Black Trinity/Three Silhouettes

Wrote the Wikipedia biography of Elizabeth Allen, a 'naive' artist who made beautiful patchwork tapestries of her daily life and folk and religious subjects. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabe...

Careful what you wish for, 3yo wanted a dinosaurs and trains birthday, and asked for the cake to be a tar pit with fossils you can eat.

(We ended up 3d printing fossils buried in a tiramisu)

I am concerned so few people can/are willing to name more than 5 dinosaurs! Half of the kids books section is about dinosaurs!

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast collection of web pages.

Journalists know that losing the Wayback Machine would be a nightmare: www.wired.com/story/the-in...

A baby carried on the back in a cardboard replica of the Orion spacecraft in from of a large Wikipedia logo

Two years baby and I won the #wikipedia Halloween contest for our disambiguation page costume: Orion (child) riding the Orion (spacecraft) above the Orion (nebula)

I saved it for #Artemis2 and I’m now the Earth and a launch/crash pas for the toddler powered spacecraft. How time flies. 🚀

What I mean is that we also put ourselves in this situation trying to be accurate 😂
Just had to explain static electricity and making the connection to his circuits building kit, could have stayed in the realm of practical experiments, but I don’t think about that until I’m in a pickle

Well you could also offer a different category/chain of explanations - “because you resemble not just us but also our parents and their parents” - which then maybe starts discussions about history or origins, and fits with mythological explanations of life?

I spend every day recovering from toddler bedtime existential crisis tbh

Toddler at bedtime wanted to know:
- how we have different hair color
- why we have DNA
- how atoms know they should be DNA and not other things
- how atoms make things that are hard and also soft
- how we know about atoms
- how there are atoms

How did parents manage before Wikipedia??

Yes and no. I find that there’s a lot more work that could be done, but Jonathan grudin has done a lot of excellent work. I haven’t read it yet (was planning to this week) but I have good hopes for Rendering history: the women of ACM-W

Discovering our Collective Potential with the Science of Wikipedia Wikipedia demonstrates the power of about focusing on unique perspectives, managing conflict, leadership through care, and the power of gratitude.

As @wikipedia.org turns 25, what do we learn from Wikipedians about our potential to organize for the common good? Yesterday @sarahagilbert.bsky.social & I gave a main stage talk at Wikipedia’s 25th birthday in NYC on the science of cooperation.

The talk is here: citizensandtech.org/2026/03/disc...

Ancient Egyptian Predynastic Statue of Woman with Child, Egyptian Gallery, Neues Museum, Berlin, Germany

The #WCCWiki meet-up for March is happening online on Tues 24 March, 13.00-15.00 GMT. All warmly welcome. Editing session on Zoom, with training if needed.

Join Zoom Meeting us06web.zoom.us/j/85192010168. Email womensclassicalcommittee@gmail.com for more info.

@womeninclassicsuk.bsky.social

Side note: Her work on Challenger was just as remarkable. I wish her work was better known outside of STS folks (so i wrote her wikipedia page back in the days, and it needs some love) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_V...

The book traces how the FAA held, and how we came to expect flying to be safe, highlighting the flexibility of operators. That this presidency broke the FAA is telling of just how much trouble we’re in.

The FAA had a remarkable safety record despite huge organizational setbacks (Reagan firing unionized controllers, understaffing, obsolete technologies).

Two pilots killed after Air Canada jet collision at LaGuardia in New York NTSB says investigation under way as nine people remain hospitalized after plane hit fire tuck on runway

I haven’t seen any coverage of this contextualizing it in the scholarship on FAA - especially Diane Vaughan’s 2021 book ‘Dead Reckoning’
She studied the FAA because it was a counterexample of how accidents emerge from normalized deviance in organizations www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Desire Paths for Wikipedia An extension that remembers the path of a cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia, “wearing” them into the page.

I've just published a new userscript that remembers the path of your cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia, averaging and wearing them into the page, showing your browsing history over time

Install at greasyfork.org/en/scripts/5... or read more about it everest-pipkin.com#projects/des...

Jürgen Habermas, influential German philosopher, dies at 96 German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has died at age 96. Habermas' work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figur...

RIP Jurgen Habermas - one of the five major social theorists of the past 60 years. Much to learn from his work. Many gaps, some errors, but he was so rigorous that he inspired some of the best simultaneously dissenting and generative thought of any postwar academic.

Tu peux citer la page en anglais sur frwiki - et traduire les citations en notes si vraiment ils insistent :)

I wish... Unfortunately that acronym just didn't mean what I thought it meant, and I have also not found parenting circles very welcoming to queer folks. It especially seems to make gender ever stricter.

Also FTM as first time mom - I sure was surprised for a long time about how many openly trans parents there were on the chat

Locally it’s also used for “Main Street Mammas” and eeeevery time I do a double take

Smearing Sussex (and Me): Responding to Nigel Biggar’s Latest Attack in The Spectator The University of Sussex, Feb 2026, taken by the author. Alan Lester The Spectator has published an article by Nigel Biggar smearing the University of Sussex as repressing students who ‘don&#…

The Spectator published this attack on me & colleagues just as the High Court is considering Sussex’s request for review of the Office for Students fine. It accuses us of ‘repressing’ our students. The magazine ignored my request for to reply. Please disseminate.

alanlester.co.uk/blog/smearin...

The layers of a floppy disk are exploded so that each is visible.

schematic illustration of a cathode ray tube, with each element labeled.

I often find myself wanting to explain to students how things like floppy disks work. Great series of explainers with really helpful illustrations. Just gotta remember where this is next time I need it! www.makingsoftware.com

Sped-read "Life After Ambition" by Amil Niazi that just came out. It's sadly not the greatest book; the pieces of her story don't hang together into a coherent whole. Also it's hard to buy that she is "post-ambition" when she has a column in the Cut AND a book out with three really little kids.

I missed it it seems, but I just wanted to say I appreciate your writing and your work :)

This resonated a lot for me - I grew up at a time we were building the EU, opening borders, thought the internet would give us access to unprecedented knowledge… Like, I remember how impressive and hopeful the EU parliament and flag felt. I don’t know how we can pass that on, right now.

Funnily enough, it followed from an earlier question: “how do I know I don’t have two moms [like my friend]”

Or like my 3yo today, “how do we know that something exists?”

The underground sign looks pretty funky. Wikimedia Commons has good AI filters and every image is free to use if that’s helpful :) commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categor...