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Local film studio Laika’s new movie Wildwood is set to arrive in theaters on October 23, 2026.

We’ll see how well it matches one of the most popular trails in local Forest Park: Wildwood trail. It’s not the first time there was a reference to something about the local neighborhood in one of their movies.

“It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard … could change the course of human affairs.”

Stanisław Ulam

Markov Chains/Monte Carlo methods are nearly magical mathematical systems. They’re based on tremendously simple math even middle schoolers can do – but have influenced everything from major computing features like spell checkers and search engines to world changing things like the analysis of viral spread and nuclear bomb development.

Wow – I can’t tell you how familiar this sounded. I didn’t work for Amazon, but what she is describing here is almost exactly what my experience was at a different top 25 high tech company. She left early in this down cycle to pursue more healthy environment, while other coworkers stayed only to be laid off.

It brought up the point of how long does one hold on before moving on?

• Mass hiring during COVID that was not justified for the work being done nor profitability
• Senior engineers that spend the majority of their day not doing technical work but stuck in roadmap, planning, alignment, turf war meetings to get real work done. Meanwhile not one thing is shipped on time.
• Senior leadership using ‘investing in AI’ and return-to-office mandates as ways to trim headcount to cover their over-hiring. (Using AI every day for work now is a real thing – but not as justification for the kinds of layoffs we’re seeing).
• Culture rot: moving from an innovation driven environment to one more focused on headcount and political manuvering.
• Feeling hollow and empty realizing you’re spending 60-80% of the average day doing planning, paper shuffling, org alignment, and meetings instead of real work.

Elsa Johnson recently wrote a piece about the fact that nearly 40% of Stanford undergrads claim they have a disability in order to game the system to get extra time on tests, excused absences, and the best housing on campus. The article went viral. But what was more interesting is that response was overwhelmingly POSITIVE from her fellow students for calling it out.

I have previously written about Winter’s Easy Company assault at Brecourt Manor. The article got a bit of notoriety on the internet since it capture the diagrams and battle flow when other sites went dark.

The attack has been studied for years as a ‘textbook’ example of how to attack a fortified position. Video games have even re-created it.

So, does it hold up today? How about an assault on a near identical situation in the Ukrainian war. While the technology and exact approach changed a bit, the assault was actually similar in the use of forked approaches and distraction.

It’s a reminder that if you don’t study and learn from the past – actual lives will be lost needlessly while you re-learn the past.

Il Ballo Del Doge is the event of Carnival in Venice this weekend if you want to shell out the several thousand Euros to get a ticket and potentially spend several thousand more on a haute couture period costume.

This video takes the same Adele vocal track and seamlessly converts it to different harmonic scales.

Besides listening to some of the different scale systems, this video shows how far we’ve come in our ability to isolate and change singers voices to just about anything we want.

It’s yet another step along the way of not even needing singers anymore – such as the the AI generated song “Walk My Walk” that literally went to #1 in the Billboard digital download charts (with some interesting caveats)

Torque Test Channel does a great job comparing different impact wrenches with independent torque testing to verify the accuracy of manufacturer claims.

It’s interesting how much the battery charge and quality matters to the performance of these devices. Almost all of them only reach their stated numbers with absolutely fully charged batteries – and lower capacity or lower charged batteries can have quite noticeably lower performance.

How much torque do I need for a particular repair job