Leeds trams update

New citation metrics: chalkdustmagazine.com/regulars/the...

I see the Greens are opposing (checks notes) solar power now.

I like Sierpinksi Triangles so I made this - because tortilla chips are trianglar too, do you see? TBH I think it worked better in my head...

Some interesting discussions about a genuine AI breakthough on Erdős problem 1196 www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread... going on over at the other place; eg. this thread by Thomas Bloom x.com/thomasfbloom... or this one by Jared Duker Lichtman x.com/jdlichtman/s...

Increasingly going to start calling myself part of the 'Lost Leeds Tram Generation. My last words to my grandchildren before the Dignitas injection takes me will be that Leeds is the biggest city in Europe without a mass transit system.

“The root cause is that the Department for Transport is based in London, the Treasury is based in London, the political decision was taken in London. There needs to be local tax-raising. If we had devolution we would get this stuff done.” www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

It's a bit depressing that in 2026, a Labour leader is promising to block a congestion charge. I have no particular knowledge of the Glasgow plan, but history shows us that in almost every case, congestion charges work for basically everyone.

This is exactly why we need to take on the CIBABs. open.substack.com/pub/chriscur...

1. I think this is (mostly) right. 2. It’s reassuring that there are MPs out there thinking about serious problems as methodically as this. 3. I will post anything that advocates for the Leeds tram. chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

Had fun in the bookshop pretending to browse the fiction section but actually eavesdropping on the staff discussing marketing and sales for reissued old books. (“We sold 200 copies of [redacted], even though everybody hated it,” they said, referring to a book I have bought but not yet read.)

“The final tankers from the Gulf will arrive in Europe around 10th April, and I fear that soon after that is when things will start to get messy.” bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-gather...

I thought that if I redrew that Bluesky graph (bsky.app/profile/jame...) with the number of daily likers on a log-scale, then it would reveal lots of extra information on trends that would be helpful for understanding. But it turns out it looks exactly the same. But I made the effort, so:

CREATION Happy April Fool's Day! xkcd.com/3227/

Am ill in bed today, but it means I could watch the Dwars door Flanderen cycling race, and the last 10 minutes was a banger!

Some thoughts of mine have ended up in the most recent ISBA Bulletin (isba-bulletin.github.io/ISBABulletin/); I think mostly consistent with what I've been posting here, but was anyhow a good exercise to try to articulate my thinking a bit. May try to blog more on this topic later.

Are we sure that NYT book review wasn’t just Good Old-Fashioned Plagiarism? Everyone seems very willing to believe the author that it was due to their using AI. But I could imagine thinking “if I blame this on misusing AI, maybe that will seem less bad than admitting I just plain copied stuff.”

Extremely intriguing top three search words on Oxford English Dictionaries at the moment

A fun one for the typography nerds! www.inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-f...

Always fun when the "list of corrections to errors introduced into our paper by the publishers" reaches its tenth page...

Earlier today, a colleague mentioned in passing "you know, that massive book about the American ... architect??", and the eagerness with which I immediately butted in with "THAT'S 'THE POWER BROKER' AND I'M CURRENTLY READING IT, ACTUALLY" is now, in hindsight, very embarrassing to me.

Given I’m a 40-year-old man with a mildly unhealthy interest in US politics, New York, walkability of cities, state capacity, etc, I suppose it’s time to make a start on this. (See you in, like, nine months.)

Some good journalism tracking down the murky story behind the collapsed buildings on Kirkgate and the family/company who owns a lot of the property on that road. leeds.ghost.io/two-years-ag...

Watching a YouTube video uploaded 20 years ago, which makes me feel very old.

The art journalist Calvin Tomkins has died. www.newyorker.com/culture/post... Last year, he wrote a journal about turning 100. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I rescued an almost-finished old maths blogpost from my drafts: a funny limit, the birthday problem, Stirling's formula. mpaldridge.github.io/blog/funny-l... (Before reading, see if you can calculate this limit without making the same mistake I did … twice.)

Email etiquette, a timeline 2015: Scrupulously edit all emails, FULL punctuation 2017: Don't use too many exclamation marks! People will think you are a small girl! 2021: Occasionally leave out full-stops as a power move 2026: One typo per email to show an AI didn't write it

UK government haven’t read the header of Scott Aaronson’s blog.

Very good: 1. Sentimental Value (It Was Just an Accident would be in this section) Good: 2. One Battle After Another 3. Sinners 4. The Secret Agent 5. Train Dreams 6. Bugonia OK: 7. Marty Supreme 8. Hamnet 9. Frankenstein Not seen: – F1 (my favourite film of last year was Sorry, Baby)

I'm trying to think who this idiocy is for, who would say: I wasn't going to vote Labour but now they've blocked a clearly exceptionally bright Sudanese woman from doing a postgraduate course in computational biology at Cambridge, I'm all in? www.ft.com/content/4493...

Pretty bad! www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

In a true sign that I’m getting very old, I’ve started listening to some podcasts at 0.9x speed.

I have written a blogpost about the multiset coefficient, if that's the sort of thing you might be interested in. mpaldridge.github.io/blog/multise...

My brain: "Weird thing for a 90s/00s pro cycling team to be posting about"

It's not really the FIFA Prize for Economics, it's actually the Federal Reserve Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Sepp Blatter.

The women’s bike race around Siena this morning was a banger. (The men’s this afternoon sucked.)

Bike lanes in Leeds and Bradford aren’t getting used all that much – but is this because they’re just not very good? leeds.ghost.io/leeds-is-bet...

Pleased to announce my discovery of 167844. numberresearch.xyz

I would like these people to take my money, but they need another 200 pledges first. leeds.ghost.io

"If the elected government decides that a new town centre, next to a sizeable railway station mere minutes outside London is more important than protecting some spiders which aren’t even there, then it should happen." takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/its-time-t...

“There’s a big crowd of people who really, really want AI success stories. And then there’s an equal and opposite crowd of people who want to dismiss all AI progress. And what we have is a very complicated and nuanced story in between.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Watching Mandelson's perp walk, I cannot get over how much the reporter sounds like Chris Morris on the Day Today. www.youtube.com/watch?v=angu...

At the weekend, I went for a walk and ended up getting locked in the grounds of Bradford Cathedral. (Which, it turns out, has very high wrought-iron fencing all around it.)

I’ve been hoping a new Manchester Mill-style journalism outfit would come to Leeds for a while, so I’m very pleased to be pledger number 131. Please consider joining too! leeds.ghost.io

RIP Frederick Wiseman. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/m... At Berkeley, a four-hour long documentary about the University of California at Berkeley, is one of my favourite films of the 2010s (and is Kanopy, if you have access to that).

Is the point that the US is a big chunk of the developed world, so the company can't afford with that cut out? Or is the implication of this that the super-high costs of healthcare in the US are actually good for everyone else, because they end up as an effective subsidy for drug development?

Fantastic piece in the @FT on London's poor record of building the homes it desperately needs. I added in another major global city* in the UK which seemed to have slipped out of the data during production 😉 giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Interesting article by Siobhan Roberts in the NYT, interviewing some mathematicians who are “mildly AI-sceptic” (at least relative to people on X/Twitter). www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/s...

I appreciate this is not a healthy relationship to have to a news magazine, but I have been hoping for this, in the same way a football fan might hope their club is going to sign a talented out-of-contract player.