And, from a totally different place, Derek Jarman, Modern Nature.

Janice Galloway, This Is Not About Me, and All Made Up.

Off the point but - can people stop describing Usha Vance as "Hindi"? Hindi is a language; and also describes people whose first language is Hindi. Usha Vance's first language is English, while her parents' family language is Telugu. By religion she is Hindu, not Hindi.

The Fortunes of Genomic Medicine: A Quarter Century of Promise Background The culmination of the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s came wreathed in promises of a revolution in medicine and healthcare. The ensuing quarter century has seen remarkable growth...

See also genomics for the past 25 years:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

With plenty of opportunity to repent in the morning.

Meanwhile, in Spain... rapture comes by the litre.

I visited the USPS museum in DC some time ago. Got the impression from the attendants that Americans view the mail with something like the same kind of affection as Brits for the NHS - equally dear, and equally endangered nowadays.

But more efficient of course. Of course?

Streaky

Dhol drummer and piper, low-angle view.

Dhol drummer and piper; Pride flag in the background.

I have zero time for any notion of what Scotland is or could be or should be that doesn't have plenty space for this.

Used to smuggle cocaine by the Medellin cartel?

The Wikipedia entry is not bad for describing the process. My partner's dad had a C19 hand press and spent happy days with a composing stick. A hugely skilled craft.

Should have been included ottermatically.

And vice versa.

Bluesky hive: Can anyone recommend any studies on eugenics and disability in France during the first half of the C20? Especially anything on neo-Lamarkianism and puericulture.

Depreciating the University of Edinburgh into the Ground — UCU Edinburgh There are four key takeaways from the University of Edinburgh’s 2024-25 annual report, which this post explores: The University continues to make a sizeable surplus. What financial pressures exi...

Great work by @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social on UoE's latest financial report. Depressing that a university doing pretty damn well financially (no deficit) compared to most of the sector choosing to destroy itself, and staff are all just sitting helplessly in the backseat of a slow motion car crash.

Marketed to/features slightly younger kids, but v engaging and of local (Alderley Edge) topographic interest: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner.
Dark teenage: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

One of those captcha things. This one says ‘select all images with bicycles. Click verify once there are none left’. There are 9 squares - 4 contain photos of bicycle seats, with the remaining 5 showing the beautiful head and face of a grey greyhound with a white stripe going from the top of their head to the tip of their nose.

Hats off to whoever did this (and the beautiful model).

Joy to the Wordle. (And a very happy holiday.)

Movie poster for The Graduate.

Ahem.

A real penguin would have realised there was something fishy about it.

Something for the weekend - I'll be smiling till Monday.

Huge congratulations to the wonderful Donna Haraway for winning the 2025 Erasmus Prize:
erasmusprijs.org/en/laureates...

Can all the folk who just got reminded that they’ve listened to a tonne of music on streaming this year, have a look at the music they heard and buy some on bandcamp today? 🫡🙏🏼

See also Scotland, where Scottish Labour is desperately trying show it's different from Westminster Labour, but being sidelined by WL on Scottish issues. The Holyrood elections in May will be interesting...

Scarcely a month after Labour lost a supposedly comfortable Welsh seat to Plaid too.

An exciting opportunity to do some important groundwork for a growing museological interest in video games at the National Museum of Scotland.

Domesticating models: On the contingency of Covid-19 modelling in UK media and policy - Lukas Engelmann, Catherine M Montgomery, Steve Sturdy, Cristina Moreno Lozano, 2023 Our article traces the representation of pandemic modelling in UK print media from the emergence of Covid-19 to the early stages of implementing the first UK-wi...

It wasn't just the policy makers who panicked. The SAGE modellers did too, when one of their less prominent members (who happened to have real-world experience of epidemics) pointed out the futility of modelling for herd immunity. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

And Robert Fripp is Norwegian for Robert Freakout.