Chris Stokes

Is lemon curd a citrus jam?

Next time the sun sets this late—4 March.

Yesterday I walked suburbia in fading light, ash-grey but shining thinly, licked with a glaze of cool. Silence fell suddenly as if everything had been switched off even my footsteps. A heron glided overhead, silent, effortless. Beneath it, a corkscrewing magpie glinted. Then a crow broke the silence

I had an entire email war with a head of department once about why his profile on the university website wasn't the place to promote his wife's bondage gear business. Don't get me wrong - looked like high quality stuff. Just time and a place, ya know?

William Hartston: I have to be very careful today. My wife told me I can't come home if I lose. Bishop to knight two. youtu.be/UUAJfB6tGgc?...

My favourite Bridgen fact (he was my local MP when I was a teenager and I knew someone who worked for his company) was that he charged people a £20 cover to attend his own housewarming party

On October 13, 1994, The Mosaic Communications Corporation launched, under the name Mosaic Netscape 0.9, the first one in a series of browsers, called Netscape Navigator.

Insofar as I understand this paper, the moral seems to be that maths is easy and translation is hard, which I think every mathematician who spends quality time with a translator will find easy to believe. arxiv.org/abs/2610.08144

Fibonacci in Nature. Fibonacci in Breakfast

BMW spotted with indicator on!

No, Kent birders shouldn't be we are 'past main migration period' Oct ain't just 'rarity season'. Our obsession with ticks and lists shouldn't outweigh the common stuff, but it does. We've commercialised it, we sell it. There is plenty of chance to see migration in October (here's Redwing c/o BoE)

@hockeyviz.com I found some beautiful data viz for you

'Data... shows a rapid descent... just two hours after take-off, descending more than 17,000 feet... in less than two minutes...' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

'Taking an average, statistically the "L" is safe for an average of 639 days or 21 months.' So in Sheffield, the locals instantly report the vanishing of the L and the highways maintenance contractor responds within seconds to restore it. They do things properly in South Yorkshire.

Et tu, Brute.

Source (credit where it's due etc.): mastodon.scot/@gl33p@masto...

Burnham claims to be providing a more serious and thought- through prospectus for Britain, but believing Britain is the world's innovation nation; trusted world leader in AI; leading the next industrial revolution, is neither serious nor new.

David Quammen's essay in The New York Times today closes with this paragraph. It's both a scientific falsehood, and an incredibly dangerous narrative. If you're willing to give me five minutes of your time, I'd like to explain why.

It's time to stop letting a small number of white American journalists who write airport books about scary diseases set the policy frame for pandemics. And it's unbelievably galling to do it - and this is always how it happens - in the middle of an ongoing Ebola virus epidemic.

What’s your best sleeping story? Mine is probably falling asleep under a piano at Gare Du Nord after reporting on the Bataclan attacks and being woken up by armed police.

AI triage of grant applications! Appears to have been the work of one of EPSRC's Place Based Impact Acceleration Account programmes. www.ukri.org/news/researc...

There's another call with distributed peer review and it's already open. This one's from EPSRC. Deadline less than a month off. www.ukri.org/opportunity/...

Alice Sara Ott & the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra performing Grieg's piano concerto in A minor live on BBC Radio 3 competing with the loud ringing of a phone for about 15 seconds there.

Got to very edit the remaining 200 manuscript pages of a novel I translated in seven hours (or more). Thought it might be fun to livesky how a book is edited while I do it. A thread!

Rightly so. cc @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @deevybee.bsky.social www.the-scientist.com/wellcome-s-5...

I heard from a UK University yesterday that they have built their own closed AI Agent to undertake grant application assessment. They are running it alongside internal demand management panels; refining the model as they go to see whether they can get to a point of dropping the panels of people.

Swiss government is getting ready to replace Microsoft 365 with openDesk

Easy. #WorldBollardAssociation

The only pets I smoke are little mice with clogs on.

Ian Sansom, sorry Professor Ian Sansom ('novelist, journalist and broadcaster', as his potted bio styles him), might have been the model for Count Arthur Strong, it seems. But the book this pops up in, ostensibly about the Auden poem, is bostin—at the 30-odd-page mark.

What doesn't kill you...

Always important to remember that UUK is an organisation that represents the vice chancellors of universities, but *not* the universities. And we all know what a bang-up job they've done of financially managing the institutions that they head-up.

Researchfish closes in July 2027. When UKRI last went to tender, it found no viable alternative product. Kyle Deme (OpenAlex) and I think that was the wrong question, read this blog to find out more blog.openalex.org/after-resear...

Jodrell Bank’s e-Merlin network still faces closure in 2028 Government says it will not save telescope network, despite Burnham pledge www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

Thanks to @kirstygrainger.bsky.social for flagging this one up. www.ukri.org/news/ukri-mo...

Stranger than fiction. Were .22 Mossbergs ten a penny in Massachusetts back in the day?