Well done everyone, you've all done really well this week! You've made it through to Friday evening, despite everything. Well done and all the best for the excellent weekend you deserve.

Hooray hooray, despite the “superflu”panic from the government and NHS leadership, this flu season is turning out pretty mild as it goes.

The short answer here is health and social care, and pensions. And it's not because those are getting much better, it's because there's a lot more need (proportionately): there are more retired-age people compared to working-age people, and that trend is baked in to continue.

Important cautionary tale from history: if you’re tempted to kidnap the Bishop of Durham today, remember you may end up with an Oxford college named in your honour. (You will also find it tricky to achieve because there currently is no Bishop of Durham, only the suffragan acting up.)

> How would you rate your experience with us today? Slightly unsatisfied  > We're sorry to hear that. Can you tell us how we could improve? Make the session timeout longer, it keeps logging me out before I can complete my task > Your session has timed out. Please login again.

Well done everyone, you’ve all done really well this week! There have been challenges and difficulties big and small and somehow you have made it through to the weekend. I hope it is at least as good to you as you deserve.

Oh fantastic. This Open University free online course about antibiotic resistance can give you a microbe credential! www.open.edu/openlearn/sc... (Actually only a cert of participation not a microcredential but the joke is too good to miss.)

After curling in Stirling the Prince and Princess of Wales could try: -Walking in Dorking -Shooting in Tooting -Squash near the Wash -Chess in Skegness -Painting in Paignton -Lettering in Kettering -Parking in Barking -Bickering in Pickering What else?

Well done everyone, you've all done really well this week! It's been quite a week. And yet again you have been quite extraordinarily brilliant in tough circumstances. Well done on making it through, and all the best for the weekend.

Alarmed by the news that the UK is to send a single British officer to Greenland, potentially to act as a tripwire force and die in an American invasion. Even more alarmed to find myself chased around the internet by an ad inviting me to join the British Army, as if it's for that specific role.

On a Teams call with a mild cold. I mute myself before blowing my nose. Teams detects the sonic blast and pops up helpfully telling me my microphone is muted. Yeah that was on purpose, nobody needs to hear that.

Congratulations to whoever is responsible for the subsampling here but this is unwise. It’s getting harder, not easier, to produce reliable core statistics and our complex world means wider-ranging and more detailed figures are needed. The UK’s ONS should be a cautionary tale, not a model.

I don't doubt this chart as a baseline but the problem is that British people can deploy sarcasm at the drop of a hat, and are sparing with superlatives. You should be very concerned if a Brit says "Well that's bloody brilliant, that is. Outstanding. Perfect. Incredible."

Just look at these beautiful yellow daffodils. Just look at them.

In “state capacity is not totally awful in all regards” news, I took a 320-mile round trip yesterday on public transport because it was the cheapest, fastest & easiest way to make the journey. The West Coast Main Line and Manchester Metrolink systems are actually good. We should have more like that.

This has not been a bad winter in terms of demand on A&E. For all the talk of super flu, it was just a little early, not particularly bad. And yet our urgent care system is floundering. This really could and should be improved.

Well done everyone, you've all done very well this week! First working week of the year, and you have made it through ... everything ... and got to another weekend. Well done, and hope you have a good one.

This is the end of an interesting and slightly sad story. Huge gift left a century ago to pay off the national debt from WW1 has finally been cashed in and gilts have been retired … achieving maybe 0.02% of its goal.

I don,t think this problem,s fixed yet, but I,m hopefull it,ll be fairly soon.

I worry my pride at having got the bins right for three out of the four collections on the Christmas/New Year altered schedule means I’ll be overconfident next week and mess up my streak.

Struck by the profundity of my own mathematical intuition. On hearing “worst snow for a decade in the Midlands” I found myself thinking “Yeah, that’s going to be disruptive, but I’d guess that’s the sort of thing you’d expect to crop up in the ordinary run of things maybe every ten years or so.”

I am lurking behind Richard here being a spaceship engineer and confirm @bridgecommand.bsky.social is the some of the best fun you can have with your (futuristic space uniform) clothes on. Not pictured: magic smoke escaping from the panels under my station when the ship couldnae take any more.

I have a vivid memory from the 90s of a post on Usenet from someone seeking help with a technical problem with one of these which included the memorable line "I drul in the webtv's box."

I was walking down the shops one day and saw a guy I vaguely knew coming the other way. I made eye contact, gave an eyebrow flash, nodded, and said “Alright?” and he did the same back and said “Alright.”

Nooooooo! The amazing, the one and only Internet’s favourite flammable festive feature, the GOAT of goats, the Gävlebocken @gavlebocken.bsky.social has fallen! Apparently blown down in a storm. Which I think is yet another new way to go. Incredible.

Welcome to Britain, where “New” College, Oxford is just short of 650 years old. And the “New” Forest was designated as such 300 years before that, in 1079.

First rule of the butcher’s shop and of the operating theatre: Never catch a falling knife. This has metaphorical application of variable utility but in the literal sense it is sound advice.

The Gävlebocken is still standing! Surely a good omen.

So perhaps we can grant a sort of Ontological Argument that a university is infinitely better with a philosophy department than with none. But we need to be careful with this inductive argument that we would be better with infinitely many philosophy depts. /

Today's final Eel Fact on my awesome Eel Facts Advent calendar featured Freud's quest to find eel testicles. Interestingly, sources differ as to whether he succeeded. Freud's work was in March and September of 1876, in Trieste, where he'd been sent - appropriately for today - by Professor Claus.

Here's a #HigherEducationPostcard of @orieloxford.bsky.social Founded in 1326, it may take its name from a manor house - La Oriole - granted to the college in 1329. Or maybe from an oriel window which is on the front If you like this image, please repost it - remember, BlueSky has #NoAlgorithm

Happy family-tech-support-mas to my fellow geeks who observe this fascinating holiday tradition. Scholars believe that today’s festive new phone transfers, Bluetooth hearing aid pairings and wifi extender setups date back to the 1980s teenager fixing the 12:00 VCR, and possibly even further.

> looking for a new study > ask the study headlines if their study is causal or confounded > they don't understand > pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is causal and what is confounded > they laugh and say "it's a good study sir" > read the study > it's confounded

Meanwhile, the UK’s equivalent of the Dutch SyRi scandal (excessive data sharing and surveillance of benefit recipients, resulting in flat-out wrong and occasionally batshit errors) has been met not with government resignations but with a shrug. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Happy solstice! More light! It gets brighter from here. Have some ridiculously early daffodils, to bring cheer and hope in the darkest and coldest part of the year.

It so wimdy in Boulder they’re worried they may lose control of the fundamentals of time! In the circumstances, “No time to repair estimate is available”. Atomic clocks and accurate time sources are an absolute wonder. Fingers crossed the global time system is robust enough to cope.

It seems flu this year is only early, not unprecedentedly bad. It is still possible it takes off again or drags on for a long run, but it is trending down from an ordinary peak. Scaremongering is bad and corrosive of trust, whether as anti-strike politics or a misguided attempt to boost vax take up.

As I keep saying, a lot of bad things follow when the price of generating plausible bullshit falls through the floor. The problem in scholarly publishing appears to be worsening.

Welll done everyone, you've all done really well this week! And indeed this whole year. It has been such an enormously challenging time. And yet you have made it through, by being the absolutely fantastic people you are. Well done, all the best for the weekend, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

AI-generated survey responses! I ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a thing. OTOH I have been saying all along that a lot of bad things follow when the price of plausible bullshit falls through the floor. www.qualtrics.com/support/surv...

This is great fun on “Jingle Bells, Batman smells …”. Not to be too Reviewer 2 about it, but the work would be significantly enhanced by relating it to earlier work on the topic, such as Tom Scott’s excellent survey analysis of the Simpsons effect: youtu.be/V5u9JSnAAU4?...

Work Christmas quiz host asked for selfies. Accidentally sent mine as a reply all to the whole company. Thought I'd got away with it. Alas not. Turns out everyone did notice, they just didn't reply all about it. Mocking me about it is likely to be a highlight of the quiz. Ah well.

This is my new favourite stupid Bayes joke. Easier to explain than referring to the Effective Altruists' purchase of Wytham Abbey near Oxford as the Bayesian Priory, which is quite high context.

In chess, any pawn has the potential to be promoted to a queen if it reaches the final rank. Except it almost never happens, and on the rare occasions it becomes inevitable ... the game usually ends before it happens with a resignation . Similar to how the king is never captured.

Worsening discharge delays seems more plausible as a reason for there being serious problems in hospitals than flu showing up early. If it turns out a bad season as well as early it could be quite grim. And as I like to say, there’s no fix to the NHS without a fix to social care - still delayed.

Hooray! Life expectancy is back to pre-pandemic levels. We are not likely to see the pace of increase in life expectancy we saw before 2010/11 or so, but we are back to a decent level.

Frustrating that the BBC is using 'Eat Out to Help Out' to represent Covid scheme fraud, when it was (relatively) well designed to minimise fraud, given the circumstances. It's my go-to example of a really excellently designed and delivered initiative ... aimed at the wrong outcome.

Flu is early this season, not terrible (yet). Early is actually good if it means the peak is over before overlapping with other winter illnesses: less pressure on care. Early is bad if it means the peak turns out much higher. We don’t know which yet. Still worth getting the vax if you haven’t.

Research: “Computer access improved students’ computer skills but did not enhance their cognitive skills.” Gen X geeks who had access to a micro growing up:

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