Recently updated blogs

I wrote this for Times Higher Education a couple of weeks ago: The people who work in universities are made up of two tribes: tragedians and comedians. These tribes view each other with bewilderment across a seemingly unbridgeable mental and cultural divide. What makes things worse is that the tribes are not named as such, and no one ever declares or even knows which tribe they belong to or why. …

It’s been awhile since I blogged about mathematics. You know why, of course — there are so many issues in the real world, the imaginary world is just not as relevant as it used to be. Well, at least that’s how I felt until now. But the latest paper we wrote with Swee Hong Chan was so much fun (and took so much effort), the wait is over. There is …

Grouping items in an array is one of those things you've probably done a load of times. Each time you would have written a grouping function by hand or perhaps reached for lodash's groupBy function. The good news is that JavaScript is now getting grouping methods so you won't have to anymore. Object.groupBy and Map.groupBy are new methods that will make grouping easier and save us time or a dependency. …

English professor Michael Clune comments.

There are two new updates to high-end cameras, at either end of the ILC sensor spectrum. Let's take a look at the Micro 4/3 update first, the Panasonic G9II ($1,900), introduced yesterday. The new G9II. Look familiar? While I'm happy that Panasonic has introduced a new Micro 4/3 camera, updating the flagship stills-side body, some of the choices it made seem, let us just say, interesting. First of all, it …

The Enlightenment in Slovenian lands was initiated by a group of like-minded people who advocated the change of the linguistic and cultural practices of the time, which relied exclusively on the use of the Latin and German languages. The Slovenian educators believed that the national language could be used equally...

Richard Davis, whose soulful, pronounced upright bass was heard on a wide range of post-war sideman recordings—from chamber jazz and hard bop to free, funk, fusion and spiritual jazz—and on a variety of albums of his own, died on September 6. He was 93. [Photo above of Richard Davis] Davis began his recording career in the Ahmad Jamal Trio in 1954. Throughout the 1950s, he recorded extensively with Don Shirley …

This is a short book review and I will confess straight away that I have never read a book quite like it. The author is refreshingly honest about their own lived experience and their multiple divergence. The author was diagnosed with Autism and ADHD as a child and bipolar as an adult along with borderline personality disorder. The author grew up hating themselves and believing that they were a problem …

I’m very excited to announce my first proper album: Melodic Guitar Music. It’s ten original guitar tunes, inspired by Django Reinhardt, The Beatles and Chet Atkins. I’d describe the style as “Django phrasing + Chet Atkins fingerpicking + 1960s pop sensibility.” I’ve wanted to record an album for many, many years. I’ve been posting YouTube videos on-and-off since 2007, but generally the YouTube video format is very ephermal and not …

Nothing marks more eloquently the end of summer than the sight of a deserted beach. The joyful voices of children playing in the waves, once resonating in the salty air, have now vanished. A lone stranded barrel jellyfish, heavy with seawater and stripped of its ethereal qualities, has washed ashore, its beauty still intact, its frilly tentacles unfurling beneath its purple-edged umbrella that, white and blueish, shimmers under the September …

It's very good. Available to buy from Do, from Bookshop, from Amazon and from other places.

The government is changing the rules of the work capability assessment in an effort to push more people into work and thinking of cutting benefits. There's a link between this and those incessant scam phone calls we all get. To see it, remember a fact which most political journalists neglect because of their focus on the minutiae of Westminster court politics. It is that the nature of capitalism shapes politics. …

Introduction to everythingPlease note that I really do like Enigma, and I have mad respect for everybody who designed its levels, since the levels are an essential part of the game. As you read, please try to keep this in mind, even when my review sounds negative or occasionally sarcastic.There is a puzzle game called Enigma. The player controls a black marble and rolls it around a top-down view to …

Full Circle

In light of the fact that Twitter (‘X’) has become completely unusable / untenable for self-promotion over the course of the past year, we’ve discontinued regular posting on that particular social media service. We’ve finally decided to set up shop …