caulkhead

Bus and Windrush line from N London to the southern peripheries to foregather with kake and friends for sociability, which was very agreeable indeed.

Also boo to miserable ol' Matthew Arnold dissing on the growing London railway network of his day as enabling people to merely move between 'a illiberal, dismal life in Islington to a illiberal, dismal life in Camberwell'. Sad git.

***

In other news: have received A Very Odd email alleging that The Textbook (of all things) is now listed on Bookbub.com. It is not entirely easy to ascertain the truth of this, as the site has no search function whereby one can locate specific titles, but searching under possible categories has not shown it up. I am not going to page through the alphabetical list of titles! What is this thing that this thing is? Spam? Phishing?

***

I actually have some passing acquaintance with Prof King (as usual, archives were in the mix): Turi King: ‘The Knox case shows there was a misunderstanding about what DNA can tell you’. I loved this:

You led the DNA verification of Richard III. How important was that project scientifically and culturally?
What I loved about it was that it wasn’t just the genetics. There were lots of different strands of evidence – genetics, osteology and radio carbon dating – and it involved people from lots of different areas, all bringing their expertise to make it a wonderful project.
....
I think one of the things that was missed in the film is that no one person could have done it on their own. Philippa Langley [from the Richard III Society] absolutely got the project off the ground, but didn’t have the expertise to lead it. Another thing the film didn’t capture was all of the women who led various aspects of the science. I’m not worried I wasn’t in the film, but it was two years of work. Nor did all the money come from the Richard III Society. Some of it did for the excavation, but the vast majority came from Leicester University.

The Ph.D. Is Not a Pit Stop for Creative Writers: Don’t do a Ph.D. program because you want to work on your novel. (Well, with the proviso perhaps that you're not using the PhD programme as MATERIAL either for a campus novel or maybe a murder mystery or even a rom-com.)

But, okay, the UK system is different anyway (this looks to be very much about the US setup), and anyway I did my PhD in a history-related discipline Many Years Ago and I was basically Doing It For Fun, although my workplace also considered it a form of professional development and gave me study leave, paid fees, etc.

And at the same time I was writing fiction - sf and fantasy, i.e something pretty much unrelated to my research (though that, as it were, mulched down into the soil that nourished the roots of a much later fictional endeavour!).

So it was a break and something different using different mental muscles.

I am pretty much there with the author of the article that the anticipated synergy is unlikely to be there, and the credo that

I truly believe that one has a better chance of becoming a writer by working at a bakery, a coffee shop, a bookstore, a 9-to-5 corporate job, a blueberry farm, a publishing house, etc.

Also that 'Much of the performance of creative writing happens in moments of quietude and, quite frankly, daydreaming'.

We are given to wonder whether the people who undertake this rather ill-advised course are writing for FUN or is it srs bznz? Perhaps they would do well to consider the case of Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and writing a kind of campus fiction that involves pushing pompous professors out of windows and finding out whodunnit.

This week's bread: 2:1 wholemeal/strong white and a couple of tablespoons of wheatgerm + some pumpkinseed oil; a bit dense but quite tasty.

Saturday breakfast rolls: was intending brown toasted pinenut, but the pinenuts turned out to be well past their Best Before, so made brown with dried cranberries instead. Not bad.

Today's lunch: halibut fillets which I poached thus (perhaps a little overdone) with samphire sauce, served with mangetout peas and sliced yellow bell pepper roasted in lemon-infused olive oil, and boiled baby Jersey Royal potatoes.

At first I thought this was about keeping them as pets ('linked to the pet trade', but I think it's actually about using them as pet food: More than 100,000 live exotic cockroaches have been seized from a commercial breeder in New South Wales in a record-breaking bust linked to the pet trade

***

Things actually not quite working (or likely to work) as touted:

Tesla's Full Self-Driving is so ready for the future that some of the people who trained it reportedly will not get in the car.

“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs: When AI eats its own product, it gets sick. Back in the day I think this sort of thing was known as photocopy syndrome - copies of copies of copies getting more and more degraded?

Mathematical modelling suggests that it is theoretically possible to reduce risk of common diseases using heritable genome editing. Scientists argue that the technology involves considerable risk and uncertain benefits.

***

Not really surprised by this: New study: Most people are not actually worried about trans women in women's bathrooms.

***

Wow. 1935 French case in which a man was acquitted of murder because the man he had shot was 'a well-known “witch” who had caused all sorts of harm'.

Some years ago I advised a composer who was composing an opera about A Historical Figure about whom I am something of a Nexpert, and I am now on their mailing list and get info on their current activities and broadcasts and so on -

And I was invited to the Private View of this, taking place at a venue which is only a reasonable bus-ride and short walk away.

Also giving me the chance to see a small part of the nearish locality with which I am relatively unfamiliar, and which has its charms.

I am not sure I was entirely enthused by the artworks - there was one installation of ceramics where I wished I had someone there to whom I could murmur that they had an urgent phallic look -

My main problem with the venue, however, was the acoustics - I think it was the kind of space where once you got a certain mass of people conversing it would always have been a bit trying for me and my hearing aids, but combined with the ambient music coming out of the various speakers, not optimal at all. (Though maybe its own soundscape....)

I don't think there was anyone there I knew besides The Composer - mostly of a younger generation and art/music people rather than groves of academe - and I didn't really get into much chat, but I did get 2 admiring comments on the green hair streaks and 1 compliment to my pendant (which I think I got at Wiscon, unless it was 4th St?).

However, I have had a sweet email from The Composer thanking me for coming.