BREAKING: Odo of Bayeux resigns after claims that tapestry was edited to make it appear that William of Normandy incited his army to invade England.

This story continues to scale new heights of such perfect Frenchness that you should only be able to read it on Minitel.

Annual repost for this: in memory of Ted, of Joe, and of Doris; and for the silence. new-cleckit.dominie.scot/silks/

One for Southsiders: Snuff Mill Bridge in an anonymous painting from 1836 (artuk.org/discover/art...). I think the "Auld Hoose" of the title is a venerable pub (oldglasgowpubs.com/tag/the-auld...), later transferred to Old Castle Road, and finally closed when Cathcart went dry in 1921.

With an eye to Photo 51 etc., has anyone written about stolen-discovery narratives as a counterpart to Eureka-moment narratives? It feels like the same underlying model of a discovery as a discrete event, neatly packaged with the credit.

A couple of photies of that spectacular sunset earlier this week.

This is good (and see also the replies). If you're appalled by Watson's dreadful opinions, it's worth learning how science works so you have some idea how to tackle the injustices. Great Man Did Great Thing is a very bad model of science, but Bad Man Did Bad Thing is not an awful lot better.

Deplore what is to be deplored, and then find out the rest.

I see Mr George Monbiot is an expert on mediaeval history now. Thinking of my mediaevalist friends at this difficult time for all of you.

Amazon here, targeting the market consisting of people who for some reason buy books but don't actually like books, or writers, or reading. (Authors, please have nothing to do with this slop-dispenser, which will mangle your prose and put translators — your allies — out of work.)

Colleagues! As you know we have ambitious strategic transformation objectives. We are therefore taking the following actions: 1. Cheese is now a kind of dog 2. Strategic mandates will be mandatory under the mandate strategy with effect from 31 Nov 3. e.g. Doncaster I look forward to your support.

Repeating my occasional plea to the developmental psychologists to come up with an object-permanence test for professors.

Sometimes my morning commute goes all in on the effects.

I realised the other day that I'd never retold the story of the barque Levenside for this website. It is neither important nor edifying, but I'm fond of it.

It's not murder if they're not sentient, and if they were sentient they would have known better than to send me that email. This is a legally watertight argument, right?

This is appalling. Sympathy and solidarity to everyone affected at Nottingham.

Unpopular opinion: if you can only teach competently in your own research specialism then maybe that's a you problem and you shouldn't go off on rants against those of us who are a bit more versatile.

*small voice* the vast majority of successful politicians have a humanities background, so pointing at a few you like and saying "see! studying the humanities makes you more human!" is very bad logic indeed.

Anyone who claims this is a "nation of animal lovers" can bloody well explain 5 November, then.

The robing and derobing room for today's graduations sems to be adjacent to the PG Open Day. I'm wondering how many new graduates, after stepping light-headedly out of the ceremony, will wake tomorrow to discover that they have accidentally signed up for a PhD.

I'm seeing people getting upset because they can't clearly distinguish the bars in this graph. Now imagine that nine out of every ten charts you see are as bad as this or worse. Welcome to my world, trichromats.

Lovely detail from one of the panellists at the Le Guin event in Glasgow this evening: apparently she used to draw dragons for the cover of a magazine for her local library. As a kid who discovered Earthsea on the shelves of a local library, this brings me joy.

If you apply for a UK student visa and your application is refused because some barely sentient slime mould misread a letter, you can request an administrative review. The timescale for this review? Up to twelve months. Bye bye funding; bye bye course. UKVI delenda est.

I think my idiotometer has just melted. If anybody needs me during the next half hour, I will be down in the basement biting a wall.

actually, ozymandias is the name of the monster

Maybe we should provide all our new students with a reference work designed to supply the cultural capital required to get the most out of classes. We could call it "What On Earth Is That Tedious Old Fart Going On About This Time?"

In the ongoing decay of all my cultural references: nobody in today's class had heard of "The Hunt for Red October", which rather spoilt the planned digression on submarines, hydrophones, and cavitation bubbles. On the plush shide, I didn't have to do the acshent.

Trying to work out what definition of "humanities and social sciences" the Kimpton Fitzroy Group are using here to arrive at a total of only 40%. Can anyone who knows the ways of HESA unpuzzle me? (www.russellgroup.ac.uk/sites/defaul...)

"The full end-to-end workflow of scientific knowledge creation." I blame everyone who's ever pontificated in public about The Scientific Method. www.aria.org.uk/ai-scientist...

Today's big pedagogical judgement call: will I regret introducing the class to my statistical advisor Dr Elephant?

So we're now importing USian "public transport scary" discourse, are we? Fine, fine. No ill can come of this.

Shocking but not surprising. As anyone working in science or engineering could have told you, the biggest constraint on academic freedom isn't whether a tiny number of academics get to be nasty about minorities; it's what the people who control the money let you do. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Unpleasant sight of the day: anti-Israeli graffiti on the side of the disused synagogue on Niddrie Road. If you can't see how this crosses a line then I can't help you.

When it's your first day as a customer-facing angel, and you've just been told rather rudely that they didn't order the fish after all. (Glasgow Museums: artuk.org/discover/art...)

Annual safety reminder to all the idiots currently making the night hideous: you should grip the explosive _firmly_ between your teeth while lighting it.

It's easy for you to dismiss it as pareidolia. You're not the one being stared at by a big brick skull.

OTD, 1925, the Sunday Post reports that one Lieutenant F. W. Kealey is mounting an expedition to Cocos Island to recover £14M in buried pirate treasure, using "a secret method known only to himself". I can find no evidence that Lieutenant Kealey was successful.

It was quite dramatic outside the office window for a few minutes there.

Just seen the Paisley xenomorph popping up for Hallowe'en, so here's a reminder that it is not the only nightmare fodder on that building.

Q3. You are exchanging emails with an academic. Every time he replies he answers half of the questions in your last email and introduces N new misunderstandings, where N has a Poisson distribution with λ=4. Calculate the expected time before you go round his office and force-feed him his own shoes.

How my brain works: 1. Discover that today is both Reformation Day and Hallowe'en. 2. Wonder if anyone carves Martin Luther pumpkins in celebration; discover that they do (www.uu.edu/news/release...). 3. Nerd-snipe self by wondering what leading theologian Linus Van Pelt would make of this.

Senior management team: We have a bold vision for reshaping the organisation while delivering our original strategic objectives, and your role as a graphic designer will be to communicate this vision as clearly as possible. Charles Joseph Minard *examining plans*: Yes. I can see why you came to me.

The end of the line.

It feels as if there's a link between this kind of official awfulness and the I-did-my-own-research school of conspiracy theories. In each case the attitude is not "what does this limited information tell me about messy human reality?" but "can I find a gotcha?" www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

I think Scotrail have acquired a new expansion deck of train-not-there excuses. In the last week or so we've had a lot of Person Taken Ill On A Train, but they also played a blinder at Central the other day with Swan On The Line. Anyone know how the scoring system works?

No criticism whatsoever of the hard-working support teams at Holyrood, but I am not convinced it is a good idea to keep our democracy on a computer in someone else's shed.

Just learned that somebody still has a silly email forward* I wrote in 2001 pinned on their office wall. * It was an allegorical treatment of a certain fantasy trilogy which is receiving altogether too much misguided attention at present; I'm still quite proud of it.

Takeaway from today's UCU branch meeting: if I were campaigning for a "yes" vote in the national ballot I would put my effort into explaining how that supports local disputes. Plenty folk here are not buying the idea of the Big Magical Deal That Solves Everything.