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For a man who died in 2001 he is a remarkably reliable guide to life in 2026.

"Odysseus invents British Food Discourse" could be the perfect Bluesky bait...

UKGov immigration policy: "can we make it look like racism to people who want racism but also somehow not be racism?" Reality: no.

Thought for the Day for fellow Scotrail users comes from the incomparable Douglas Adams.

The shows didn't make it to Scotland in my childhood, alas, but something of the charm still shines through. I love the attention to detail that went into them.

THE FIFTH POSTULATE

I don't have shoes like that, OK?

More #DominieAufUrlaub pics from the Ausburger Puppenkiste. (They did have one of the current Chancellor as well, but it's really just a collection of loosely-jointed limbs that flails randomly whenever someone yanks its strings.)

We were at Kölner Dom just over a week ago, and the amount of work that building is currently undergoing is astounding. C19th stonework plus many decades of air pollution (not to mention the attentions of Bomber Command) must have left them with a maintenance nightmare...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmV...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt2g...

*breaks bottle on the edge of the bar and waves it around threateningly while shouting "It can be shown that the small-t asymptotics in the two cases are identical COME AND PROVE ME WRONG IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD ENOUGH"*

Without going full-on S-W, I find it hard to believe that there's no feedback from format to thought. Many of us do at least some of our thinking as we write, so I'd expect genre/disciplinary constraints on our writing at least to channel our thought. (But I am no philosopher of language!)

That would be a fascinating project! As you probably know there is some interesting work around the rhetoric of mathematical proofs: @fennert.bsky.social in particular has looked at how they use imperatives and what this says about the popular idea that proofs are purely deductive in form.

Absolutely: no communication exists without an implied audience. The particular example I have in mind uses the trick of throwing assertions at the reader without connecting them logically, which is a serious disciplinary sin in applied maths, and also alarmingly common.

Pro-tip for academic authors: it is your job to explain what you mean and persuade the reader that it is true. It is not the reader's job to take a bucketful of ill-written adversarial prose and swallow it unless they can prove that what you meant to say was false.

Give the current regime a couple more years and that admission in itself would probably be enough to bar you from entry to the US. (I'm assuming I'm already persona non grata for at least a couple of reasons.)

Something I've noticed is how this "consolidation" is sold as "reducing the assessment burden", meaning that any resistance has to reckon with a storm of OH SO YOU HATE STUDENTS DO YOU. Standard but very wearing tactics...

*peers cautiously over back of sofa* If you've followed me on the strength of the OCR thing then, er, hi. Please don't expect quality. Usual service on this feed is described here: bsky.app/profile/ncdo...