https://dcb.lu/blog/Recent content on dcb.luHugo -- gohugo.ioSun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/pretty-good/Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/pretty-good/I’ve got a lot of interests, and often get stressed feeling as though I’ll never get around to working on or learning everything I want to. There’s two thoughts that I find helpful for this. One is the SMBC’s 11 lives comic. The idea is that if it takes 7 years to master something, that gives you about 11 opportunities to do so throughout your lifetime. Zach frames this as being 11 short lives, treating each new start as a rebirth.https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/lego-portraits/Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/lego-portraits/This is just a quick write-up of a portrait I did of my son about a year ago using LEGO bricks. Between the portrait of my wife and the little watercolor of our pets I commissioned, we’ve almost got the whole family covered – I’m the only one missing at this point, though I’ve got plans to fix that as well. I was originally combing through BrickLink to find 1x1 tiles I could use as pixels for a dithered image, and picking the cheapest colors I could that would still give a halfway decent palette.https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/elements-song/Fri, 05 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/elements-song/Not too long after the announcement that IUPAC had settled on names for the 4 elements needed to fill out the 7th row of the periodic table, I started thinking back to what Tom Lehrer’s Elements Song would sound like today. The first recording I had heard was his 1967 performance in Copenhagen but even then it was outdated, with Mr. Lehrer kindly requesting that the audience mark down newly-discovered lawrencium in the margins of their programs.https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/dutch-flag/Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/dutch-flag/This is a rewrite of an older post, edited down since the original rambled a bit. You can read the original here. First, A Few Fun Flag Facts The Luxembourgish and Dutch flags are nearly identical, save for their slightly different shades of blue used for their bottom stripes.1 One day I was curious to see how different they were, and whether the reds are actually the same.2 This sent me down a much deeper rabbit hole than even the usual questions about colors tend to be.https://dcb.lu/blog/archived/red-waiss-blauw/Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/archived/red-waiss-blauw/First, A Few Fun Flag Facts Luxembourg and the Netherlands have nearly identical flags, save for two differences: a slightly different proportion1 and a different blue for the bottom stripe. I recently started wondering, though, how different are they? The definition of Luxembourg’s blue is fairly straightforward. Because no one had really bothered to make the flag official for about a century, the precise definition of the flag wasn’t written until 1993 and used Pantone to define its colors, which are then pretty easy to look up sRGB values for.https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/topographic-halftone-patterns/Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/posts/topographic-halftone-patterns/I’ve long admired the work of Ed Fairburn. In many of his pieces he draws on old topographic maps, using the contour lines to build up stunning portraits. For Abi’s birthday I thought I’d try to do something similar with a region of the Moon that Abi and I have spent a lot of time analyzing together. I considered commissioning Ed directly as he’s worked with lunar maps in the past, but as far as I’m aware there aren’t any good topographic maps of the area I’m interested in – at least not at the resolution I was aiming for.https://dcb.lu/blog/colophon/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://dcb.lu/blog/colophon/Built using Hugo, hosted on Github. Typeset in Roboto Mono and Barlow Semi Condensed. Math rendered with $\KaTeX$. Templates and styles © Daniel Bolan under an MIT license. Content © Daniel Bolan 2021–2023 under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.