I do my bit. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Academic family tree of descendants, beautifully calligraphed by a colleague, hung in a place of honour.

Still stumbling over urban strolls I have not been on before. This one used to be a cutting on the Nottingham Suburban Railway.

Out for an equinoctial stroll around my favourite urban wilderness. I wonder if the insects basking in the warm autumn sunshine share the sense of impending melancholy.

I wouldn’t normally bother, but there is a certain satisfaction in just clicking on Quick Vote to annoy the right whingers.

In case you have the impression that I think all senior management in universities is incompetent, let me stress that I have had the privilege to work with some very talented senior people. What is depressing is that they achieve no more advancement than the incompetents who surround them.

The course closures my former department faces would be funny if not so tragic. They are driven by a combination of bean counters who don’t understand that there is essentially no additional load in running small “physics with” degrees that require no additional modules… www.iop.org/about/news/q...

Let us name those who should take responsibility for this situation. The senior management of universities failed to negotiate a sustainable system of funding, and then sleep-walked into mess. But will they be held accountable? Of course not. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Moonfall. Has there ever been a worse movie?

Newspaper with a vested interest in creating a controversial league table to sell newspapers creates controversial league table. Hold the presses. www.lbc.co.uk/article/oxbr...

Enjoying the late summer sunshine at University of Nottingham, with a couple of photogenic herons. 🪶

Enjoying the late summer sunshine at University of Nottingham, with a couple of photogenic herons.

The gold-standard test of peer review — assessing reproducibility with a duplicate review — shows that it is of limited efficacy. The good news is that much cheaper processes like distributed peer review do no worse. (arxiv.org/abs/2004.04165) #PeerReviewWeek #PRW2025

Latte macchiato. Nom nom!

Apparently it’s all my fault… #PeerReviewWeek #PRW25

Why yes, my wife is away this evening. How did you know?

Having acquired the expensive fancy coffee machine, I now feel obliged to experiment with the expensive fancy coffee. Irritatingly, it is definitely nicer.

Dear @ukri.org, I think JJ Thomson nailed the perils of having Government agencies use “clear eyes” to decide where to focus research funding to maximise benefit to society. 🧪 (www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...)

The concept of the Dyson Sphere seems to be predicated on the premise that very advanced civilisations are (a) very inefficient in their production and use of energy, and (b) fixated on the idea that larger civilisations are better. None of this seems very likely to me.🔭🧪

Our fancy new coffee machine has interchangeable hoppers for caf and decaf. I needed an easy way to remember which was which.

Yesterday, I replaced the battery in my wife’s Bose Soundlink Mini 2, which turned out to require a lot more surgery than I expected. Rather to my surprise, I didn’t end up with screws left over, and it actually works. I feel like that guy on Facebook who fixes games consoles!

Proper cappuccino at the touch of a button? I don’t need to leave the house until spring!

Malcolm Press is an old friend, but on this I think he’s catastrophically wrong. “Hobbyist research” is a big part what makes academia attractive to the bright people we need to teach advanced subjects. To write it off is abject surrender of purpose. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

Upgrade.

It is a tad breezy this afternoon.

Barrister uses ChatGPT to construct his case, then relies on reassurance of ChatGPT when existence of cited case is questioned, with predictable consequences… (tribunalsdecisions.service.gov.uk/utiac/2025-u...)

A late entry for #baturday, from last month’s adventures in the Amazon.

Very strange experience. After wife had nosed around a website I sent her, looking at itineraries for a holiday in New Zealand, I entirely separately sent an email listing what we had decided we actually wanted.

You’d have thought an actual scientist would know better than to describe an object as “anomalous”, when it is only the third of its type ever discovered, and all three have been totally different. 🧪🔭 avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-is-...

It's a God awful small affair… (Maybe microbes) 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The flowers in the walled garden at Clumber Park still putting on a show.

A pleasant little outing for lunch at Clumber Park. The bird life was fairly unexceptional today — pelican only in stained glass in the chapel! 🪶

Due to a combination of ill health and the endless twilight of summer this far north, first time out with the telescope in ages. Good to see that the Universe is still out there! NGC 7023 (the Iris Nebula) and 6946 (the Fireworks Galaxy) are two of my favourites. 🔭

Be careful out there! This hit me on the head this afternoon…

Fallen down the rabbit hole of seeing whether anyone before Maxwell noted the “coincidence” that c = 1/√(ε₀μ₀) (since measurements of all these constants predated his equations). Looks like Kirchhoff did in 1857, in the context of signals propagating along wires (isidore.co/misc/Physics...) 🧪

Loving Nottingham’s new water feature (www.nottinghampost.com/news/notting...)

Once again, I am struck by the difference between what passes for the “cultural agenda” set by Start The Week, which comprises a bunch of people plugging the books they’ve written, and the breadth actual culture presented in In Our Time.

Wife bought a kit to make a hanging rail for the dolls clothes she has been making, but it proved too short and generally a bit crap. So I conferred with ChatGPT: between us, we wrote an OpenSCAD script to make and 3D print end pieces that join some of Wickes’ finest doweling…

The good folk of Sherwood are irritated.

First time back on the exercise bike in two years after significant health issues. Baby steps!

A rather fine-looking Moon tonight. (Sony a6600, Sigma 16-300 1/100 F6.7 ISO100). 🔭

Finally time to sort through and tidy up a few of the shots from the Amazon last month.

NOOO! This programme represented culture in its true sense (not just as a lazy synonym for the arts). Sadly, even if there were someone up to taking on the job, I fear that no broadcaster would ever dare commission such a shamelessly intellectual programme in future. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

It’s no Rio Negro, but up river on the Trent had a certain damp charm this morning. 🪶

Well, I do d’eclair.

Life would be simpler if the convention adopted by the board manufacturer for the polarity of the battery connector were not the opposite one to that adopted by the lead manufacturers. I think. So now I have to try not to forget!

I have broken the code: when BBC Radio describe one of their programmes as a “podcast”, they just mean that someone has taken 20 minute of content, and dragged it out into a six-part series of half-hour broadcasts.

Astronomical PSA: the meteorologists are wrong. It is still summer in the northern hemisphere until 22 September.

I can

Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday? Wanna bet?