The best of what I've read, and audiobooks I've listened to, in 2025. Fiction audiobooks This was the year we "discovered" Bob Mortimer writing, and listened to as much of it as we could. Aside from his biography, we listened to The Hotel Avocado and then The Satsuma Complex. Crime drama.When the Lights Go Out will...

No doubt it’s more complicated than I expect, but as a user of a small EV I love this idea: make the EV charge proportional to the size of the vehicle.  From Private Eye, no. 1665, 20 December–8 January 2026. 

I prefer to subscribe to things via RSS, and I've now ended up with some high-volume feeds. Although I skim past much of it, the noise has taken the enjoyment out of opening my feed reader. The solution I've come up with is to use a couple of tags.  I have a "Daily" tag for things that are lovely or timely. Like posts...

Thank you to the MRC, the University of Glasgow and the Centre for Virus Research for the paper art viruses. We've made a start on a couple of the easy ones. Why are they symmetric? From the PDF, viruses "have to be assembled from an extremely limited set of components, using the same building blocks repeatedly."  They...

Reading: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, Cory Doctorow, 5 December 2025.Three things jumped out at me from Cory Doctorow's interesting, important, and entertaining talk:1. The investment thesis driving AI The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can...

Watching: "How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking" from Advait Sarkar of Microsoft. There's a nice demo around 7 minutes in. The set-up is someone who needs to understand some written materials and write a report. Instead of throwing the task at an LLM, the idea is that an LLM should challenge you as you...

I like Northflank PaaS. I restrict what repositories it has access to for building Docker images, and I always forget how to add more repositories. The steps are: Go to the Team page (home page, likely) and select "Integrations". Select "Git" on the left-hand menu, and then "View all" GitHub accounts. Select your GitHub...

Reading: What, if Anything, is Wrong with Extreme Wealth? Ingrid Robeyns, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 24 June 2019. The opposite of a poverty line: "Limitarianism claims that one can theoretically construct a riches line and that a world in which no one would be above the riches line would be a better...

The good thing about a storm is you get a very distinct tide line. As you walk along it, it's easy to become curious and fall into an impromptu mini beach clean. The dog can scamper away, as there's no one else around, and you can collect all sorts of odd bits of plastic and rope-like stuff. It makes it possible to...

During drug development, you want to know the affinity between a molecule (potential drug) and its target, such as a protein on the surface of a cell. That is: does this particular molecule tightly fit at a specific place and stay there? Key in a lock, hand in a glove, are the analogies.Today ML can't solve...

I'm giving a small number of print gifts, and wanted to remove background items from the photos I'm using. This was beyond my editing skills in Pixelmator Pro.   But Gemini can do it. I used prompts like this: It did a very good job at making the edits, but it just could not do the quality. Nowhere near 300 dpi. The...

We were at another Think Again! event, which is a "live psychology panel show". I recommend you try sometime. It's part lecture, part stand-up, part Q&A.  We learned, amongst other things: Dogs laugh (play pant); All the popular tells to spot a liar are junk; and Laughter may have evolved because it's more efficient...

What makes AI so compelling is not simply faith in technology but the way it suggests we can improve medicine by leapfrogging the difficult work of structural change to confront disease-causing inequality, corporate interests and oligarchic power. Long read from Dr Eric Reinhart in The Guardian (US) from 9 November 2025.

Reading: "Dr. Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us—and How AI Could Save Lives", Charlotte Blease.  It's a book looking at the patient-doctor relationship: where it works, where it lets us down, and where AI might fit in.   One section I want to remember describes how Iora Health in the US (now part of One Medical) uses...

you want to know why I find biology interesting, it's this. From 2017, and still genius and beautiful, and there's an hour of commentary.