Andrew

Two scientists walk through a cluttered old-fashioned science laboratory. The female scientist says “Analogue instruments! Paper records! Chalk boards! I thought you'd agreed to modernise the laboratory?” The male scientist replies “That's what i'm so excited about: we have moved to cloud-based storage for our data!” They step out onto a balcony. She says: “Please tell me you haven't built a library zeppelin” This is exactly what he has done. It floats across the sky and he adds “It's got a fax machine!”

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

The UK used less coal in 2025 than they did in 1600, when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Source: buff.ly/Ifmz1Eo

Printed recipe. Text reads ‘For melancholy. Rub the body all over with nettles’

Questionable 1700s treatment for melancholy... rubbing yourself all over with nettles

We are very excited to share the full programme for the London Open Science & Scholarship Festival 2026 and announce that bookings are officially open! ✨

Find all the details on the Open@UCL blog 👉 buff.ly/S7yECkO

[We see a close up of a young white male, tanned, white teeth, coiffed hair clearly an influencer on social media. It is an image such as you see when social media posts are shown on the news. In the corner of the screen is named a location: DUBAI. He is staring slightly off-camera for several silent panels of the comic strip. His eyes move slightly. He is having a thought.] From off-screen a newsreader’s commentary comes: NEWSREADER: Extraordinary images here of an expat in Dubai [The influencer’s eybrows raise slightly] …Having their first ever geopolitical thought. [CUT TO a BBC news scene. The BBC newsreader CLIVE MYRIE is talking to an interviewee next to the screen showing the social media influencer’s face. The interviewee’s name is David Jones]. CLIVE MYRIE: To explain the significance of this moment we’re joined by David Jones, our Expat Thoughts correspondent DAVID JONES: Clive, this is momentous It was caught on film at the end of an Instagram post titled: ‘Dubai Is Brilliant’. [Pointing at the screen, the influencer’s expression still the same] You can clearly see in the eyebrows here, the dawning realisation that there *might* be something in the world beyond his dickhead self. It marks a *huge* departure from all the Dubai Expat’s previous thoughts. CLIVE MYRIE: Which are…? DAVID JONES: You've Got To Get Yourself Out Here Mate, Everything Is So Clean, I Don't Have To Pay Taxes, I Am Incurious As To Why I Do Not Have To Pay Taxes, and Spa. CLIVE MYRIE: And might we see an expansion of these new Thoughts in coming days? DAVID JONES: I think we can expect to see: “I Deserve To Be Airlifted By A Country I Pay No Tax To” CLIVE MYRIE: Mmm. [Ends]

In case the scam here isn't obvious - Grammarly is, without permission, creating little LLM agents based on the work of academics and then claiming this is the same as their "expert opinion" - using their names and reputations for free without consent.

Text on an academic article about "Moving Things: Moving Cartloads of Treasures from Venice to Ethiopia, ca. 1400" pasted into Grammarly in a Browser. It offers to invoke the digital ghosts of David Abulafia, Barry Flood and Chris Wickham to give me "expert feedback".

Using Grammarly for the first time in forever ... WHAT?

As a non-native speaker writing primarily in English, I used to use it to check prepositions, point out too long/convoluted sentences etc.

It now offers to summon colleagues both living and dead to "expert review" the piece???

What?

A man checking his phone in a bar, seen through reflecting windows

Brass hands on a doorway

A gloomy King's Cross canal

Canal boats by King's Cross

September 2025 part two: this was the first time I tried Kentmere 200, I'm quite liking it.

A man checking his phone next to a locked-off underground gate

The outside of St Pancras, with a few tourists and one man looking like he's walked for an hour

Queues at the Euston bus stops

A mostly-empty upstairs canteen at St Pancras

September: stations on a strike day

A light-well in an old building

HMS Belfast looking broody on the Thames

Tower Bridge from below the decking

A very complicated and ornate sculpture of ... harpoons? in a roofed-over plaza

June 2025

(using Shanghai GP3, which is nice and cheap but also surprisingly fiddly to work with - kept twisting. Maybe not worth the saving)

A billboard reading NO FAKE NEWS HERE on an empty street

A dark night-time road with car headlights and a runner on the pavement, city lights behind

A tube station platform seen from the opposite site, with people standing around

An empty Overground carriage

caught up with developing a bag of older film today.

London, early 2025

baffled to realise that the UK apparently regulated against this in (checks notes) 1774. ahead of the trend!

The disorder in the streets was so bad, and disabled or wounded soldiers were treated so badly in the melee, that the London local authorities agitated for the enforcement of queuing at bus and tram stops, that courtesy entirely foreign to the rush-hour Londoner. In December 1917 the LCC organised a conference on how best to achieve this new departure.

The invention of queuing, 1917. (Jerry White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War)

March Andrew Dodds On Sunday gawky and glaiket, For life no carin’ a preen; On Monday lookin’ forsaket, Wi’ a misty weet in her een; On Tuesday as prim as a daisy, And sweet as a maiden can be; On Wednesday cap’rin’ and crazy, Wi’ an eldritch glint in her e’e; On Thursday smilin’ and winsome – Settin’ the blackies a’ gyte; On Friday dowie and dinsome, Fu’ o’ splutter and spite; On Seterday in a white mantle, A daffodil stuck in her hair, She walks doon the dusk wi’ a hantle O’ pride in her sorrowfu’ air.

On Sunday gawky and glaiket,
For life no carin’ a preen;
On Monday lookin’ forsaket,
Wi’ a misty weet in her een;
On Tuesday as prim as a daisy,
And sweet as a maiden can be;
On Wednesday cap’rin’ and crazy,
Wi’ an eldritch glint in her e’e…

—Andrew Dodds, “March”
#Scots #poem #poetry

I forget how much I like the crofters bit in this, with Peggy Ashcroft and John Laurie (who seems to have gone straight to looking about sixty and stayed there his entire career)

here we go (featuring bonus fake-married, Hitchcock was really into the full set)

The 39 Steps A man is pursued by the police for a murder he did not commit and by an international spy ring for information he does not possess. Classic Hitchcock mystery.

iplayer currently has the 1935 version of The 39 Steps, which is great fun: plus, for fans of such things, contains an early appearance of "but there's only one bed / oh no" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Archives by Edwin Morgan generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon generation upon g neration up n g nerat on up n g nerat n up n g nerat n p n g erat n p n g era n p n g era n n g er n n g r n n g n n g n g

Today, 28 February, is Scottish Archives Day. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s poem “Archives”, published in Centenary Selected Poems, @carcanet.bsky.social 2020
@edmorgantrust.bsky.social
#archives #poetry #archives #ScottishArchivesDay
www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/inde...

NASA scraps 2027 Artemis III moon landing in favor of 2028 mission The announcement that NASA will rejigger Artemis III not to land on the moon in 2027 came after the agency’s Artemis II mission encountered problems, delaying its launch

Shocking no-one, a confirmation - there is no lander, there are no tankers, there is no refuelling process, and now there will be no Artemis III landing. www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa...

A month later the UCI had slowed to four but the Cameo were up to eleven showings a day, two of their three screens - still something like one in twelve of all film showings in the city. They kept going for three months before (presumably) finally running out of people in the city who'd not seen it.

The UCI ran it on four of twelve screens, the Cameo in Tollcross on one of three, both sold tickets faster than they could imagine, whilst the Dominion in Morningside went on record saying they didn't think it was their sort of thing. Of course they did.

Something I stumbled across a while back: on the day it came out on general release, ~20% of all film showings in Edinburgh cinemas were of Trainspotting. You had a choice of 25, including one at 1.30am the next morning.

Its just so hard to imagine

"He retained something of a Lancashire directness throughout his career"

oh dear

On Wednefday laft, a young lady, from London, difguifed in an officer's regimentals, was intercepted near Barnet, on her road to Scotland. where it was fuppofed fhe was going 10 be married with an officer in Burgoyn's regiment ; but the lady's friends having timely notice of the affair, prevented the fcheme from being put in execution

From the Caledonian Mercury, November 1763 - an early example of someone running to Scotland to get married underage after "the late Marriage act" (in 1753) stopped it in England

This article clears up a strange detail about the whole Mandelson arrest thing: they *told* him who gave them the information to arrest him?

Apparently a screwup: "regarded by the force as a serious breach of protocol ... inadvertently revealing information" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Irish Independent: Man stole three coffee machines in a week from Monaghan department store.

How does he sleep at night?

‘A woman actually voted!’: Lily Maxwell and the Manchester by-election of November 1867 - The History of Parliament More than half a century before the partial enfranchisement of women in 1918, Lily Maxwell, a Manchester shopkeeper, cast a parliamentary vote. Dr Kathryn Rix

With the Gorton and Denton by-election taking place tomorrow, we're sharing our article on an earlier Manchester by-election. How was a woman able to vote there in 1867, decades before women received the parliamentary franchise? Find out more here: historyofparliament.com/2025/03/14/l...

somewhere, a Lib Dem volunteer squints, sighs, and starts typing "ONLY TWO POINTS BEHIND THE TORIES"