I’d managed to miss this book when it came out and only read it last week! It felt like the enthusiasm for Florence that comes out of you at every con and in every relevant post distilled into novel.

Had a lovely ten minutes this afternoon watching a cormorant fishing in the bay at Es Cana. Really not immediately obvious from rear view it was bird rather than something in the seal or otter line: a sleek brown back above water and the folded wings looking rather foot-like.

It feels there ought to be a better word than “inoperable” for “this cancer can’t be removed by surgery and requires immunotherapy or a targeted inhibitor” - ‘inoperable’ seems final and terminal whilst I think most people would prefer targeted chemo- or antibody therapy to aggressive surgery.

Make index table of size p^2 to save having to implement binary search.

Memory usage of code is O(N^3/p)

So getting it to fit in RAM as N goes up requires increasing p. At which point the index table stops fitting in RAM. Guess I have to implement binary search now :(

Thank you for mentioning this, it has not been well advertised!

After ten weeks on quite a fast computer with 200GB of memory, I discovered that 861^8 + 1953^8 + 2012^8 + 3113^8 = 1128^8 + 2557^8 + 2767^8 + 2823^8.

A few minutes later I discovered that Nuutti Kuosa had found this in 2006, presumably using much less compute :(

5^10+23^10+34^10+34^10+85^10+92^10 = 16^10+25^10+28^10+32^10+71^10+95^10 is the smallest number that can be written in two ways as a sum of six tenth powers; 1^10+8^10+15^10+26^10+26^10+33^10+38^10 = 22^10+23^10+24^10+29^10+32^10+35^10+36^10 is the smallest with seven.

I remember being very irritated by the layout of that document the last time datacentres in space came up and I wanted those figures from it …

There are also the Heat Rejection System radiators (page 14 of that document), six sets each 23.3 by 3.4 metres (each set being eight fold-out panels because the whole thing had to fold into a Shuttle cargo bay) for a total rejection of 70kW. 14kW is per PVR.

Most elements cannot be spelled using element-symbols because you can't do -ium. I am amused that the two newest elements, TeNNeSSiNe and OGaNeSSON, can. Also that SiLvEr became spellable when livermorium (116 Lv) was named in 2012.

I spend on average a pound a week on Samsung remote controls because we have a dog :(

The FT is owned by Nikkei in Japan, who are fairly independent of UK politics.

Is there something about hydrostatic pressure that makes 'transparent plastic water jug should survive a two-metre drop onto tile while full, and also not damage the tile' a difficult design requirement?

Harry Styles and Anthony Joshua among UK's top tax payers The former One Direction member-turned-solo artist appears on the Sunday Times list for the first time.

I am confused by the reporting here: I’m pretty sure individuals dont pay corporation tax so i dont understand why the analysis mentions corporation tax rates www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Lovely! Should get some gorgeous globular cluster shots

Do they? I mean, most of them read the news and can empathise with Jack Ma who went from the Jeff Bezos of China to public enemy #27-or-so overnight, or Khodorkovsky who went from richest man in Russia to nine years in labour camp and >90% of his wealth confiscated.

More members of Liz Truss's cabinet are in Reform than in Badenoch's shadow cabinet...

It’s not *very* therapeutic - it looks as if it’s for the destroy-the-cancerous-bone-marrow step before bone marrow transplant. I had thought that was done by massive radiation dose rather than chemically, but I guess chemicals can be slightly more targeted.

The people who were afraid when Reagan and Thatcher were running for office that they wouldn’t get a meaningful state pension are now mostly retired and getting a meaningful state pension. This is an unfounded belief.

Weber State with a "WTF did I just watch? (Complimentary)" to win the partner stunt competition at nats

www.instagram.com/reel/DTmAnJx...

Looks like you can get lanthanum and erbium nitrates pretty cheaply on alibaba to test the column - as far as I can tell, separation is cheap enough in China that mischmetal is now quite pure cerium and swimming-pool-dephosphatiser quite pure lanthanum nitrate.

I guess if you’re starting with clay rather than fuel rods you can avoid having both complicated aliphatic phosphates and an excess of strong nitric acid, which is oxidatively over-exciting - it looks as if you can keep it all in conc. acetic though hydroxides will crash out if the pH goes high.

I love this exposition of the Hierarchy of Heaven (‘Santi protettori di Palermo invocano la grazia contro la peste’) - the people ask S. Rosalia who asks the Virgin Mary who asks Jesus who asks God. @adapalmer.bsky.social ‘s translation of grazia as ‘client-patron influence’ is an epiphany

A category of devotional object I hadn’t seen before - a manuscript order of service, from the Gloria to the blessing after the Mass, in an almost reliquary-grade frame

Somebody looked at the Garden of Unearthly Delights and decided to reproduce bits of it in 3D at tchotchke scale … www.clart-store.com . I do not have luggage space for something this fragile :(

Thank you, I hadn’t thought of using Google Books because I thought it only gave paragraph-size snippets.

Palermo Cathedral - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo... claims (citing a £155 academic text ed. Rosa Bacile from 2015) that the four porphyry coffins of Sicilian kings were probably made in Sicily from a column taken from the Baths of Caracalla or of Diocletian in Rome

Arancina con aranciata

Bother, I have followed my nose to a place where the roads don’t link up to where the bus goes from without retracing my steps. But look what beautiful flowering succulents I am lost by!

Palermo view from the top of Monreale cathedral

I am having trouble thinking of another city in a setting quite so good as Palermo. Lisbon’s not bad, am I missing somewhere obvious on the English coast where the hills go up to 2000 feet around and behind it? Are there places I could take a photo of Los Angeles not unlike this one?