- We go live with by-elections for Parliament 55, meaning our election result website now has every election to the House of Commons since 2010 > electionresults.parliament.uk
- We swap out some Rush identifers for some Wikidata identifiers.
- We lost Young Rachel :-(
hurrah for identifiers! tho I am now wondering if we ever resolved the issue of the tiny handful of people with two Rush IDs.
Telegraph newspaper editorial on Mandelson's appointment in December 2024 versus editorial today
apropos of absolutely nothing, I have just opened a memoir by a magistrate's court clerk and found this on a judge circa 1920:
"He had been one of a team of learned counsel [...for the DPP...] but his indecision and diffidence became so acute and held up the work that he had to be got rid of."
Right, people have in fact noticed that the big AI companies aren’t actually doing anything to ameliorate the social impacts they keep talking about.
And on Thursday, I'll be chairing this panel on some of the ways that AI tools are disrupting publishing bsky.app/profile/uclo... - both free to attend, do come along!
I'll be speaking at a seminar on AI and expertise next Wednesday, following on from my work on AI, publishing, and disinformation risks - pages.thebulletin.org/2026-0422-ex...
It continues remarkable that the Labour ministry is pissing away the opportunities presented by its once-in-a-generation 174-seat majority in the House of Commons on the twin altars of pretending that Peter Mandelson wasn't a wrong 'un and appeasing elderly racists.
And on Thursday, I'll be chairing this panel on some of the ways that AI tools are disrupting publishing bsky.app/profile/uclo... - both free to attend, do come along!
I'll be speaking at a seminar on AI and expertise next Wednesday, following on from my work on AI, publishing, and disinformation risks - pages.thebulletin.org/2026-0422-ex...
In 2019, I defended my PhD on 'It's not X, it's Y' and similar constructions, which I call contrastive negation constructions. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that 'It's not X, it's Y' would become the topic of comment pieces in newspapers.
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One reason the AI industry (something separate though complicatedly enmeshed with AI research) invokes such hostile responses is that it has failed to produce legible public good while loudly proclaiming the likelihood of annihilating jobs in the service of extreme wealth.
So here's a thing we've been thinking about: AI makes it easier to do a lot of things, which can be good on an individual level but causes capacity problems in public services that depended a bit on it being hard to do things.
I too aspire to have an API limit and for you to either pay me more to keep working, or wait until after I've had a nap
Finally, we've found a job that we all agree can be replaced with an AI!
Huh, four in the UK! 1927, 1932, 1944 & 1957.
Some of them got weird. There were dozens of baby Marxes (the first in 1850!) and Lenins, a few called Stalin (and one Stalina!) ... but perhaps the one who got the worst of the deal was Miss Mussolini Smith (born in Selby, 1932).
Finally, spare a thought for the more awkwardly-named Laboria Barber (1873), Laboura McKenzie (1879) & Labora Oates (1887)...
There were four families with baby "Liberal"s between 1840 and 1885. 1850 had a Liberal Reform Darby (!) born in Tendring, and in 1885 a Liberal Heneage Brown born in north Lincs; probably not unrelated to a nearby Liberal MP being one Edward Heneage.
an unexpected @victoriancommons.bsky.social angle to this: in 1865 a family in London welcomed young Palmerston Russell Pratt. On the other side, 1869 saw a Disraeli Tory Gillet in Liverpool, and the following year a Disraeli Stanley Irving.
More bipartisan was Russell Stanley Shuttleworth, 1868.
this weekend I sat down and hacked together a very inefficient script to fulfill a simple goal: tell me if there is a snake in a film without having to watch it. Amazingly, it works. github.com/generalist/s...
Scientists have been working very hard and have finally achieved what many thought impossible: a Mail Online comments section defending a Labour MP.
Talked to Wikipedians about AI all day. A thing that came through loud and clear: editors are experiencing AI as an outright high-volume assault. That is related to, but much more intense than, “I tried AI in 2024 and it sucks”. People building AI tools for wikipedians have to grapple with that.
On 12 April 1866 Sir Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood, MP for Preston 1832-47, died.
He is most well-known today for founding and giving his name to the seaside town of Fleetwood in Lancashire. Find out more about his career and legacy via this article by Dr Kathryn Rix for @victoriancommons.bsky.social.
Spurious Home Office decisions rejecting student visas are threatening universities' ability to enrol young people from abroad, it is claimed. New rules come into effect in June that will punish universities if more than 4 per cent of study visas are rejected by the Home Office. However, the changes coincide with a marked increase in the numbers of visas being refused by the Home Office on spurious and inaccurate grounds, according to research by universities that has been shared with The Times. Neither students nor universities are able to challenge the decisions, which are often taken months after a university has accepted the applicant and in some cases just days before they are due to start studying.
UKVI carries out discretionary "credibility interviews" to ascertain that a student's intentions to study here are genuine. In another interview, when asked why they had chosen to apply to their chosen institution, the applicant said they had considered several factors, including the university's ranking, employability support, student satisfaction while also noting that it was an ancient institution and cited the year it was founded. The UKVI rejected the application, explaining that they were not satisfied the applicant was genuine given they had quoted the wrong founding year. The university subsequently confirmed that the applicant had provided the correct year and the UKVI caseworker was incorrect, but the decision could not be reconsidered.
In another case a foreign student was rejected from obtaining a visa to study at the University of East Anglia due to a dispute over whether the university was in Norfolk. The applicant asserted correctly that it was, but the UKVI caseworker appeared to confuse Norfolk with Norwich, which is the capital of the county, and rejected the application - believing the applicant was wrong.
In another credibility interview the applicant was asked to describe some of the taught modules they would be studying as part of their degree. The applicant explained that they had been offered a place to study a PhD in biomedical engineering which was fully research-based so did not have any taught modules. Despite this, the UKVI refusal letter stated that they were not satisfied on the basis that their answers were "vague and generic" and had failed to explain the taught modules they would be studying.
It is almost, almost, impressive just how Labour have taken the massively dysfunctional and incompetent Home Office and managed by dint of policies and rhetoric to make it even more dysfunctional and incompetent. It is a true testament to how hostile they are to migrants.
archive.today/07Hdr
idle bit of #wikidata curiosity: the most famous fictional characters, using wikipedia sitelinks as a proxy for fame - qlever.dev/wikidata/uYS...
most famous American is Spiderman (114x), the UK has Sherlock Holmes (106x), then Switzerland (William Tell, 68x).
Graph of birth registrations for "Ava" 1837-1979; a big jump in the 1950s
Graph of birth registrations for "Myrna" 1837-1979; a big jump in the 1930s
Film stars had a much more pronounced effect than their characters: the system is struggling a bit with getting full data for some names, but here is "Ava" and about 80% of the records for "Myrna".
So I passed him some very good advice, that if you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk-lamp. The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.
“[I]f you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat.”
—Nancy Hawkins, the majestic narrator of Muriel Spark’s A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON, on why a writer should own a cat
#BookwormSat 🐈⬛
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the data for this is a bit more vibes-based than it might appear: especially in later years it's common to have multiple entries for a single name, because of double surnames or middle names? But the jump is pretty unambiguous regardless.
A jackdaw standing on a sloping surface. It has a large scrap of cardboard in its beak, and it is twisting its head round as if wrestling with it.
A jackdaw in Whithorn demonstrating the ancient rural art of opening an Ordnance Survey map in the wind.
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