Today is Quartidi the 4th of Pluviôse in the year 234. Pluviôse is the month of rain. Today we celebrate snowdrop.#JacobinDay More information on snowdrop

This is all making me think of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which I read in my early teens. Might be interesting to revisit it and see how it holds up.

this is weirdly mesmerising to watch

When someone suggested using AI to translate work this week I found a graduate student with the expertise and the institutional funds to get them paid to do the translation. Everyone was happy in the end. It’s a tiny thing but an example of a small difference one can make.

Ever relevant, this poem by Mary Oliver, especially today.

The older I get, the more baffling I find the first Bridget Jones movie. She’s in her early 30s with a massive flat in central London, a series of interesting jobs, family wealth with a lovely dad and a gang of fun and loyal friends she has the disposable income to go out with. What’s not to love?*

I currently have borage growing in my garden. Anyway, we need more action now!

Historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, technology and medicine are all very familiar with the near impossibility of teaching outside our narrow school/college in UK HE. I may even eventually be made redundant because I was put in a very narrow pigeonhole.

My Christmas gift - panto for FREE 🌟♥️🌟 10 yrs ago I made Panto! for BBCStoryville. A feature doc about an am-dram group staging a panto - Puss in Boots at the Nottingham Arts Theatre. A tiny budget, a punishing schedule & a ramshackle donkey costume are just some of the challenges they face

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Robin Ince reveals to last night’s audience at a recording of Infinite Monkey Cage that the BBC has forced him to resign over his support of trans people

A standing commute made worth it by arriving to see homemade kourabiedes and melomakarona on my desk from my lovely Greek colleague.

I was diagnosed with #HIV in 1998, when I was 30. Many of my friends had died of AIDS. I did not expect to live to 50. I’m 58 now. HIV treatment works. Treatment also makes it impossible for me to pass HIV on during sex. Ensure HIV treatment for all. End HIV stigma. #WorldAIDSDay

I am proposing for TalosCon 2026 that part of our conference budget is hiring an artist to help create speaker slides We will ask speakers to not use AI and have an artist available to brainstorm images and create them I’d love to do this for Kubecon and @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social too #noAI

So tired I just started talking about Christmas baking with “marmozan”, which I can only assume is a portmanteau of marmoset and marzipan or is maybe is marzipan made out of marble?

Here's the DfE consultation document on international student fee levy, just gone live. "Providers will pay a simple flat fee of £925 per student per year, which will not be introduced until 2028/29." consult.education.gov.uk/internationa...

Looking forward to this tonight!

Just have the need to share that I achieved new PBs for squats *and* bench press yesterday

😬🫣🤪

If you witnessed a hate crime against a member of staff but the victim said they weren’t going to report it because they said it wouldn’t be taken seriously, what would you do? Asking for me.

Can I quietly ask we stop talking about what "AI" *could* do in education and identify instead what's actually happening with AI in education? I'll start...

"What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost everybody, is that things cannot go on in their present way" – The Times, May 1975 “It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life” – Professor Stephen Haseler, 1975

Every ad now

Took such pleasure in sitting under a berry-laden tree while a busy squirrel dropped half-eaten fruits on me. So nice not to be inflicting problems on the more-than-human world, but instead be mildly inconvenienced by animal enjoying autumn fruitfulness.

'people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing than are those who speak just one language.' Good thing that schools, universities and governments are so actively promoting modern languages then, isn't it? 1/2

I spotted this on Mastodon and I find it horrible, not least for the speed with which this has happened.

Was feeling really rubbish and tired and grumpy and foggy earlier but it turned out all I needed to do was deadlift 90kg for the first time in months and now I am a New Woman.

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you? students: no AI I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

Onedrive I do not have time for your jests. I need to access my files!

Call for (post-PhD) historians and cultural scholars for the pod! We have a specific wishlist of scholarship we’re looking to add to the lineup: - ancient & medieval history and/or - histories of anywhere other than the US and UK, preferably outside Europe Pitches to: [email protected] 🤗🤗🤗

My grandad getting on the post-war Emergency Training for Teachers scheme and leaving the coal mines was the best thing that happened to my family; it literally saved his life.

Whoever wrote in the blurb for this edition of Edward Said’s Out of Place that the book reveals “an unimaginably rich world of colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes” desperately needs to read some Edward Said

Next time someone tells you that train drivers "just push buttons" show them this from the BBC

A movie you have seen more than 7 Times with a GIF

Last chance to turn it off. On Monday, November 3rd, Microsoft will start using your LinkedIn data for AI training. And remember, you're opted in by default. To toggle it off 👉 Account - Settings & Privacy > Data privacy > Data for Generative AI Improvement.

Seeing young people out this evening and I’m not sure if they are wearing their usual clothes or doing Y2K as Halloween fancy dress. Either way, I’m being haunted by my youth.

So I’ve just seen that the new Lanthimos film is called Bugonia and features BEES. I guess a classical reception trip might be in order.

New preprint alert! 🚨 “Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University”

One more push: please help spread the word about my crowdfunding effort to support Arabic-language access to ancient Gazan literature & financial support for a Gazan translator!

Just prepared a bit of ‘de Spectris…’ by Lavater as some seasonal unseen practice for my Intermediates to do optionally over Study Week. The vocab is not what I’m used to, but the syntax is pretty simple.

Hmm - worrying in terms of the direction of travel, but worth remembering that this is a white paper, so there is still room for lobbying and change before any legislation emerges.

I will definitely be sharing this with my students!

With my intermediate Latinists I’ve been doing unseen practice using (adapted) Columella because I thought, “why can’t they learn the word for pear tree instead of another word for missile?” Anyway, I thought it might be quite boring but apparently a lot of them like it???

BREAKING: economist discovers “second shift,” a concept coined by sociologists almost 50 years ago; gives it new, stupider, and less explicitly labor-oriented name

Lyncus: this is yet more nanny-state interference from Demeter and Triptolemus. Ordinary people aren’t interested in what the agricultural elite are selling and down-to-earth leaders like Lyncus know this.

Universities across the world seeing this: "its only wrong 45% of the time!! Lets buy free licenses for our students, staff and faculty!! Lets lock into contracts with rapacious predatory AI companies with shitty technofascist politics, sucking up water and jacking up electricity prices!!"

It looks so interesting!

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

WOW: "Covid-19 vaccines... set off a powerful alarm that rallies the human immune system against cancer and nearly doubles the median survival length of patients, according to a new retrospective study by researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center & the University of Florida."