Today in ARB: @irapley.bsky.social reviews “The Ryukyu islands” by Gregory Smits @uchicagopress.bsky.social & “The Legacy of The Ryukyu Kingdom” by Takara Kurayoshi (JPIC) asianreviewofbooks.com/the-ryukyu-i...
Congrats!
T20 cricket is just astonishing.
And going out to India in the semi final, with a creditable but never quite challenging effort is the most bang on par performance imaginable.
Would 100% let beavers colonise the stream running down the side of our fields.
I've only been here for 12 years, but best I can tell we had the opposite ratio: 6/7 chapels, only 2 pubs. Both pubs are still open, but one is a huge building that is rarely that occupied I think.
And how many churches/chapels?
I'm reading A Small World at the moment. Is quite amusing, but feels really like a bygone age.
Has he played someone playing Churchill?
A new set of bookshelves, with space for more books
In our family have the potato & gravy problem. You've got a roast potato left at the end of a meal so you pour a little gravy for it. Then after the potato is finished, there's some gravy left. So you need another potato to mop up the gravy...
So too, the 8 year old has found, books and bookshelves
To be fair, that was also me, a southerner, when I first encountered Booths.
A counter argument would be that in/out of Europe cut right across both parties' voting coalitions. An issue that splits your base becoming very salient is always going to require skillful handling.
The most productive for me had been "just write the bloody thing"; but an underrated one is that readers are paying less attention than you think, and so you need to be direct and explicit, and maybe even (a little) repetitive
I used to say make it an episode of Columbo not Miss Marple, but very few of my students these days know who Columbo was, or the central gimmick of the show (you see the murderer commit the crime in scene one). We need a reboot.
Trying to learn how to hit over the top. Definitely not my natural game. And I very nearly needed a new phone.
An advert for a £300 toothbrush. Reduced from £800!
Description of the software support for an ai enabled smart toothbrush
AI in everything update: pretty sure I don't need a £300 toothbrush, I don't need a toothbrush with software updates, and you know what, I think my current toothbrush is protected against cyberattacks already, tyvm.
Look, reading week isn't for achieving research goals, it's for lying in a state of nervous exhaustion repeatedly telling yourself you should be taking advantage of the opportunity but ultimately failing to do anything.
I'm going to be so bloody cross if trump kills us all
He also told a story of Andrew visiting the Welsh town of Tonypandy, saying ‘he insisted on coming by helicopter, unlike his mother, who came twice to the Rhondda and always came by car. He left early and he showed next to no interest in the young people’.
Chris Bryant, in Isabel Hardman's @thespectator1828.bsky.social email.
The queen may have taken the car, but I once recall the ticket inspector on my way home buzzing because she'd had *Hugh Grant* a few hours earlier on the train up the Rhondda to visit Bryant.
Homer: "Kids, you tried your hardest and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try."
I'm massively in the pro rhubarb camp, so maybe I'm just a hypocrite
Yeah, if the core case for a fruit requires loads of sugar and cream, I'm skeptical.
Also, what is this thing "a conference grant fund"?
Large language models: they're not exactly a fax machine, are they.
"there are 3 things which have revolutionised academic life in the last 20 years: jet travel, direct dialing telephones, and the Xerox machine"
!["[Scholars] don't have to grub about in library stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have xeroxed and read it at home...
... As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you're ok. You're plugged into the only university that really matters - the global campus"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4hdgffjypqzueookuk34wcwx/bafkreid3nb2yb7fvnpgjril6prqu43yhe7wk3c2ib4v6n3pjzvhvm2r3oq@jpeg)
"[Scholars] don't have to grub about in library stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have xeroxed and read it at home... ... As long as you have access to a telephone, a Xerox machine, and a conference grant fund, you're ok. You're plugged into the only university that really matters - the global campus"
Still thinking about AI in Higher Ed. @adamtooze.bsky.social talked about the impact of JStor on his research (before my time), and coincidentally I just read this description of a prior quantum leap. (Small World by David Lodge).
Gooseberries.
A lot depends on whether we're comparing good examples of each fruit, typical examples, or bad ones.
But still, gooseberries.
This goes in the microwave, and while it doesn't give you the full rice cooker experience, it makes for a pretty decent space/rice compromise.
Cricket coaching is proving a nice way to end the week.
The current list of things I need to work on:
Front foot
Back foot
Balance,
Judging length
Judging line
Top hand grip
Bottom hand
Waiting
Shot selection
Getting there!
Being any form of skeptic on LLM is leading to some increasingly awkward interactions in surprising places.
Meiji Revolution sighting.
Possibly a bit earlier, but I thought Mark Gayn's diaries ("Japan Journal"?) were very good.
On the subject of Japanese women, western men have been waxing lyrical about how they're not all opinionated like western women for as far back as I've ever looked.
