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On Lifestyle Design <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Microsoft researchers found white-collar workers are adding a 9pm shift to their workday.<br><br>I wrote about why:<br><br>- your entire day is filled with online meetings<br>- flexible work empowers night owls<br>- more global teams<br>- WFH + parenting = "triple peak" day<a href="https://t.co/QO8dwcwo8Y">https://t.co/QO8dwcwo8Y</a> <a href="https://t.co/DyYH47oCOi">pic.twitter.com/DyYH47oCOi</a></p>— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) <a href="https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1510965707688890374?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 4, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> What I’ve learned A couple of months of invoices in the …

Lady rona finally deigned to come and visit, with comically bad timing. It’s pretty nasty, even after vaccination. On the other hand, the freezer is well stocked, and I had a week off of work anyway, so I’m just going to suck it up and catch up on some sleep and podcasts and maybe attempt to make some soup.I now have faith in lateral flow tests. I was beginning to …

One highlight of the fortnight was going on a tour of friend’s Animal Crossing islands. With a WhatsApp call for chat. It makes you realise how big the game is – not in what you can do, but in the number of characters, and the number of objects. It’s all so extra – the detailing, the actions, and most of all the weird algorithms that power everything that happens. They’ve …

Shostakovich’s Sixth and Ninth symphonies clearly belong together – flip sides of the same coin, the composer wrong-footing the Soviet establishment with an irony bordering on insanity. The opening Largo of the Sixth is one of his greatest deceptions and Steven Lloyd-Gonzalez (in this his debut recording for First Hand Records) ladles on the intensity in what is clearly music of serious consequence. Or so Shostakovich leads us to believe. …

SUMMARY OF THE PAPERS Conference report for ‘Britain Afraid: Imperial Insecurities and National Fears, 1798-1945’, organised by Dr James Crossland and hosted by Liverpool John MooresUniversity in collaboration with the Invasion Network, 21–22 June 2022 Anxieties related to the maintenance and expansion of the Empire, fear of internal radicalism,international extremism, and the invasion in Great... Continue Reading →

Many apologies to subscribers who received a notification of a new post earlier today. Unfortunately this was an error on my part. I was working on an upcoming essay and managed to hit the “publish” button in error well before the work was done. So I’ve unpublished, and will try to get on with finishing up the post itself. It’s actually part of a big long-term project and it’s going …

Gold pig charms that hide a tiny erotic photo viewed by peering into the pig's butt hole

This week, the 4th international conference on the history of physics finally took place at Trinity College Dublin. The event, supported by the Institute of Physics and the European Physics Society, was the fourth in an ongoing series of international conferences on the history of physics, a biennial series of meetings that aims to bring together professional historians and physicists with an interest in the history of their subject. It …

[Mr. Bingo, Fuckofftopus] Over the last year I’ve started to feel like an Octopus. This feeling began when I got an eerie sense that part of my brain had been damaged through the isolation of a forced lockdown. Octopuses distribute their neurological activity across nine centres; one central cortex and eight ‘mini-brains’ that are located in their tentacles. Their thinking is spread across their body. If a tentacle is damaged, …

I received a circular from Standard Life this morning in the email, offering advice on “How to pass on your pension to your loved ones”. This, I thought, was a bit previous as I have no intention of dying anytime soon, although I grudgingly admit that at some point it may have to happen. Like Woody Allen, however, I don’t intend to be there when it does. One of the …

Art is something made. Any work that demonstrates labor shows evidence of human effort. Not everything is art. This essay is like a walk in the park from the blogger of Architectural Comment.… Continue reading What Is Not Art? →

This year, I’ve helped 5 design teams draft their charter. At the outset of this work is a series of 4 2-hour group sessions (it used to be a one-day workshop in a conference room) to define different aspects of the team. Having done it a bunch now, I’ve developed a fairly strong agenda for conducting these sessions, which I’m now sharing publicly. Feel free to use it for your …

It’s the hottest day on record, the south coast swelters as we all look for a way to cool off… and on stage at Chichester Festival Theatre it is hotter still as their big summer musical is launched. So as I write this I’m thankful for two things – the air-conditioning that was added in Chichester’s 2014 relaunch and the sheer joy of Gershwin’s timeless tunes! It’s that glorious music …