant, beech leaves, anchor, St Augustine's churchtower, Viking ship, cogwheel, domed gateway with bull's head, talbot with posthorn, water-bougets, broom, half a wheatsheaf, two dolphins, sprigs of lavender, chough, swan with a mouthful of roses, popinjay, the White Tower, dragonheaded boat, portcullis
32 mottos Service: To serve the people, We serve, We serve, We govern by serving, Through difficulties serve God in faith, United to serve, Unity accomplishes service Unity: What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity, Fellowship is life, Not for self but for all Progress: Progress with unity, In unity progress, Forward, Forward together, Progress with humanity, Let us go forward together, Progress with the people Judgement: By the grace of God let us be judged by our deeds, Justice is our tower, Let us be judged by our actions, Let us be regarded according to our conduct Strength: Boldly and rightly, By industry ever stronger, Stand fast in honour and strength Welfare: The wellbeing of the people is the highest law, The welfare of the people is the most important consideration Piety: Lord guide us, From God and the King, O Lord watch over the city Aspiration: Let us strive for perfection, From great things to greater Freedom: Liberty motto-less: Kingston-upon-Thames
LEGO Ideas has been leaning heavily into the 80s this year with 21361 Gremlins: Gizmo, and the upcoming The Goonies set, and it’s not hard to see why. The 80s are to some, the pinnacle of pop culture so it’s not surprising that LEGO is keen to mine it for sets and ideas, which has […]
And are there any circumstances where a mount can be done without a
pre-existing mount point (i.e. a mount point appears out of thin air)?
I think there is one answer for why this is a good idea in general
and otherwise complex to do, although you can argue about it, and
then a second historical answer based on how mount points were
initially implemented.
The general problem is directory listings. We obviously want and
need mount points to appear in readdir() results, but in the kernel,
directory listings are historically the responsibility of filesystems
and are generated and returned in pieces on the fly (which is clearly
necessary if you have a giant directory; the kernel doesn't read
the entire thing into memory and then start giving your program
slices out of it as you ask). If mount points never appear in the
underlying directory, then they must be inserted at some point in
this process. If mount points can sometimes exist and sometimes
not, it's worse; you need to somehow keep track of which ones
actually exist and then add the ones that don't at the end of the
directory listing. The simplest way to make sure that mount points
always exist in directory listings is to require them to have an
existence in the underlying filesystem.
The historical answer is that in early versions of Unix, filesystems
were actually mounted on top of inodes, not directories (or filesystem
objects). When you passed a (directory) path to the mount(2) system
call, all it was used for was getting the corresponding inode, which
was then flagged as '(this) inode is mounted on' and linked (sort
of) to the new mounted filesystem on top of it. All of the things
that dealt with mount points and mounted filesystem did so by inode
and inode number, with no further use of the paths and the root
inode of the mounted filesystem being quietly substituted for the
mounted-on inode. All of the mechanics of this needed the inode and
directory entry for the name to actually exist (and V7 required the
name to be a directory).
I don't think modern kernels (Linux or otherwise) still use this
approach to handling mounts, but I believe it lingered on for quite
a while. And it's a sufficiently obvious and attractive implementation
choice that early versions of Linux also used it (see the Linux
0.96c version of iget() in fs/inode.c).
Sidebar: The details of how mounts worked in V7
When you passed a path to the mount(2) system call (called 'smount()'
in sys/sys3.c), it
used the name to get the inode and then set the IMOUNT flag from
sys/h/inode.h
on it (and put the mount details in a fixed size array of mounts,
which wasn't very big). When
iget() in sys/iget.c was
fetching inodes for you and you'd asked for an IMOUNT inode, it
gave you the root inode of the filesystem instead, which worked in
cooperation with name lookup in a directory (the name lookup in the
directory would find the underlying inode number, and then iget()
would turn it into the mounted filesystem's root inode). This gave
Research Unix a simple, low code approach to finding and checking
for mount points, at the cost of pinning a few more inodes into
memory (not necessarily a small thing when even a big V7 system
only had at most 200 inodes in memory at once, but then a big V7
system was limited to 8 mounts, see h/param.h).
While some ideas get shelved entirely, some ideas are merely on the back burner for a while before becoming fully realized ideas and narratives. Such was the case for author J. R. Blanes, who kept returning to the idea that ended up becoming his newest novel, Portrait of Decay. Follow along to see how a friend inspired Blanes to have this idea in the first place.
J. R. BLANES:
A friend once asked me, “If you couldn’t create, what would you do?” Since I’ve been a creator all my life—writing stories, playing music, and any number of other creative endeavors—I’d never considered what would happen if that was taken from me. My entire identity, my life even, is intrinsically tied to my imagination. Without the ability to create, I wouldn’t be the same person. I don’t know who I would be. For all I know, I might not exist.
Now, I think what my friend was really asking was what I’d do for a career if I couldn’t create, but that first interpretation of his question stuck in my head. I was struggling with my identity as a writer at the time. I’d spent years writing literary fiction with increasingly less satisfaction and very little success. Frustrated, I returned to my roots and my first love: horror. I’d grown up reading the likes of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe before graduating to Stephen King and Clive Barker (my biggest influence). Even after I began writing horror again, I wasn’t sure what kind of horror writer I wanted to be. I wrote some short stories—a few published, many others thrown into the trunk to rot—and hoped that one day soon I’d find my voice.
Portraits of Decay started as a short story about a young woman who travels to see a swamp witch to buy a poison that will trap her cheating boyfriend under her control. As far as story plots go, it was very thin, which was why I shelved it for a while for other projects. Yet I kept coming back to it, knowing there was something there. I just didn’t know what. I really wanted to write about New Orleans and the effect the city had on me during the years it was a home away from home while I worked for a private passenger train company out of Chicago. I yearned to invoke its culture, its traditions, and its folklore through the lens of my imagination. Still, all I had was a somewhat cliché revenge tale. I knew there needed to be more.
My friend’s question sparked a conflagration: What if I explored what happened to an artist when he no longer had the ability to create—as he slowly lost his identity (or soul, if you will) while withering into nothing? I imagined what emotions I’d feel if I was trapped with the ideas, thoughts, and anxieties in my head. The dark path I might take with no outlet to express these pieces of myself. A path that would surely lead to depression, anger, and even madness. While contemplating such an existence, I endured extreme panic attacks and bouts of intense fear. It’s with these intense emotions that I painted the main character of Portraits of Decay, Jefferson Fontenot, as he suffers at the hands of his girlfriend Gemma Landry after she doses him with a concoction from swamp witch Mirlande St. Pierre.
To ground these themes of obsession and control, I turned to another form of art well-remembered from my time in New Orleans. I remembered checking out the galleries around Royal Street, the Bywater, and Faubourg Marigny: The art I witnessed captured the vibrant atmosphere, multiculturalism, and colorful landscape of NOLA. It also captured the dark lore that ran through its streets and floated along the swamps of the bayou. Writing from the artists’ point of view provided the narrative with a visual aspect to the loss of identity. My descriptions of the emotions and struggles my characters move through in the course of the novel are framed through the lens of art. To make this world as visceral and instinctive as brushstrokes on canvas, I spent many hours researching the art world—talking with artists, visiting galleries, and working with my editor who is a painter herself.
What would I do if I couldn’t create? My novel Portraits of Decay is the closest I can come to an answer. In writing this book, I found my voice as a writer amidst the terror of its loss.
Our good friends the Lowthers visited a couple of nights ago, and I wanted to make curries. I asked them ahead of time what their favourites were so I could have a stab at making them (as well as the dhansak that’s my favourite and the korma that is Fiona’s). They are not at all authentic, but they came out well enough that our friends asked for the recipes. So here they are.
Last night’s curries. From top to bottom: chicken bhuna, chicken dhansak, pilau rice, chicken korma, chicken and mushroom balti.
All these curries start from a base of onion puree. The day before, I peeled and thinly sliced six onions, fried them gently in plenty oil until they mulched down, then pureed them in a blender and returned them to cook through, reducing and intensifying. You can do this well in advance in batches, and freeze it till you need it.
All four curries used chicken. I defrosted a 1 kg bag of cheap chicken breasts from Lidl, then chopped them into pieces, and marinated them overnight in a mixture of spices (salt, freshly ground black pepper, ground ginger, cumin, coriander, paprika and turmeric), lemon juice, and a small amount of natural yoghurt. This, too, I did the day before, to allow plenty of time for the marinade to do its work.
On the night, I cooked the chicken. I started with plenty of oil in a pan. When it was good and hot, I added cumin seeds; after a minute or so, finely chopped ginger root; after another minute or two, finely chopped garlic. Then just before the garlic started to burn, I added in the chicken, turned it well to mix in the cumin/ginger/garlic, and left it to cook gently with a lid on.
Meanhwhile, I fried some onions in big chunks. I also cooked some lentils for the dhansak — green lentils simmered for a while in chicken stock with whole peppercorns, then when they’d started to soften, I added red lentils and kept simmering till they were all cooked.
Once the chicken was cooked, I removed it with a slotted spoon, keeping all the juices and oils that had come off it, and topping the liquid up with more oil. To this, I added plenty more spices (the same ones I listed above), enough to make a thick paste with the liquid, and cooked it off for a while, before adding in the onion puree from the previous night and bringing it all to a simmer. Separately, I finely chopped a tin of tomatoes.
This is the point where I split the base into the four curries. They each got a more or less equal portion of the chicken and of the base curry sauce. Then I did different things to each of the four.
The dhansak got the cooked lentils, some lemon juice, and some thinly sliced ginger rot.
The korma got a lot of natural yoghurt and some flaked almonds.
The bhuna got half the tomatoes plus some concentrated tomato puree, the cooked onions, a teaspoon of finely chopped lime pickle, and plenty of coriander leaf. (I could also have given it a kick of chili at this point, but I passed.)
The balti got the other half of the tomatoes, some sliced mushrooms, and some ground coriander. (What makes it a balti rather than a curry? The truth is, they are pretty much the same thing. Don’t @ me.)
And that’s pretty much it. From there, it’s a matter of keeping them warm as they cook through, tending to their textures (adding a bit of water when necessary), and synchronizing with the rice.
To serve, I decanted each curry into a balti dish, and garnished: the dhansak with more fine slices of ginger, the korma with more flaked almonds, and the other two with more coriander leaf.
Oh, and the rice: I washed some basmati rice three times to remove starch, added an equal volume of water, plus some salt, fennel seeds, star anise and cardomom pods. I cooked it in a rice cooker. When it had finished cooking, about 20 minutes before I wanted to serve, I sprinkled a little red and a little yellow food coloring over the surface and left it. After 20 minutes, I mixed all the rice up together, spreading the coloured grains throughout.
Ahoy there, adventure gamers! monkeyisland is a community for the beloved classic game series Monkey Island, featuring the comedic swashbuckling adventures of the improbably-named Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate™. Anything about Monkey Island is fair game: your own fanworks (art, fic, videos, games, music, cosplay, memes/silliness, whatever), recs of others' fanworks, livestreams/let's-plays, discussions, news and articles, tips for messing about in the game resources or scripting, requests for hints, screenshots, all that good stuff. If Monkey Island is your jamrum rum and jam (it's an old pirate favorite, everybody knows that), then come on over and have a grog.
This is a rather unexpected article that suggests that some mRNA vaccines can potentiate the actions of some immune-checkpoint therapies used in oncology. Specifically, the authors find that the mRNA coronavirus vaccines significantly increased overall survival rates in those patients who were getting anti-PD-1 antibodies as immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy (!)
In a welcome reverse of the usual way we end up studying cancer therapies, this effect could be replicated in mice. There was a strong synergistic effect of mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccination and anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody treatment in mouse cancer models, well beyond what either could achieve on their own. And this seems to be driven through Type 1 interferon pathways (which may remind you of the cancer vaccine work that I blogged about here the other day).
It wasn’t the spike-protein mRNA that did this specifically - the authors replaced that with mRNA against a cytomegalovirus antigen and this vaccination had the same effect. So it’s the immune-potentiating effect of the mRNA dose itself that’s helping, not anything to do with the specific antigen that’s it’s aimed at. The authors went to some trouble to try to figure out the mechanism behind this. They rigorously purified out any remaining double-stranded RNA that might have been in the vaccine doses, but that had no effect. On the other hand, changing the lipid nanoparticle formulation did wipe out the benefits - coupling that with other literature reports, they hypothesize that the LNPs form higher-molecular-weight secondary RNA structures that activate some of the innate immune receptors (like MDA5) that are watching for double-stranded RNA as a sign of viral infection.
They were able to demonstrate strong immune activation in the mice after these doses through multiple interferon-driven pathways, but (interestingly) could only partially replicate it by dosing them with interferon-alpha itself. Both innate and adaptive immune responses kicked into gear. So there’s a lot going on in there, and it’s safe to assume that we don’t know the whole story yet, but what seems clear is that the RNA-LNP vaccination primes the immune system for activation, presentation, and recognition of many tumor-associated antigen proteins, and that these effects are strongly potentiated if you’re simultaneously being treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors like the anti-PD1 monoclonal antibodies.
Another interesting effect was that in human volunteers the cytokine response to the vaccines was stronger with the Moderna shot (mRNA-1273) than it was with the Pfizer-BioNTech one (BNT162b2), and this appears to be a sheer effect of the former vaccine having more total mRNA in it (!) The mRNA vaccines seem to amplify tumor PD-L1 across a wide range of tumor types, and this effect even seems to extend to immunologically “cold” tumors that would otherwise have been considered not to be responding to treatment.
This is really, really good news, and it immediately suggests that patients who are eligible for immune-checkpoint therapy (things like Keytruda, Opdivo, Tecentriq, Bavencio, Imfinzi, etc.) should be dosed with some sort of LNP-mRNA shot right along with it. And it also suggests that there are patients who might not be thought to benefit from such ICI treatment who should be given a crack at it with this protocol, since the enhancement seems so robust. There’s obviously a lot more to be worked out as far as doses of mRNA, timing, formulations, tumor types and all sorts of other factors, but the survival curves in this paper argue against waiting for patients who are being treated right now. The benefits seem to be very real, and the risks - particularly compared to the underlying cancers - seem to be very low. Go for it!
I made this point the other day, and I want to make it again, because it cannot be overemphasized: there is still so much that we don’t know about immunology. We literally don’t know when something great like this will pop up, so we have to keep banging away in these areas and discovering as we go along. And while I’m at it, there is another thing that cannot be overemphasized: if you are spreading doubts and fears about vaccines and about mRNA research, you are killing people who could benefit. Killing them by not protecting them from the diseases being vaccinated against. Killing them by making them suspicious of advances in medical science in general. Killing them by driving them away from things like this new work that could fight completely unrelated diseases like cancer.
That’s you, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That’s you, Jay Bhattacharya. That’s you, Marty Makary. And all the rest of your minions and gofers and toadies. You have chosen the side of death and human suffering, and in a better world than this one you would be disgraced and shunned for it.
From a record-breaking 60,636 submissions, the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition (previously) has selected 100 images that capture the breadth of life on Earth. The 61st annual contest, helmed by Natural History Museum, London, features a diverse array of habitats, from a brown hyena skulking through an abandoned Namibian diamond mine to an orb weaver spider illuminated by the kaleidoscopic glow of headlights. Together, the photos present a timely consideration of our impact on the environment, along with an astounding glimpse at the planet’s many gems.
As usual, you can find a fraction of the winning images below, but all are available for viewing on the museum’s website or in person through July 12, 2026. Photographers can also submit their works for the 2026 competition through December 4.
Wim van den Heever, “Ghost Town Visitor”Simone Baumeister, “Caught in the Headlights”Quentin Martinez, “Frolicking Frogs”Georgina Steytler, “Mad Hatterpillar”Chien Lee, “Deadly Allure”Luca Lorenz, “Meet the Neighbours”Alexey Kharitonov, “Autumn Icon”Andrea Dominizi, “After the Destruction”Javier Aznar González de Rueda, “Rattled”Luca Lorenz, “Dawn Watch”
The city, and indeed the planet, have a strange history and an oddly mixed economy.
A very solid and enjoyable Bernice Summerfield novel by Terrance Dicks, bringing her and Chris Cwej to a large city called, er, Megacity, where a huge corporate crime scheme called The Project is bubbling under the surface, and parts of the story are told in the first person by an intellectually enhanced Ogron who is a private eye. It’s not trying to be deep, it’s just trying to be fun, and it succeeds. You can get Mean Streets here (at a price).
That takes me to the end of the Bernice Summerfield novels that I read ten years ago and failed to blog at the time. I’ll jump now to the unblogged Eighth Doctor novels, starting with Time Zero by Justin Richards.
The August 2023 Nightmares Underneath Bundle featuring The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Chthonstone Games.
The Smith chart from electrical engineering is the image of a Cartesian grid under the function
f(z) = (z − 1)/(z + 1).
More specifically, it’s the image of a grid in the right half-plane.
This post will derive the basic mathematical properties of this graph but will not go into the applications. Said another way, I’ll explain how to make a Smith chart, not how to use one.
We will use z to denote points in the right half-plane and w to denote the image of these points under f. We will speak of lines in the z plane and the circles they correspond to in the w plane.
Möbius transformations
Our function f is a special case of a Möbius transformation. There is a theorem that says Möbius transformation map generalized circles to generalized circles. Here a generalized circle means a circle or a line; you can think of a line as a circle with infinite radius. We’re going to get a lot of mileage out of that theorem.
Image of the imaginary axis
The function f maps the imaginary axis in the z plane to the unit circle in the w plane. We can prove this using the theorem above. The imaginary axis is a line, so it’s image is either a line or a circle. We can take three points on the imaginary axis in the z plane and see where they go.
When we pick z equal to 0, i, and −i from the imaginary axis we get w values of −1, i, and −i. These three w values do not line on a line, so the image of the imaginary axis must be a circle. Furthermore, three points uniquely determine a circle, so the image of the imaginary axis is the circle containing −1, i, and −i, i.e. the unit circle.
Image of the right half-plane
The imaginary axis is the boundary of the right half-plane. Since it is mapped to the unit circle, the right half-plane is either mapped to the interior of the unit circle or the exterior of the unit circle. The point z = 1 goes to w = 0, and so the right half-plane is mapped inside the unit circle.
Images of vertical lines
Let’s think about what happens to vertical lines in the z plane, lines with constant positive real part. The images of these lines in the w plane must be either lines or circles. And since the right-half plane gets mapped inside the unit circle, these lines must get mapped to circles.
We can say a little more. All lines contain the point ∞, and f(∞) = 1, so the image of every vertical line in the z plane is a circle in the w plane, inside the unit circle and tangent to the unit circle at w = 1. (Tossing around ∞ is a bit informal, but it’s easy to make rigorous.)
The vertical lines in the z plane
map to tangent circles in the w plane.
Images of horizontal lines
Next, let’s think about horizontal lines in the z plane, lines with constant imaginary part. The image of these lines is either a line or a circle. Which is it? The image of a line is a line if it contains ∞, otherwise it’s a circle. Now f(z) = ∞ if and only if z = −1, and so the image of the real axis is a line, but the image of every other horizontal line is a circle.
Since f(∞) = 1, the image of every horizontal line passes through 1, just as the images of all the vertical lines passes through 1.
Since horizontal lines extend past the right half-plane, the image circles extend past the unit circle. The part of the line with positive real part gets mapped inside the unit circle, and the part of the line with negative real part gets mapped outside the unit circle. In particular, the image of the positive real axis is the interval [−1, 1].
Möbius transformations are conformal maps, and so they preserve angles of intersection. Since horizontal lines are perpendicular to vertical lines, the circles that are the images of the horizontal lines meet the circles that are the images of vertical lines at right angles.
The horizontal rays in the z plane
become partial circles in the w plane.
If we were to look at horizontal lines rather than rays, i.e. if we extended the lines into the left half-plane, the images in the w plane would be full circles.
Now let’s put our images together. The grid
in the z plane becomes the following in the w plane.
An evenly spaced grid in the z plane becomes a very unevenly spaced graph in the w plane. Things are crowded on the right hand side and sparse on the left. A useable Smith chart needs to be roughly evenly filled in, which means it has to be the image of an unevenly filled in grid in the z plane. For example, you’d need more vertical lines in the z plane with small real values than with large real values.
A Random Walk through the Goblin Library" by Chris Willrich [Beneath Ceaseless Skies]. Superlative fantasy + math short story. I am excited to FINALLY be able to shout about this now that it's published - I had the privilege of reading this in draft and I love it to pieces. :3
I woke up this morning wondering, "Why am I so cold?" I have the bed's heating mattress set on high, even though the temperature outside is only at freezing (well, 2C/35F anyway), but I'm still cold.
The cat demanded food, so I went downstairs to feed her. I checked the house thermostat. Ah! The batteries on the thermostat were drained, so the furnace was not running at all. I put the batteries in the recharger, but I have no AAA-sized batteries right now that are charged. It will be hours before I can get even a temporary respite from the cold.
I went back upstairs and checked the thermometer (the CO2 meter) by my bedside. It's 12C/54F in my bedroom. That's why I'm so cold this morning. Problem identified, and the fix is on the way.
P.S. The cat finished her meal, came back upstairs, and clawed her way under the sheets in my bed. I turned the heating mattress back on for her. I'm at my computer, wrapped in a thick bath robe for warmth.
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.
Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.
As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.
45 Squared 37) CLEAVER SQUARE, SE11
Borough of Lambeth, 110m×40m
London's first garden squares date back to the 17th century but it took until 1789 before the first appeared south of the river. It all kicked off when Mary Cleaver sold her field alongside the Clapham turnpike to the landlord of the Horns Tavern, who then laid out and developed the square one side at a time. The meadow had been called White Bear Field, hence The White Bear pub just round the corner which is of a similar vintage. The new development was named after two houses called Princes Place, between which lay the access point off Kennington Park Road, hence it became Princes Square. Only in 1937 was the name changed to Cleaver Square to reflect the original owner of the land. Thus we now find an oblong square within the Kennington Triangle not far from The Oval.
As squares go it's really nice, as befits a rim of Georgian terraces surrounding a central garden. I say garden but it's more a very large area of tarmac flanked by plane trees, ideal if you ever need a location for a multi-player boules tournament. The central space was originally used for grazing (17th century), then a formal garden with an outer path (18th century), then a nursery with greenhouses (19th century). Plans build to rows of garages (20th century) were thwarted by taking the plot into council control, although it soon ended up somewhat unloved and only following a lottery grant was it prettified and benched (almost 21st century). I imagine it's fairly featureless in winter, but the current carpet of orange leaves makes taking a seat well worthwhile.
A majority of the 60 houses are listed, as befits smart brick terraces with sash windows, mansard roofs and elegant arched fanlights. These are doors you could hang a wreath on and conjure up a Christmas card, as indeed I did one year. There are also just enough doors that there's always one opening or closing somewhere, like a middle class farce, although a lot of this turns out to be builders and plasterers refitting a kitchen or scoping out a basement. Watch for long enough and a mummy will emerge with a carseat while a natty couple unload groceries from the boot of their custard yellow jeep. Parking spaces have been at a premium ever since that catastrophic garages decision in 1927.
There are only two non-residential intrusions. One is the City & Guilds of London Art School which is housed in purpose-built Victorian studios and 1930s warehouse space facing Kennington Park Road. The student entrance is however up Cleaver Square, the connecting road now only passable by bike, where you may find blokes in berets vaping outside a modern atrium behind a snazzy black gate. The other non-house is The Prince of Wales, part of the same independent pub chain as the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, which has graced a corner plot since 1901. Outside it's all hanging baskets and prized tables, while inside has a provincial vibe with pouting portraits flouncing across every wall. I don't know if the landlord always angles the swiper downwards so you can't see how much you're paying but no way was the cider worth that much.
After some of the drab flatpack squares I've been to in this series it's a pleasure to visit one with a proper history and a splash of class. It's so sophisticated an award-winning author has even written a novel about it - Last Days in Cleaver Square - in which a retired poet is haunted by the ghost of a Spanish dictator. That's not the book that won the award, obviously. Best of all the square boasts a former Prime Minister amongst its former residents, and maybe not one you'd expect. It is in fact John Major who bought a house here a couple of months after losing the 1997 General Election, not just because it's peak Kennington but mainly because it's less than ten minutes walk from The Oval. He's no longer here, he majors in his big house in Huntingdon, but Cleaver Square still definitely cuts it.
We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.
The Olympic Games took place 13 years ago and yet there are still no flats on any Olympic land south of the mainline railway. There ought to be an entire suburb called Pudding Mill around the DLR station, indeed the upcoming neighbourhood was gifted its new name as long ago as 2011. But the only significant building here is the temporary Abba Arena and the only housing to go up is outside the original Olympic Park footprint.
The latest snail's-pace nudge in the planning process is the upcoming emergence of a reserved matters planning application for the Bridgewater Triangle, a six acre wedge between the Greenway, the railway and the City Mill River. A new bridge arrived in August to better connect the site to Warton Road and a burst of embankment remodelling caused the closure of a footpath last October. But everything else on the triangle remains hardstanding, bar the 50 Pudding Mill allotments relocated here in 2016 as part of an Olympic trade-off. Alas the plans for infilling the empty bit have just got taller.
The first rumblings came in 2021 when developers proposed building 575 homes in the Bridgewater Triangle, three of them 11 storeys tall. "You'll block out our sunlight" said the allotment holders, and both sides drew maps to try to prove the other side was wrong. You may remember I blogged about it at the time. It's now 2025 and the developers are back with an updated masterplan outlined in a wodge of "pre-planning content" released this week, and it's not good news for the vegetables.
The new proposals squeeze in an extra 133 homes and address a recent requirement for tall buildings to have two staircases rather than one. They also, somewhat unexpectedly, increase the height of the three tallest buildings. The two furthest away from the allotments rise to 15 storeys and 18 storeys respectively, but the block closest to the railway shoots up to 21 storeys. That's almost double its previous height, and what's more it's the tower most likely to shade the sun in the early afternoon.
The official date for checking sunlight for planning purposes is March 21st, which is what the following diagram indicates.
The yellow shading on the left represents over 7 hours of direct sunlight at the equinox and the purple top right represents less than two. Later in the summer the sun is higher and the shadowing less, but you really don't want to be the unlucky plotholder in the corner whose growing season is stunted by the new estate. The previous planning application proposed shifting six plots to a brighter strip by the river and relocating community storage into the dimmer section, but we haven't yet seen precise mitigation for the updated scheme.
If you're interested there's a consultation website here.
Also a detailed 12 page 'pre-planning update' document.
Also a 'have your say' feedback form here.
Also a drop-in session at the Mirror Works on Marshgate Lane tomorrow from noon-3pm, see poster here.
Feel free to tell the developers what you think.
In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).
In high school Calvin Joyner (Kevin Hart) is the most popular boy in class. By contrast Robbie Weirdicht (Dwayne Johnson) is an overweight bullied teen who gets stripped naked and thrown in front of his classmates. Jumping forward 20 years and Calvin is a safely married accountant and Robbie – now using the name Bob Stone – is a muscle-bound secret agent working for the CIA.
The things we will watch when bored and on an aeroplane. There’s a problem with mainstream American movie comedies. The majority are, in my opinion, fairly poor and not particularly funny. To be fair that’s a problem with almost all cinema, but in regards to this country and this genre it seems more pronounced than most. It’s often difficult to tell which ones will be the diamonds in the rough, however, and eventually you have to wind up watching them to find out.
Central Intelligence has promise. Dwayne Johnson has a huge screen presence and a demonstrated ability to be funny on-screen, and the commercial success of Central Intelligence suggested that it might exploit his talents well and be rather funny. Unfortunately the film falls very flat. The jokes feel tired and it struggles to make an impact. What is worse, it is plagiarising – intentionally or more likely unintentionally – someone else’s film.
Back in 2010 James Mangold directed Knight & Day, an action-comedy starring Tom Cruise as a secret agent who may or may not be a maniac gone rogue and Cameron Diaz as a safe, boring everyday person constantly kidnapped by him and thrown into mortal danger. Central Intelligence may cut out the romantic elements of Mangold’s film, but broadly speaking it’s the same damned movie. Knight & Day was rough and idiosyncratic, but despite its flaws I found it pretty enjoyable. Central Intelligence just feels as if the life has been sucked out of it.
I get the feeling that the filmmakers – including director Rawson Marshall Thurber (We’re the Millers) – know that their film is not working, because so much effort is spent laying joke elements over everything. Bob Stone is not just a bright, overly friendly CIA agent. He loves unicorns and wears them on his t-shirt. He walks around with a fanny pack around his waist. In developing the character everybody has simply tried a little too hard. Small supporting appearances are made by actors like Aaron Paul, Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, as if their presence will help to prop up the movie. Dwayne Johnson does his best, but the best he can do is be an entertaining actor in a bad movie. Kevin Hart is a solid enough performer, but he is not given much with which to work. He too is better in other films.
Like many comedies of the last decade or two, Central Intelligence plays outtakes and bloopers over the closing credits. It is always a warning sign: if your outtakes are funnier than your actual jokes, your comedy is in big trouble.
While I do not know how many machines there are in your fleet, I
wonder whether you do incremental rolling, using a small snapshot for
verification before rolling out to the whole fleet?
This means that progressively rolling out a kernel update (and
rebooting things) to our important, visible core servers requires
multiple people-visible reboots of machines, instead of one big
downtime when everything is rebooted. Generally we feel that repeated
disruptions are much more annoying and disruptive overall to people;
it's better to get the pain of reboot disruptions over all at once.
It's also much easier to explain to people, and we don't have to
annoy them with repeated notifications that yet another subset of
our servers and services will be down for a bit.
(To make an incremental deployment more painful for us, these will
normally have to be after-hours downtimes, which means that we'll
be repeatedly staying late, perhaps once a week for three or four
weeks as we progressively work through a rollout.)
In addition to the nodes of our SLURM cluster, there are a
number of servers that can be rebooted in the background to some
degree without people noticing much. We will often try the kernel
update out on a few of them in advance, and then update others of
them earlier in the day (or the day before) both as a final check
and to reduce the number of systems we have to cover at the actual
out of hours downtime. But a lot of our servers cannot really be
tested much in advance, such as our fileservers or our web server (which is under
constant load for reasons outside the scope of this entry). We can (and do) update a
test fileserver or a test web server, but neither will see a
production load and it's under production loads that problems are
most likely to surface.
This is a specific example of how the 'cattle' model doesn't fit
all situations. To have a transparent rolling
update that involves reboots (or anything else that's disruptive
on a single machine), you need to be able to transparently move
people off of machines and then back on to them. This is hard to
get in any environment where people have long term usage of specific
machines, where they have login sessions and running compute jobs
and so on, and where you have have non-redundant resources on a
single machine (such as NFS fileservers without transparent
failover from server to server).
Guardian: 它具体有什么功效，我并不了解, but I don't understand what its specific effects are 还有什么想要说的吗, is there anything else you want to say? 镇魂灯始终就藏在特调处的周围, was the Guardian Lantern always hidden around the SID?
In my post last week where I mentioned I had been writing “full-time” for a year and shared my favorite ten pieces from this past year, one commenter asked me about my overall experience with my writing career so far. I was going to reply to all his questions in a comment, but then I thought that it was worth a piece on its own.
Talking about how I’ve felt about my job this past year, how I feel as a writer, what’s different now compared to last year, I honestly have more to say about the whole thing than I realized. So thanks, Mike, for the content inspiration! I hope your questions get answered in the next few paragraphs.
First, more than anything, I’m grateful to be able to do this. I’ve been writing on the blog on and off (and with varied levels of uhhh.. talent) since 2018, and since the beginning I have always felt thankful to have such a fun, cool opportunity as what I like to call “doing whatever I want and writing about it.” It can be a struggle sometimes to come up with content when I’m feeling particularly unmotivated, but overall having the freedom to choose what kind of content I want to create is a huge thing that I’m very happy about it.
I feel so lucky to have a fun, stable, not physically demanding job. It’s a rare breed of job. And I have had other jobs, for what it’s worth, but turns out I like sitting at my laptop a lot more than just about anything else. Wonder where I get that from.
Beyond feeling grateful for the position itself, I also feel grateful to have dedicated readers and commenters. I am consistently amazed and surprised at how many of you comment such nice things, always encouraging me and supporting me. It means a lot! Of course, I love my haters, too, and have a collection of screenshots of many jackass comments before they get malleted, just to laugh at later on down the road. So thanks for being here, y’all, I couldn’t do it without you!
This past year of writing has taught me a lot about myself. Mainly that I’m depressed and sticking to a schedule is very difficult for me. This past year I was supposed to have a pretty solid writing schedule, and be in my “office” (in the church) for a set time to do things like blog posts and other writing endeavors. Well, turns out I don’t feel like doing that a lot of the time, so I didn’t.
I actually heavily slacked and neglected my responsibilities over the past year. There were many times where my dad would specifically ask me to contribute more pieces to the blog whilst he was busy traveling or on tour, and I would say no problem, I can do that. And then I’d only put out one piece that week. I would mean to do more, really I would! But I didn’t. And I did that kind of thing a lot.
I’ll get to it later. I’ll find the time to do it later. I’ll just post tomorrow, instead. It was a lot of that sort of thinking this past year. Turns out that that doesn’t make me feel good about myself or my work. I regret how much I didn’t do. I hope that moving forward, I do more, and most importantly, am more consistent. It’s good for my brain to be more consistent, yet harder to achieve. Plus I want to give y’all consistent content to look forward to!
One thing I was supposed to do this past year on top of doing blog posts, was to write creatively, as well. Guess what I didn’t do even once! That’s right, write anything fictional or personal or anything that wasn’t a blog post. Damn. Better luck this upcoming year, I guess!
My life lacks structure and intentionality and it turns out you need both to be a writer. Damn (again). Turns out I’m a procrastinator. Wonder where I get that issue from.
Anyways, all of this is to say that I’m disappointed in myself this past year and I hope to do better moving forward. And I hope to write creatively. That is my dream, after all. Following in footsteps and whatnot. You get the idea.
Aside from all that, this past year is the first time in my life where when people ask me “what do you do for work?” I say “I’m a writer.” Of course, that always leads to “what do you write?” and then “so do you write for a magazine or a newspaper orr..?” and I have noticed that it always always leads to, “so how do you make money from that?” I understand the curiosity, but I also find it to be a strange question.
I can honestly say I have never asked anyone how they make money from their work. If someone tells me they’re an artist, I don’t ask if that’s salary or hourly, or ask the Tik Tok content creator if that comes with benefits and PTO. I think unless the information is offered willingly, it’s best to leave it alone.
It’s important to note that I’m not ashamed about how much I get paid or in the way that I get paid for this job (and it does in fact come with benefits!), but the issue for me is that it feels like a question that is only asked of those in creative fields, and makes them feel lesser than other jobs. It’s feels demeaning, because it’s not like I’m asking every market analyst I come in contact with how they’re putting bread on the table. Why do I have to disclose my salary for you to take my profession seriously?
I guess it’s just been an interesting experience overall telling others that I’m a writer. I can’t say I really like it. I feel awkward every time I say it. I hope I get past that feeling eventually.
All in all, I obviously love being a writer and being able to share all my experiences, both good and bad, with you all. I hope to branch out in topics and push outside of my comfort zone of mainly just restaurant reviews. It’s just what comes easiest to me, so it’s what I do the most. But I’d like to be more varied moving forward.
I’m looking forward to this next year of writing. I feel like I finally understand myself and my craft better than I ever have before, and I’m glad y’all are on this journey with me. Cheers to the year ahead.
During a month in which hauntings and ghastly cosutmes are a ubiquitous sight, Brandon Morris presents a new body of work that taps into a shared sense of unease. The New York-based artist makes his Paris debut with Tissu Expansé, a collection of five fiberglass and resin gowns that appear as though they’ve come to life.
Constructed in pale blue, the spectral works are part of Morris’ Ghost Dresses, a series that stitches together fashion and sculpture through garments that materialize without a body. Bodices are full, while skirts angle as if they’re moving with an invisible owner. One piece even lunges forward, the arms reaching out with what seems like a kick of the back leg that lifts the hem upward.
Tissu Expansé is more lively than the artist’s earlier collection, which saw hunched shoulders and bent postures suggestive of monstrous occupiers. While similarly haunting, these pieces appear less sinister, arising more as whimsical apparitions than supernatural villains.
Morris’ exhibition is on view through October 30 with Europa. Keep up with his practice on Instagram.
[Image description: Bluesky post by Luke Turner reading "here is a pleasingly anti-fascist animal painted on the Hurricane of gay RAF pilot Ian Gleed", above a picture of Gleed in the cockpit of his plane pointing to the image on its side of a cartoon cat swatting at and destroying a swastika.]
Current East of Eden, by John Steinbeck The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon
Last books finished The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley (did not finish) An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, by Ted Chiang Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Dragon’s Teeth: Tales from North Kosovo, by Ian Bancroft
Next books The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Japan is an island nation rich in timber, from cypress (Hinoki) to cedar (Sugi) to larch (Karamatsu). Its renowned woodworking heritage dates back centuries, taking the form of immaculately carved wooden beams in houses, ornate storage boxes, and revered religious statuary. For some artists working today, this timeless tradition translates perfectly into contemporary expressions.
Hand-hewn from timber, expressive faces and dynamic motifs emerge in the sculptures of Kigaku – Re(a)lize – at FUMA Contemporary Tokyo. Colossal readers may be familiar with the work of Ikuo Inada and Yoshitoshi Kanemaki, and the show also includes recent pieces by Kosuke Ikeshima, Ayako Kita, Yuta Nakazato, and Ryo Matsumoto.
Ayako Kita, “Let Go of Everything” (2024), Japanese cypress and acrylic resin, 33.5 x 20.5 x 14 centimeters
Inada’s recognizable figurative sculptures, for example, feature sleepy people, their faces often obscured by sweatshirts or blankets, as if they are wandering back to bed after a midnight snack. Kanemaki’s characteristically glitchy portraits reveal numerous faces belonging to one personality, and Kita’s bold pieces combine carved wood with clear resin, creating an optical element with dresses one can see right through.
The exhibition furthers a project initiated in 2018 called Kigaku – XYLOLOGY, which highlighted the technique of wood carving and aimed to shine a light on contemporary artists working with the medium. Kigaku – Re(a)lize – is a continuation of this mission, showcasing the work of six Japanese artists creating today.
Alongside pieces made within the past few years, Kigaku – Re(a)lize – includes examples of carved sacred sculptures from the Early Edo period (1603-1690) and the Heian period (794-1185). The exhibition continues through November 1. Find more on the gallery’s website.
Yoshitoshi Kanemaki, “Tiny Caprice” (2025), painted Japanese boxwood, 13.2 x 4.5 x 4.5 centimetersKosuke Ikeshima, “Vanitas” (2025), camphor wood, 29 x 27 x 11.5 centimetersAyako Kita, two views of “Public Self” (2023), Japanese cypress and acrylic resin, 33.5 x 20 x 16 centimetersYuta Nakazato, “Princess’s Whereabouts” (2025), Japanese cypress, 37 x 35 x 60 centimetersRyo Matsumoto, “kyojitsuhiniku, offering, broken skull-shinenshisou, kyojitsuhiniku, offering, mask” (2025), maple and camphor wood, 19 x 15 x 22 centimeters and 16 x 13 x 5 centimetersIkuo Inada, “Some things aren’t ‘whatever'” (2025), camphor wood, 58 x 18.5 x 18 centimeters
The previous post looked at how to generate random points on a sphere, generating spherical coordinates directly. I wanted to include a demonstration that this generates points with the same distribution as the more customary way of generating points on a sphere, and then decided the demonstration should be its own post.
I’ll generate random points in Colorado using both methods and show that both put the same proportion of points in the state, within a margin that we’d expect from random points.
I thought about using Wyoming, because I’ve been there recently, or Kansas, because I’m going there soon. Although Wyoming and Kansas are essentially rectangles, there are minor complications to the coordinates of the corners. But Colorado is very simple: it’s bounded by latitudes 37°N and 41°N and by longitudes 102.05°W and 109.05°W.
Here are the two ways of generating points on a sphere.
from numpy import *
# Random point on unit sphere in spherical coordinates
def random_spherical():
rho = 1
theta = 2*pi*random.random()
phi = arccos(1 - 2*random.random())
return (rho, theta, phi)
# Random point on unit sphere in Cartesian coordinates
def random_cartesian():
v = random.normal(size=3)
return v / linalg.norm(v)
We’ll need to convert Cartesian coordinates to spherical coordinates.
And we’ll need to convert spherical coordinates to latitude and longitude in degrees. Note that latitude is π/2 minus the polar angle.
def spherical_to_lat_long(rho, theta, phi):
lat = rad2deg(pi/2 - phi)
long = rad2deg(theta)
return (lat, long)
And finally, we need a way to test whether a (lat, long) pair is in Colorado.
def in_colorado(lat, long):
return (37 <= lat < 41) and (102.05 <= long <= 109.05)
Now we’ll generate a million random points each way and count how many land in Colorado.
random.seed(20251022)
N = 1_000_000
count = 0
for _ in range(N):
rho, theta, phi = random_spherical()
lat, long = spherical_to_lat_long(rho, theta, phi)
if in_colorado(lat, long):
count += 1
print(count / N)
count = 0
for _ in range(N):
v = random_cartesian()
rho, theta, phi = cartesian_to_spherical(v)
lat, long = spherical_to_lat_long(rho, theta, phi)
if in_colorado(lat, long):
count += 1
print(count / N)
This prints 0.000534 and 0.000536.
Efficiency
Note that this isn’t a very efficient way to generate points in Colorado since only about 5 out of every 10,000 points land in the state. If you wanted to generate points only in Colorado, you could randomly generate latitudes between 37° and 41°N and randomly generate longitudes 102.05° and 109.05°. This might be good enough in practice, depending on the application, but it’s not quite right because Colorado is not a Euclidean rectangle but a spherical rectangle.
A more accurate approach would be to randomly generate longitudes 102.05° and 109.05° as above, but generate latitudes as the arccos of points uniformly generated between cos(37°) and cos(41°).
The topic of generating random points on a unit sphere has come up several times here. The standard method using normal random samples generates points (x, y, z) in Cartesian coordinates.
If you wanted points in spherical coordinates, you could first generate points in Cartesian coordinates, then convert the points to spherical coordinates. But it would seem more natural, and possibly more efficient, to directly generate spherical coordinates (ρ, θ, ϕ). That’s what we’ll do in this post.
Unfortunately there are several conventions for spherical coordinates, as described here, so we should start by saying we’re using the math convention that (ρ, θ, ϕ) means (radius, longitude, polar angle). The polar angle ϕ is 0 at the north pole and π at the south pole.
Generating the first two spherical coordinate components is trivial. On a unit sphere, ρ = 1, and θ we generate uniformly on [0, 2φ]. The polar angle ϕ requires more thought. If we simply generated φ uniformly from [0, π] we’d put too many points near the poles and too few points near the equator.
As I wrote about a few days ago, the x, y, and z coordinates of points on a sphere are uniformly distributed. In particular, the z coordinate is uniformly distributed, and so we need cos ϕ to be uniformly distributed, not ϕ itself. We can accomplish this by generating uniform points from [−1, 1] and taking the inverse cosine.
Here’s Python code summarizing the algorithm for generating random points on a sphere in spherical coordinates.
Every so often I see some politician Gotcha'd with "Can women have penises?" - and the results have always either be flailing or in a very rare case (new Greens leader Zack Polanski) just saying "Yes", in a way which basically hands everything to the interviewer.
And I know that it's really hard to deal with an interviewer who is determined to make you look bad. But it bothers me occasionally that people don't try and explain "But here is my point of view, and where it comes from" - because while saying "Yes" might be very reassuring to people already on your side, it does nothing to persuade others who are just confused by/mildly hostile.
So here, in a simple set of 4 steps is my view.
1) Nobody is choosing to be transgender. It's a difference in brain development. See here. This isn't new, it's the medical view, and has been for many years.
2) Forcing people to live in the gender that they don't identify as is incredibly destructive to their mental health. This is also long well known. The vast majority of attempts to raise boys as girls and vice versa have appalling impacts on people. The poster-boy for this was David Reimer, who suffered a terrible accident as a baby which destroyed his penis (in the 60s), never knew he was born a boy, and was raised a girl (on the advice of a doctor who believes that gender was just cultural conditioning). And it made him *incredibly* unhappy - within weeks of his parents breaking the rules they'd been given and telling him (at age 13) that he had been born a boy he'd changed his name and presentation. Details here.
3) Most transgender people are not publicly out. You might get the impression that trans people are all out activists. But the vast majority aren't. They don't want to be "The person who was born one way and is now another", they want to be the person that they are on the inside. So almost nobody they interact with on a daily basis knows that they are transgender. The ones where "Everyone knows about this transgender person" are the exception, most of them are not public about it. As a friend said "My identity is female and back when I transitioned the advice was to deal and vanish into the big bad women's world."
4) Therefore, as a society, we have a choice between either forcibly outing people whenever they want to use a toilet, get married, throw a ball, or otherwise interact with society, or letting them live in the gender that they are presenting*.
There you go. That's the humane, liberal approach to transgender people. And every time you get hooked into arguments about the definition of the word "woman", you get pulled away from those very simple things: Nobody asked to be born in a body that destroys their mental health. Most people don't want to be public about that having happened to them (because it stops them just living as the gender they are in their brains). So we can either be supportive or we can torture them.
*And that's the approach that the European Court of Human Rights took, in Goodwin vs The United Kingdom in 2001. They balanced the right of someone to not have to out themselves, against the the negative consequences thereof. And found that the proven negative consequences were basically nonexistent. Which is what then led to Labour being forced to pass the Gender Recognition Act. The rights coming from that, to live in the gender that you choose, are what is currently under attack.
If, like me, you enjoy 'The Importance of being Earnest' (and even possibly if you don't), this delightful little story by Kalypso will surely please you as much as it pleased me.
The latest Superloop route has been announced and is up for consultation. The SL15 will run between Clapham Junction and Eltham - a proper orbital for once - with the intention that buses start operating in 2027. [consultation][map]
The key rationale is that the route follows the South Circular almost all the way, just as the SL1, SL2 and new SL13 essentially track the North Circular. But whereas the North Circular is a broad dual carriageway, the South Circular is a hamstrung collection of ordinary roads bolted together, suggesting the SL15 won't be terribly speedy. It will however fill a significant gap, because if you want to follow the same route at the moment it takes at least ten different buses. So that's what I attempted. See if you can guess how long it took.
The SL15 will kick off round the back of Clapham Junction where there isn't currently room. TfL are keen its drivers have easy access to a toilet (as "it may take up to 72 minutes to get from Eltham Station to Clapham Junction") so intend to kick out the C3 to make space. The fallout from this involves turning an existing bus stop into a bus stand, evicting seven other routes, and this is expected to inconvenience about 7000 passengers per day. Not everything about introducing the Superloop is a positive.
The first stop on the SL15 will be by the railway bridge, so that's where I went to start my shadowing journey. And I was immediately thwarted because it's closed, this while the council prettify and de-pigeon the glum space under the bridge. Damn, I really wanted a 35.
Instead I wandered down to the main shopping street and waited there. I now had the option of another route, the G1 which links directly to the next target of Clapham South station. However it goes the long way and it's only every 20 minutes and it wasn't showing up on the board, so I caught the 35 as planned instead. Start the clock.
[0h00]35: Clapham Junction to Clapham Common Length of journey: 2 stops, 3 minutes
You could take this bus east to Brixton but the Superloop aims further south so I wasn't going to be on it for long. A special award to the driver who managed to close the doors onto a pensioner standing in the doorway trying to find his card.
No buses operate along the western edge of Clapham Common so I had to alight and walk, passing a heck of a lot of exercising dogs along the way. This entirely unassuming parkside road is somehow the A205, the official designation of the South Circular. After half a mile the G1 emerges from a side road, and the next bus wasn't far away so I could always wait and catch it.
[0h23]G1: Clapham Common to Clapham South Length of journey: 1 stop, 4 minutes
The G1 may be London's most frustrating bus, enduring numerous contorted wiggles before doubling back to serve other unserved roads. In this case it passes Clapham South station but entirely fails to stop outside, overshooting up a side road and stopping nowhere near where I needed to be. So in fact I decided not to catch it and walked all the way to the tube station instead, easily beating the bus.
[0h27]355: Clapham South to Clapham Park Length of journey: 4 stops, 4 minutes
This was just a single decker and it wasn't coping. By stop three we had a wheelchair aboard and standing room only, then ten more passengers tried to board plus an infirm lady with a stroller. This is the intended Superloop stop, not the better connected next stop at Clapham Park where the 57 and 59 begin. I squeezed off there.
[0h46]57: Clapham Park to Streatham Hill Length of journey: 2 stops, 3 minutes
Grrr, the 57 runs "every 12-14 minutes" and I had to wait for 13. And grrr, like all the other buses along here it only runs for a few stops before turning off. If you want to head east it's ridiculously bitty and inefficient, which'll be why the SL15 is such an excellent proposal. A special award to the driver who drove one-handed for a minute while finishing off his Lavazza coffee.
This interchange is currently rubbish because neither the 57 nor the 201 stop near the crossroads so it's a five minute walk plus a nasty set of traffic lights. Even after all that I had a maximum wait.
[1h09]201: Streatham Hill to Tulse Hill Length of journey: 5 stops, 6 minutes
The 201 doesn't go direct to Tulse Hill, it keeps passengers happy by diverting off to serve an estate. This leaves three quarters of a mile of the South Circular unbussed. If I were relying on a Hopper I'd already be onto my second fare.
Round the corner from Tulse Hill station is a low bridge, so low that the SL15 will be forced to have single-decker buses. Only the 201 and P13 use the road at present and they're single deckers too.
[1h36]P13: Tulse Hill to Wood Vale Length of journey: 7 stops, 19 minutes
Finally a bus ride that lasted more than six minutes. Unfortunately much of that was because of roadworks, which are always going to be a problem on a duff arterial like the South Circular. We whizzed to West Dulwich station (where there'll be a Superloop stop) and Dulwich College (where there won't), but got caught up in a 10 minute jam alongside Dulwich Park.
Annoyingly for anyone heading east the P13 doesn't stop in the same place as the 185. That's the third time this has happened, and another reason why the SL15 will be an utter boon.
[2h12]185: Wood Vale to Catford Length of journey: 11 stops, 18 minutes
Unbelievably I'd already been travelling for over two hours and wasn't yet halfway. Thankfully the 185 was a zippy bus that'd take me the equivalent of three Superloop stops - one by Forest Hill station, one at the foot of Brockley Rise and one outside Catford and Catford Bridge stations.
[2h31]202: Catford to Lee Length of journey: 6 stops, 12 minutes
Finally a perfect swap from one bus to the next. I was overdue one of those after several painful waits. Trundling east along plain streets I kept thinking 'Can this really be the South Circular' and of course it was. At Lee you could switch to the SL4, another Superloop route which parallels the 202, but I had to alight for the Sidcup-bound 160.
[2h46]160: Lee to Eltham Green Length of journey: 4 stops, 6 minutes
Finally the South Circular looked arterial and we sped along. The big question was then did I stay on the 160 for its diversion round a big council estate or did I stick to the official SL15 route? I plumped for the latter, aware I had a choice of three routes, but had to run to catch the B16 to make it all worthwhile.
[2h55]B16: Eltham Green to Eltham Length of journey: 3 stops, 5 minutes
In good news I did beat the 160 to Eltham High Street. In bad news nobody's put a bus stop near the crossroads so the choice was undershoot or overshoot. Currently not a single bus route turns left here, not like the SL15 will. However the Superloop is not going to be convenient for the shops, sorry.
[3h05]233: Eltham to Eltham Station Length of journey: 2 stops, 2 minutes
You could walk this last bit but so many routes go to the station that it's always quicker to ride. The driver of the 233 wasn't expecting anyone to be so lazy at the very end of his route and nearly didn't stop.
To answer my earlier question, it took 3 hours and 7 minutes to ride from Clapham Junction to Eltham. That's 1 hour 25 minutes of actually travelling and 1 hour 43 minutes of faffing between stops and waiting around. All of the latter would have been wiped out had I been riding a single Superloop bus rather than ten individual buses. Also an express bus would only have stopped sixteen times, speeding up the journey faster than the almost-1½ hours I took.
The big downside for the SL15 is going to be traffic snarl-ups, of which the South Circular gets plenty, also the roads are almost all single carriageway so overtaking isn't going to be easy. But as I hope I've shown, making the same east-west journey at present is an utterly fragmented nightmare so the introduction of the SL15 should be a gamechanger for all along its route.
This week I’ve been playing Slay the Spire, with a few Next Fest games mixed in.
Slay the Spire is going well, I got to ascension ten with The Silent, and finally trying to play The Watcher better.
Aside from that, I played the demo for YapYap. A game that is pretty much the reverse of R.E.P.O. instead of collecting valuables you’re destroying them, and instead of robots you play as little wizards that can cast spells with voice commands. Unsurprisingly it’s a bit janky at times, and the UI can be unclear due to a complicated font. But it’s a good idea nonetheless, and I look forward to seeing what happens with it.
The other game I played was Tears of Metal. A rougelike with gameplay that feels a bit like Hades. But instead of playing as the son of Hades, you’re leading a Scottish battalion trying to take back your homeland. I like how many fodder enemies there are. I don’t know what else to say. It’s fun.
I've mentioned this before in passing (cf,
also) but today I feel like saying it
explicitly: our habit with all
of our machines is to never apply a kernel update without immediately
rebooting the machine into the new kernel. On our Ubuntu machines
this is done by holding the relevant kernel packages; on my Fedora
desktops I normally run 'dnf update --exclude "kernel*"' unless I'm
willing to reboot on the spot.
The obvious reason for this is that we want to switch to the new
kernel under controlled, attended conditions when we'll be able to
take immediate action if something is wrong, rather than possibly
have the new kernel activate at some random time without us present
and paying attention if there's a power failure, a kernel panic,
or whatever. This is especially acute on my desktops, where I use
ZFS by building my own OpenZFS packages
and kernel modules. If something goes wrong and the kernel modules
don't load or don't work right, an unattended reboot can leave my
desktops completely unusable and off the network until I can get
to them. I'd rather avoid that if possible (sometimes it isn't).
(In general I prefer to reboot my Fedora machines with me present
because weird things happen from time to time and sometimes I
make mistakes, also.)
The less obvious reason is that when you reboot a machine right
after applying a kernel update, it's clear in your mind that the
machine has switched to a new kernel. If there are system problems
in the days immediately afterward the update, you're relatively
likely to remember this and at least consider the possibility that
the new kernel is involved. If you apply a kernel update, walk away
without rebooting, and the machine reboots a week and a half later
for some unrelated reason, you may not remember that one of the
things the reboot did was switch to a new kernel.
(Kernels aren't the only thing that this can happen with, since not
all system updates and changes take effect immediately when made or
applied. Perhaps one should reboot after making them, too.)
I'm assuming here that your Linux distribution's package management
system is sensible, so there's no risk of losing old kernels
(especially the one you're currently running) merely because you
installed some new ones but didn't reboot into them. This is how
Debian and Ubuntu behave (if you don't 'apt autoremove' kernels),
but not quite how Fedora's dnf does it (as far as I know). Fedora
dnf keeps the N most recent kernels around and probably doesn't let
you remove the currently running kernel even if it's more than N
kernels old, but I don't believe it tracks whether or not you've
rebooted into those N kernels and stretches the N out if you haven't
(or removes more recent installed kernels that you've never rebooted
into, instead of older kernels that you did use at one point).
PS: Of course if kernel updates were perfect this wouldn't matter.
However this isn't something you can assume for the Linux kernel
(especially as patched by your distribution), as we've sometimes
seen. Although big issues like that are
relatively uncommon.
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jaysbrickblog_feed at 01:00pm on 24/10/2025
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depressed
In my post last week where I mentioned I had been writing “full-time” for a year and shared my favorite ten pieces from this past year, one commenter asked me about my overall experience with my writing career so far. I was going to reply to all his questions in a comment, but then I thought that it was worth a piece on its own.
