Just been reading (again!) about how food in the UK is horribly bland and lacking in the multicultural fusion influences enjoyed in the USA. Let me just finish this rather splendid vegan chilli masala burito I bought here in my little Scottish town, and I'll have more to say on that. 🤣

I'm currently enjoying this pairing: "Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door." —Charles Lamb [On hearing her doorbell ring] "What fresh hell can this be?" —Dorothy Parker (I'm with Parker.)

A-a-and... They fixed it. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I know the difference has never been absolute, but I do wish the BBC would get its act together on "historic" (likely to go down in history as important) and "historical" (happened in the less-recent past). Gary Glitter's alleged offences are unlikely to be historic. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm enjoying this pairing: "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." —William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social, "The Science in Science Fiction" NPR (30 Nov 1999) "The present is never the present. It's layered with persistent pasts." —George Zebrowski, Macrolife (1979)

Oooh. Doctorow makes a lot of sense about the AI bubble. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026...

It's graduation day in my little town, and for mysterious reasons a choir sings "Gaudeamus Igitur" to the graduands—a thirteenth century drinking song. I wrote about that here: oikofuge.com/gaudeamus/

Here's one I prepared earlier:

Did a bit of walking on Arran a couple of weeks ago, when the weather was cold, wet and windy. (Remember that?) Here's the report: oikofuge.com/cccp-2026-ar...

Interesting rainbow at sunset last night, with diffuse streaks of pink cloud to the left (inside the arc), but not on the right. There is always diffuse scattering filling the inside of the primary arc, but reduced scattering between primary and secondary (Alexander's Dark Band).

Just been watching Sky's "Alien Autopsy Scandal" series, about the 1995 Ray Santilli film. The obvious give-away at the time was the tentative cluelessness of the people conducting the alleged autopsy. To any clinician, they clearly had no bleedin' idea of what they were supposed to be doing. 1/2

A faded Painted Lady rests after a long migration flight. Tighvein, Arran, Scotland, June 2nd 2026.

It's a funny old world. Hate football. Needed a haircut. So had to do fifteen minutes of homework on Scotland's chances in the World Cup before I sat in the barber's chair. It paid off. All I needed was an opinion on Haiti and Morocco, and she did all the talking thereafter. Win!

From the Department of Excruciating Scottish Puns

Techno-pipe dreams. "Thirty years ago, nanotech was about to change everything. Let's not get tricked again by Silicon Valley's magical thinking." Terribly good stuff by @philipcball.bsky.social. (From last year, but no less timely for that.) aeon.co/essays/no-su...

This is a superb overview.

"A-level maths exam so difficult that pupils describe it as a war crime" They're rightly distressed, and as self-centred as teenagers often are, but I don't think the Times should have headlined that particular piece of naive crassness. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...

That UK heatwave hasn't reached the Grampian Mountains here in Scotland. Today is overcast, feels like about five degrees Celsius here at 3000ft, cold wind. Ideal Scottish hillwalking conditions!

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Summer reading started early. Dominic Selwood's _The Sword of Moses_ inhabits a region somewhere within a triangle bounded by Frederick Forsyth, Dennis Wheatley and Dan Brown. A fine romp. First time I've seen the technicalities of lock-picking done (almost) right! www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

I'm seeing a lot of gloaty mockery about the NYT headline here. "But it EXPLODED! Hahaha." Of course it exploded. It deliberately simulated a return to a capture gantry, but in the ocean. So then it (inevitably) fell over. And rockets that fall over tend to explode. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/s...

It turns out that a lot of the bafflingly poor metaphors used by LLMs (as opposed to repetitive linguistic constructs like — or “it’s not X, it’s Y”) are actually direct regurgitations from human-written bad fanfiction in the training data: tuhinchakrabarty.substack.com/p/ai-slop-gr...

Neanderthals doing root canal work with jasper drills! Cool. But I'm intrigued by the use of the phrase "intentional dentistry". Is there such a thing as "unintentional dentistry"? In what way would that differ from smack in the mouth? www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/s...

Shetland seems very keen on changing its street names, and keeping track of the changes on its street signs, but this is the first time I've seen a trio of "formerly".

Dear god, BBC. The past tense of the verb "to dwarf" is "dwarfs", not "dwarves"!🙄 ("Dwarves" isn't even the plural of the noun "dwarf", unless you're JRR Tolkien, or are pretending to be JRR Tolkien.) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I took this photograph of the St Ninian's tombolo in Shetland today, and it made me think of @mooseallain.bsky.social Amazing how sandspit technology has developed. My current sandspit (foreground) and an original 80s sandspit in the background, the size of a brick!

Still thinking about this (from @ferrisjabr.bsky.social 's Becoming Earth): "a single gallon of gasoline represents 100 tonnes of ancient life, roughly equivalent to 20 adult elephants". I knew it was big, but never worked it out. A tank of petrol is a LOT of ancient life. +1 reason to electrify!

Atlantic puffin, taken with a cheap phone camera, Sumburgh Head, Shetland, today.

Just discovered how to get the point-and-click adventure game Rama (1996) to run under Windows 11. Joy! I haven't played it for thirty years, and the graphics are of that era, but it's still a delight. Even a guest appearance from Arthur C. Clarke himself. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_%2...

Setting aside the utter irrelevance, this is a classic of bad questionnaire design. Pluto was not "downgraded"—it hasn't lost a corner office and a pay grade. It was just reclassified. The emotive choice of "downgrade" prejudges the issue and introduces bias.

Grey feathers exploding across pink petals. A sparrowhawk took out a pigeon under our cherry tree.

Typing in the 1980s, pages ... "...encrusted with sanitizing scabs of correcting fluid, impatiently overprinted before it was fully dry so that the corrections were embossed rather than inked." I feel seen, @philipcball.bsky.social

Serious flag error at Arlington National Cemetery during the King's visit. Someone was in distress, evidently.

If you've read @helenczerski.bsky.social 's lovely "Blue Machine" in the UK edition, you'll have seen an interesting ocean map on the cover. This is the Spilhaus "World in a Square" projection, one of my favourites, and I've written about it here: oikofuge.com/the-spilhaus...

Suffrajitsu. Edith Garrud demonstrating how to restrain a policeman. She also taught jiu-jitsu to women who were victims of domestic abuse.

Oh dear. The Flat Earthers have discovered my blog post about why the illuminated side of the gibbous moon sometimes appears not to point directly towards the sun. Apparently "giant lenses in the sky" makes more sense than "perspective". Into the spam folder they go. oikofuge.com/why-does-the...

Having recently found out that @philipcball.bsky.social is writing a second novel, I've start reading his first. I'm guessing there's some significance to the section-breaks being marked by the Greek letter psi, the symbol for the wavefunction in quantum mechanics. philipball.co.uk/the-sun-and-...

If you love words, are interested in the Elizabethan Era, or are a Shakespeare buff, you'll love @hntdove.bsky.social's alternate history novel "Ruled Britannia", in which England is occupied by Spain, and Shakespeare is caught up in insurrection. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/287652... 1/

As a clinician, this seems both entirely predictable and really important to know. While LLMs can pass medical exams, they're much less good at dealing with the way real patients present info. @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @philipcball.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2504.18919 /1

"Scotland" by palette knife painter Georgia Hart

Scotland is a country in which 90% of the geographical features have names incomprehensible to 97.5% of the population. Life is simpler if you know Gaelic. This is Clach Thoill. The name means Hole Rock.

"Most of us have had the experience of venting ferocious rage about someone online, only to reconcile when we speak face-to-face or hear the warmth of a voice over the phone." Really? Most of us? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

LLMs train on only a subset of human comms, and in turn they are influencing how we communicate with each other. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

News that the Chagos Archipelago handover has stalled for another year at least means that the sun still never sets on the British Empire. oikofuge.com/sun-set-brit... oikofuge.com/sun-sets-on-...

EFF off X. Eff off, X.

I meant to post a link to my little dissertation on Old Lady-Day (note the position of the hyphen!) on April 5, but forgot. oikofuge.com/old-lady-day/ Now I'm reminded by @hntdove.bsky.social 's calendrical detail in his excellent "Ruled Britannia". www.goodreads.com/book/show/20...

Is it just me, or are the constructors of the NYT crossword obsessed with breakfast cereals and sweet treats? (I ask as someone who considers "breakfast cereal" and "sweet treat" to be oxymorons.)

This is catastrophic.

If anyone shares Naomi Wolf's confusion about the illumination in Artemis II's Earthset picture (ART002E009288) www.nasa.gov/image-detail... they should look at the preceding image www.nasa.gov/image-detail... which shows matching crescents. 1/2

Reading @chrischirp.bsky.social's rather poetic use of "the dark side of the moon" reminded me of how some people get their knickers in a twist over that usage. It's "dark" as in "poorly known", folks—the Dark Ages weren't particularly devoid of sunlight, either. open.substack.com/pub/christin...