The Chalkdust guide to: Citation metrics - Chalkdust Confused by other academics telling you about their h-index? Then this handy guide may be just what you need!

New citation metrics: chalkdustmagazine.com/regulars/the...

'Industrial scale' solar farms attacked by Norfolk's Green The county council's Green leader says solar panels should be locally owned and put on roofs.

I see the Greens are opposing (checks notes) solar power now.

I like Sierpinksi Triangles so I made this - because tortilla chips are trianglar too, do you see?

TBH I think it worked better in my head...

It’s above my number theory ability to follow it fully, but one part of it is an interesting Markov chain down through the divisors of a number n. From n, you take out a prime power of p^k, thereby moving to n/p^k, with probability log p / log n; keep repeating until the leftover number gets small.

Some interesting discussions about a genuine AI breakthough on Erdős problem 1196 www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread... going on over at the other place; eg. this thread by Thomas Bloom x.com/thomasfbloom... or this one by Jared Duker Lichtman x.com/jdlichtman/s...

‘Field of Dreams stuff’: will Leeds finally get its trams after decades of promises? Plans for return of such transport have been discussed for years, and not all local people believe that service will come

Increasingly going to start calling myself part of the 'Lost Leeds Tram Generation. My last words to my grandchildren before the Dignitas injection takes me will be that Leeds is the biggest city in Europe without a mass transit system.

‘Field of Dreams stuff’: will Leeds finally get its trams after decades of promises? Plans for return of such transport have been discussed for years, and not all local people believe that service will come

“The root cause is that the Department for Transport is based in London, the Treasury is based in London, the political decision was taken in London. There needs to be local tax-raising. If we had devolution we would get this stuff done.” www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

It's a bit depressing that in 2026, a Labour leader is promising to block a congestion charge. I have no particular knowledge of the Glasgow plan, but history shows us that in almost every case, congestion charges work for basically everyone.

Thx for the nom.

This is exactly why we need to take on the CIBABs.

open.substack.com/pub/chriscur...

To grow the economy we need more trams, and fewer kebabs Britain’s second-tier cities are being held back by a simple problem, too many people still cannot get across them quickly enough to reach the jobs, customers and opportunities that drive growth.

1. I think this is (mostly) right.
2. It’s reassuring that there are MPs out there thinking about serious problems as methodically as this.
3. I will post anything that advocates for the Leeds tram.
chriscurtismk.substack.com/p/to-grow-th...

Had fun in the bookshop pretending to browse the fiction section but actually eavesdropping on the staff discussing marketing and sales for reissued old books. (“We sold 200 copies of [redacted], even though everybody hated it,” they said, referring to a book I have bought but not yet read.)

The Gathering Storm Save yourself, serve yourself, world serves its own needs

“The final tankers from the Gulf will arrive in Europe around 10th April, and I fear that soon after that is when things will start to get messy.” bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-gather...

I thought that if I redrew that Bluesky graph (bsky.app/profile/jame...) with the number of daily likers on a log-scale, then it would reveal lots of extra information on trends that would be helpful for understanding. But it turns out it looks exactly the same. But I made the effort, so:

4-panel comic. (1) [Black panel with white text boxes] TEXT BOX: And God said, "Let there be light," (2) [Sun radiating light.] TEXT BOX: And there was light. (3) [View of bright sun rising over Earth's horizo] (4) TEXT BOX: God saw that light was-- [Chat bubble from Earth] CHAT BUBBLE: Can you add support for dark mode? Open xkcd.com to view toggles for different modes.

CREATION

Happy April Fool's Day!

xkcd.com/3227/

Am ill in bed today, but it means I could watch the Dwars door Flanderen cycling race, and the last 10 minutes was a banger!

A final (I hope) footnote to this, via Ben Sixsmith on X: Alex Preston, the plagiarist, is the brother of Preston, né Sam Preston, of Ordinary Boys / Celeb Big Brother / storming off Never Mind the Buzzcocks fame.

Why LLMs Ruin Everything Reading, Writing: feat. Matt Goodwin, Alex Preston and the Bookpocalypse

FWIW, Sam Leith has a quote from Alex Preston, author of the plagiarised NYT review, here, and it seems somewhat plausible to me. samleith.substack.com/p/why-llms-r...

Down here in the self-replies where no one will see it, I will say that I prefer the (plagiarised) NYT review to the (original) Guardian review. The Guardian writer delivered mostly a big hunk of plot summary, while the NYT writer (or the AI?) knowledgeably put the book into wider context.

The Guardian: “A scientist, an inventor, a futurist, a voracious reader with a photographic memory and, according to local rumour, shapeshifting powers, Viola wishes to fly like poet-pilot Gabriele d’Annunzio, but her parents require her to marry money and reproduce. And the ‘repulsive little creature’ who falls into her bedroom while undertaking repairs on the Orsini roof is a long way from their idea of marriage material. “In secret, though, the pair cling to each other. Cosmic twins, contrarians desirous of a new world…”

“A scientist and an inventor with a photographic memory, she dreams of flight like the poet-pilot Gabriele d’Annunzio. Her parents, however, expect her to marry well and reproduce. The ‘repulsive little creature’ who crashes into her bedroom while repairing the roof is not their idea of a suitable match. Yet Viola and Mimo become what Viola calls ‘cosmic twins’: contrarians yearning for a new world…”

The Guardian: “But the novel is also rich in smaller characters, from the lazy Machiavellian Stefano to hardworking Vittorio, whose otherworldly twin brother Emmanuele is prone to speaking in tongues and dressing up in ragtag begged-and-borrowed uniforms: a clue to the note that sounds loudest in Watching Over Her. Because this is most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland. The Italy that produced both Mussolini and Fellini, fascists and futurists and communists; where ‘beauty is always imperilled’ and ‘genius grows like a weed‘.”

The New York Times: “The novel is also rich in secondary characters, from the lazy, Machiavellian Stefano to Mimo’s childhood friend and fellow craftsman Vittorio and Vittorio’s otherworldly twin, Emanuele, who speaks in tongues and dresses in scavenged uniforms. Together they populate what is ultimately a love song to a country of contradictions: battered, divided, misguided and miraculous. This is an Italy where life is performance, where circuses rise on wasteland, where beauty is perpetually imperiled and genius proliferates unchecked.”

This just looks like plain old boring copying to me.

Some thoughts of mine have ended up in the most recent ISBA Bulletin (isba-bulletin.github.io/ISBABulletin/); I think mostly consistent with what I've been posting here, but was anyhow a good exercise to try to articulate my thinking a bit. May try to blog more on this topic later.

Are we sure that NYT book review wasn’t just Good Old-Fashioned Plagiarism? Everyone seems very willing to believe the author that it was due to their using AI. But I could imagine thinking “if I blame this on misusing AI, maybe that will seem less bad than admitting I just plain copied stuff.”

In defence of the publisher, the "paper" (monograph?) is nearly 230 pages long...

Extremely intriguing top three search words on Oxford English Dictionaries at the moment

H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.

A fun one for the typography nerds! www.inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-f...

Always fun when the "list of corrections to errors introduced into our paper by the publishers" reaches its tenth page...

Earlier today, a colleague mentioned in passing "you know, that massive book about the American ... architect??", and the eagerness with which I immediately butted in with "THAT'S 'THE POWER BROKER' AND I'M CURRENTLY READING IT, ACTUALLY" is now, in hindsight, very embarrassing to me.

Agree! (So far; I’m two episodes in.)

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq by Rory Stewart Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982 by Dominic Sandbrook The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro

Little worried about how #WaterstonesDad my recent reading is. (38 Londres Street is excellent; Occupational Hazards is good, but not quite as good as The Places In Between; the Sandbrook – which I mostly listened to on audiobook – is fun, long, and the author is more Thatcher-sympathetic than me.)