Mike Page

If this Lammy/Vance/celebrity/Cotswolds nexus isn’t an argument for sortition and deliberative democracy, then I’m not sure what is https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czr68vde7nvo

The business secretary Jonathan Reynolds says the racist protesters intimidating asylum seekers in Epping are "upset for legitimate reasons.”
I don't remember any Labour frontbencher saying the same about people protesting the genocide in Gaza. On the contrary, they've criminalised peaceful dissent.

I reluctantly admit you have a point, but I’m still quite chuffed with its renaissance. I had to get it on DVD because nobody streamed it, even when that had become the default. Come down to NW11 for a screening!

@mattpagefilm.bsky.social Finally this comes good, with Front Row heralding Absolute Beginners as an unacknowledged classic AND quoting Scorcese to the same effect! Where’s your Prince of Thieves now, eh!? https://x.com/mike_page/status/1272606900757172224?s=46&t=mHqDYMcMxepCmX_hjbyhkw

Heroes ✊👏

…and always print the name and affiliation on any badge, so that those of us who occasionally fail to retrieve the names of even people we know well, can craftily look at the name while sagely stating “ah, still at University of X, I see”

Have you worked out the gCO2/p.km? 😉

There's been a bigger scandal over a BBC documentary about the horrors inflicted by Israel against Palestinian children, over an irrelevant detail, than the horrors inflicted by Israel against Palestinian children.

The world turned on its head.

Depraved. Deranged.

Thanks, I’ll look at that with interest. I guess my problem is why add the lime at all? Limecrete typically needs a timber frame for structure. So why not just fill the timber frame with hemp fibre insulation and forget the lime? This is bound to be better from an emissions perspective, I think.

Hi. I’m not sure that it’s ever neutral because there are typically two sources of CO2: the fuel for the kiln and the gas driven off the CaCO3. Moreover, the finished block is not, I think, structural, and is a worse insulator than the hemp itself. I do worry about Hempcrete…

I don’t suppose you need someone to test their Immediate Serial Recall every day or so…

“Snapping up US researchers”, while making UK academics redundant, is not a very strong look.

Can recommend @garymarcus.bsky.social on these and related issues. He’s been very good on this question for a long time.

I once purchased a smoked eel with Jonathan Meades.

Traditionally, “The Backs”, King’s College Chapel, the streets around the Colleges in the centre (near Market Square), Fitzwilliam Museum, maybe St John’s/Trinity, etc.. Good buildings at Queen’s (Silver St). I think you’d like Kettle’s Yard - be sure to see the house, not just the Gallery

Half empty, I think. A “real-terms freeze” is, as you know, a cut which, combined with the effects of similar incremental cuts to student funding over more than a decade, leaves the sector even more vulnerable. If we continue to settle for real-terms freezes, eventually we freeze to death.

In terms of (extended) anticipatory pleasure and ultimate irresistibility (as well as an outrageous DJ trap), I nominate Billy Stewart https://youtu.be/1VkA8HoB5m8

…and in tasks where participants are asked to generate, out loud, a continuous series of random digits, they produce many fewer immediate repetitions of a digit than they should.

Tbf, I don’t eat the peel either 😉

Off. I mean, so off. Definitely off.

I watched Groundhog Day again.

Absolutely. But I’d argue that those same highly-paid VCs failed effectively to oppose the fees’ freeze, and thereby trashed the sector. Their lack of solidarity was bought.

I fear that this depressing tendency of “representative” democracy to fail to provide effective representation, is a feature rather than a bug. David Van Reybrouck’s “Against Elections” quite good on the history of this. I’m on team sortion and communalism (Murray Bookchin), but unlikely to win!

If only they had a complete monopoly on degree-awarding powers. Oh, hang on…

(And, yes, I realized too late that I had put an apostrophe in VCs. The ignominy.)

I continue to believe that it is VC’s, including through UUK and the like, who are jointly responsible for this sorry situation. Until they show solidarity with their staff and with each other (a trait for which they are selected against), and get serious with Government, this will not improve.

I have just listened to “Limitarianism: the Case Against Extreme Wealth” by Ingrid Robeyns and can thoroughly recommend. Ten or so chapters of about an hour each. Comprehensive and convincing, IMO.

Mass starvation. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide.

That is what our government is enabling — and it should be eternally ashamed.

End all arms sales to Israel now.

Netanyahu is openly gearing up to commit a crime of unthinkable proportions - the forced ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, with the continued backing of the US. Every sane and civilized country must oppose this.

Every day that this barbarism is committed, and let to pass, further destroys our collective humanity.

An image of a partially eclipsed sun, magnified and projected through one side of a pair of binoculars

You can take the boy out of engineering, but…