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  Is there a word for continuing to watch a TV show just to see how bad it can get? Like Dark Matter.

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  Profound words from the manual

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  Australian spiders not scary enough for you? Well now it seems they build catapults. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ballista-spider-new-discovered-web-traps-green-ants-queensland/106831796

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  The British Library is always worth a visit. Here's a typewritten document by Alan Turing: "I propose to investigate the question as to whether it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour. It is usually assumed without argument that it is not possible..."

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  Outside of my immediate social circle it seems like a high proportion of people are conspiracy theorists. We have entire TV channels that seem to be nothing but alien conspiracy documentaries. Has "conspiracy theory" taken over as the main religion of the US?

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  I'll be listening many times more but nothing on Inferno has really grabbed me so far. Tomorrow's Harvest is still the greatest album ever made.

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  There are a lot of District line stations that are place-names in the US: Monument, Richmond, South Kensington, Temple, Tower Hill, Victoria, Westminster and Wimbledon.

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  I enjoyed the metaness of the moment as I sat down in Pret à Manger, King's Cross station, surrounded by Pottermania, to sip my cappuccino and start my new book which coincidentally started at King's Cross station with the protagonist surrounded by Pottermania. (Slow Horses, if you were wondering.)

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  TIL the now defunct silverware company Oneida (who manufactured our own silverware) started as a sex cult whose membership included one (actually successful) assassin of a US president https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community

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  I've never heard of this book by Fred Hoyle before (Ossian's Ride) but I was sold when I read the blurb and first paragraph.

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  Bank holiday, hottest day of the year, and yet this beach on the south coast of England is almost empty...

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  The most perfectly post-apocalyptic beach I've ever visited. The looming nuclear reactor complex gives it all a bit of a Stålenhag feel.

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  I enjoyed watching The Mandalorian and Grogu even if the target audience is about 8 years old. I guess I was mildly annoyed by the whole gladiator has to win just one more fight story that's as old as the hills and always plays out the same way. But Grogu and the Anzellans made up for that and it was cool to see some instantly recognizable Phil Tippett stop motion. I watched it in Borehamwood where the original Star Wars was made, one day shy of its 49th anniversary.

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  I'm sure Google can't actually be using generative AI to create plausible train times around London but after a week I'm yet to see any real train that corresponds to anything listed by Google Maps.

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  Vanity purchase on eBay due to having a mention in it. But check out these ads. I tried doing something with Shortcuts on my iPhone this morning but I think that Sharp might do it many times better. Only problem is I now have to figure out how to restore failed glue in a "perfect bound" magazine from the 80s.

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  At 11.82 bits per English word, a 40x40 jpg is worth a thousand words.

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  All day long. Copying numbers from emails and texts to web sites. From little plastic cards to apps. Digging them out from old emails to copy to web sites. 6 digits. 4 digits. 12 digits alphanumeric. All day long. Make it stop! I'm not a number copying machine.

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  40999180004300000 / 999970000299999 = 41. 00041 # prime 00043 # prime 00047 # prime 00053 # prime 00061 00071 00083 # all three prime 00097 00113 00131 00151 00173 # yes, still prime 00197 00223 00251 00281 00313 00347 00383 # even more prime 00421 00461 00503 00547 00593 00641 00691 00743 # still all prime 00797 00853 00911 00971 01033 01097 01163 01231 # more same 01301 01373 01447 01523 01601 ... # you get the picture

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  Often a machine can do a task better than a human. But economics being what it is, what may actually happen is that machines can do a worse job for a lot less money and for that reason the machines take over that task. People warned us about superintelligent machines taking over. What will actually happen is that almost every aspect of our lives will be dominated by machines less intelligent than humans.

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  Movie idea: elaborate plot to hijack an aircraft involving hijackers making a movie with the sole purpose of winning a large hunk of metal that they could use as a weapon on an aircraft. Clearly there is an audience for whom this is a plausible story. An Emmy might be better than an Oscar. A friend of mine had a bit of hassle trying to bring his back one year...

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  The US has basically abandoned democracy and replaced it with some kind of weird game involving fractals.

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  Something it took me many years to appreciate is this: a lot of constructions in algebra can be interpreted as figuring out what you can precompute when you're not sure what's coming next. The first example I was taught may have been the free group on some generators. You're basically saying "well I don't know how to multiply these things so I'll just record whatever I need now so when I do learn how to multiply elements I've already done...

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  "Edger Dijkstra, one of the greatest computer scientists of our age and a spiritual descendant of Plato, has claimed that the development of the microprocessor has put computing back twenty-five years. His assertion is based on the view that the easy availability of computing power to people with no systematic training in good programming will lead to the wholesale abandonment of the standards and techniques painstakingly developed over the years by him and his colleagues; all the old m...

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  Astounding story in the news today: the first ever sub 2:00:00 marathon. Even more astounding: two sub 2:00:00 marathons in one race. Sebastian Sawe followed by Yomif Kejelcha. https://apnews.com/article/marathon-record-sawe-london-under-two-hours-8481a99809f19e0dd2cafca36bd3676a

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  @sjb And spotlight beams! https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/jets-that-appear-faster-than-light/ It's funny, when faced with things like this we have to tighten up our language about what exactly the "thing" is in "nothing travels faster than light".

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  @aspiwack.bsky.social @pigworker A spreadsheet of numerically valued cells 🧾p can be computed by taking a spreadsheet of cells of formulae 🧾(🧾p->p) each of which can evaluate its value by reference to the entire spreadsheet of values. See http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/11/from-l-theorem-to-spreadsheet.html Or even https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Functional-pearl%3A-getting-a-quick-fix-on-comonads-Foner/d32b9d33edabc21a20eb5428c6d089e3d03016b9

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  @EdCates You do know 30% of people are completely unaware that anyone else exists?

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  @mjd You can do better than asking for code audits. I asked Claude to write its own tools to detect things like classes doing too much work, or grouping parameters together in a class. It did a great job. Also cuts down on tokens used.

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  I'm enjoying that after some hacking I can now run BBC Micro ROMs in the terminal. Here I recreate a piece of code that someone demonstrated to me at high school back in the 80s and which probably changed my thinking about computers and mathematics forever. He showed me that in Prolog we could define addition and multiplication using 4 simple axioms. And more importantly, this is executable logic. And the thing that really blew my mind: unmodified this code can also divide. I guess it...

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  I sort of have this mathematical picture of why physical therapy is useful even though it sometimes seems counterintitive due to it exercising the very body parts that you damaged through use. Damage to the body, let's say muscle for now, stimulates repair mechanisms. But there's a nonlinearity in the repair. For example, in ordinary every day use you are always doing minor damage to muscles and that damage is always being repaired so you end up in a steady state. But if you st...