New-Cleckit Dominie

It was only published in 1985. That's what, about fifteen years ago. Right?

(The state of mind, for those of you old enough to get Garrison Keillor references, is called a fake wobbegong daze.)

This is the face of a goosefish who has just lost his life's one chance of love when she realised he wasn't a tasselled wobbegong after all.

I would contribute to a crowdfunder to have someone hack this... gentleman's... Alexa and make it respond to every request with "Why can't you just grow up?", delivered in his own mother's voice.

At least there's not a failure to agree. Just a failure to agree about whether there's a failure to agree.

The "winter wonderland" being set up on the Green features a beer hall, make-you-dizzy rides, and axe throwing.

Suddenly I feel better about every risk-assessment form I have ever submitted.

Yakov Guminer's 1931 poster reading "The arithmetic of an industrial-financial counter-plan: 2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5".

So. 76 FTE posts to go, in addition to unquantified "retirements, non-replacement of posts and vacancy management". But at least we remain committed to delivering the Five-Year Plan.

for just £20 per month researchers can have unlimited access to my custom LLM which was trained on an extensive database of potsherds and answers "Druids!" to everything

"Hologram lecturers. AI coaching. Robot sandwich-makers."

Somebody needs to confiscate the Loughborough PR team's collection of Red Dwarf videos.

That was the aspect that caught my eye: it has the flavour of a mature technology, about which people had spent a lot of time thinking and experimenting to squeeze the maximum reliable communication through the channel.

I've just been sent the slides from a talk by @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social on Indigenous smoke telegraphy in Australia.

Pre-print here: heartily recommended for anyone who's trying to broaden their base of historical mathematics.

arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15350

Trilithorns.

In the interests of fairness, any quines ditto will also get tea and biscuits.

Got the subway up to Hillhead this afternoon, for the first time in years. It's a truly remarkable public transport system: how many cities are there where you can have the experience of being made seasick underground?

People, people. What have we said about ragebait?

*class shuffles uncomfortably*

And what have we said about the D*ily M*il?

*class goes very quiet; studiously avoids eye contact*

Thank you.

"Throughout history people have wondered..."

Thank you: mighty fine, indeed!

There would be worse ways to spend my time tbqh.

A bit antisocial, that.

We seem so far to have escaped the local epidemic of tagging, but that's probably just because we're on a well-lit corner and nobody suspects us of having a football affiliation.

Any loons who turn up wanting to constitute themselves our armed guard will be spoken to kindly but firmly and fed tea and biscuits until they calm down a bit.

For the record: I'm on the vestry of a church in an area where Christianity is probably the fourth largest religion. Here is a comprehensive summary of all the trouble we have had from our Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, or indeed atheist neighbours:

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Thank you for reading.

I guess these wingnuts don't even know their inaccurate Glasgow history well enough to blame it on the Hell Fire Club.

Aye. Flying is the one context in which I've had to use a wheelchair, because the alternative was trekking the length of a major hub airport against the clock. It was an informative experience and I hope I don't have to do it again.

An important side issue: as someone with intermittent mobility issues, your options when flying are (a) wheelchair or (b) nothing.* If you can't risk having to dash for a departure gate, you need (a).

* Some airlines combine the two options by losing or breaking the wheelchair.

"If you can crack the mine with the hammer, you will never grow old."

(From an original joke by Lewis Carrol, ofc.)

If nobody has yet made the straight-to-the-bargain-bin movie Bears On A Ship, we need it.

How a New Hampshire libertarian utopia was foiled by bears Seriously, this happened. You should absolutely read about it.

It is never a bad time to post this reminder of what happens to places when they're run by people who don't think you need to understand how anything works:

www.vox.com/policy-and-p...

I am prepared to spray paint "AI" on the mine and sell it to them for a 500% markup.

(For any mods reading: landmines are bad and they are not full of yummy candy, and I am not suggesting that anyone should do this.

For any techbros reading: oh who am I kidding; as if you people read.)

Idly wondering how many techbros you'd lose if you gave each of them a landmine and a hammer, and told them that the mine was full of yummy candy but poor people were too stupid to crack it open.