Lots of great contributions here, including an insightful analysis by @dukechussey93.bsky.social of @mickbyrne.bsky.social book which forms a launching off point to consider value theory and housing politics

Unsettling words drift in from the other room: “I think the baby has stolen my bone fold…”

Travelling with my Struwwelpeter tote so the locals know I’m “one of them” (someone whose childhood was marked by nightmares about having their thumbs cut off with a giant pair of scissors. Otherwise completely normal.)

The Vatican heard Timnit was talking shit so they made this for her. Your puny tl;dr is no match for the Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development. There’s even a QR code.

No Haraway references in Magnifica humanitas? Laudate Deum included one.

Counter-thought: no we aren’t, because there is little evidence of exam-only assessment becoming the norm again. Is there a current tendency towards more exam-based assessments? Certainly. Are costs and logistics a factor either way? Not that I can see, but I can’t speak to the UK situation.

What is it about native English speakers’ inability to correctly order “i” and “e”? Excepting “ironic” intent, constant misspellings of “Keir” persist. That his departure will finally bring an end to this is perhaps its most urgent motivation. It’s a four-letter word and you all have spellcheck.

New blog post! Let's say an effect you are interested in varies between countries and you want to explain some of that cross-cultural variation. What could possibly go wrong? www.the100.ci/2026/05/20/f...

how it started: how it’s going:

If Is It Credible’s analysis is correct (it seems to be) John Burn-Murdoch’s work is doing the FT’s credibility as a newspaper no favours. Using an article which hasn’t been peer-reviewed (and its conclusions are being widely challenged) as the basis for fertility-rate clickbait is disappointing.

I am giving a talk on the Plantations and the history of capitalism in Dundalk in a few weeks. Heads like Ferghal MacBhloscaidh, Sinéad Kennedy and Conor McCabe will make the journey worthwhile, get involved www.ticketsource.com/left-eire/le...

This is Mr Clickle-Clackle. His japes are much-beloved by my daughter. We find him unsettling. Worse, he has a twin, as yet (perhaps thankfully) unnamed.

I do this for a living, as the bard (Vincent in Collateral) had it.

Wes running reminds me of seeing Owen Smith doing a walk-around in London Fields (the top part by the tennis courts, near to where Rawduck (RIP) was – not the bit where he’d have been bullied by 12-year-olds) in 2016 and feeling my soul ascend far above the metropolis from second-hand embarrassment.

[furiously breathing into paper bag] New…John Sayles…Western

Corey Robin has given Sven Beckert’s new book (“Capitalism: A Global History”) what might be politely described as “quite a kicking”. Good grief. www.thenation.com/article/societ…

An otherwise restful afternoon in the city centre enlivened by someone deliberately trying to hit first a pedestrian, then me, my partner and child with a car (everyone is fine, the gentleman in question had the misfortune to pass a police van as he rather erratically left the scene).

My daughter was in the paper today, not for her many crimes and delinquencies, which are deemed of little consequence by our decadent society, but for entirely wholesome reasons. I myself have never been so fortunate, of course.

Definitive proof that age is mellowing me: I now only wish for a blanket ban on amplified busking on Grafton St, having been a vocal proponent of immediate and indefinite detention without trial in the past.

My plumber (wonderful) noted that his ancestor, the Rev. Christopher Teeling McCready, was the author of “Dublin Street Names, Dated and Explained”. A foundational text in Irish historical geography. We have a copy, but it’s missing. I shall have to locate it. freemanlibrary.ie/library/book/1…

This evening’s mystery is how my daughter’s little yellow dress made its way from VEB Kinderoberbekleidung in Freital (www.archiv.sachsen.de/archiv/bestand…) to the Oxfam on Thomas St, in Dublin. It must have been manufactured before 1990, since the VEB became a GmbH in 1990.

Excellent news. Arif Ahmed should resign, or, if not, should be sacked

Reading her “ghost book” (Barrow, A. (2025). Five little ghosts. Nosy Crow.) to my daughter and began pointing out that there was in fact no need for the little ghosts to stand in front of the fire because they can’t fee—anyway now is perhaps not the time, yes I can make the funny ghost cat sound.

skill issue. I use them to do things like build near-instant fuzzy search engines for the Aubrey-Maturin corpus, so I can summon an instance of the phrase “very happy” any time I feel like it. My work keeps me quite busy, and I would not otherwise have time for this kind of fun creative computing.

The frontier models are very good at enabling my special interests.

My daughter chases a seagull which is probably about her size. It being a university seagull – MA (Dublin) – it easily evades her.

For the first time in living memory, the optician did not take the opportunity of a captive audience to attempt to sell me new frames which would make me look like a pitiless Scandinavian medic. A shame, as the idea of a change has – unusually – been on my mind lately.

The hexagon is the largest regular n-gon that admits a tiling of the Euclidean plane, which is, I think, all that needs to be said concerning this afternoon’s announcement.

Struck down by norovirus (or one of its cousins) while attending a relative’s extremely well-attended wake, AMA.

This is presumably a consequence of relaxing the eligibility criteria for starting grants, effectively allowing every Tom, Dick, and German PhD candidate to apply; a frankly stupid decision. However, failing in two successive applications seems like a strong signal: research is not for everyone.

If you park your police car on the tram tracks to investigate a minor shop-lifting incident, I will politely insist that you move it immediately as a tram is approaching. My partner – perhaps more used to London policing – will loudly imply that you are an idiot. The tram will – naturally – be full.

Please share - Trinity Geography is hiring for a tenure track position of Assistant Professor in Human Geography with a focus on Historical/Cultural Geography Job details can be found here jobsireland.ie/en-US/job-De...

the end of scrutopia

this Helen DeWitt post about explaining literature to the industry is an all timer: 'The problem is not that I am speaking from a position of ignorance. I am speaking from a position of knowledge to people who don't know what knowledge would look like'. paperpools.blogspot.com/2007/08/corm...

I have a hypothesis that bivariate choropleth maps are confusing to most people, but I don’t work in HCI / human factors / perception etc. Who wants to do the research with me? Is Cynthia Brewer on Bluesky?

The Cellar / Cinderella rhyme in “Each Peach Pear Plum” is very difficult for Papa on a number of levels. We have much to thank the Ahlbergs for, but not this.

You can tell he wrote this himself because half the paragraphs begin with the phrase “For example …”, to say nothing of the examples that follow. Even the first-gen LLMs wouldn’t do that.

This thread of replies from Lee (whom I do not know, but whose work I know quite well) demonstrates a degree of politeness and generosity that is wholly unwarranted given the degree of uncollegial lashing out and intellectual dishonesty on display.

Zohran is doing James Connolly shoutouts hahahaha this is incredible

The structuralist thesis about AI (as constructive realization of subjectless minds) was already put forward in 1994 by Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his book about cybernetics and cognitive science.

[quietly, to an audience of about four people] this percepta thing seems like it might be a big deal

Writing an apoplectic screed to the author of “Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes” demanding to know where the “There was one little baby who was born on the ice” page is supposed to take place; the baby has a penguin friend, but penguins do not live anywhere with a human population.

I saw an interesting comment from an academic elsewhere regarding the word “train” – they insisted that their PhDs and postdocs were advisees. I love this because even though we don’t really use that term in Europe (ime), I loathe the term “train”. That’s not what’s going on.

“The ePub version of Don DeLillo’s unacknowledged 1980 hockey romp is available on Anna’s Archive” is quite the thing to find oneself murmuring.