On the way to the pub we paused at a bus stop decorated with mosaic tiles. It’s striking. I wondered if it was stained glass at first, but it’s not. According to Wikipedia it’s by the local potter Bryan Newman, who died in 2019.It’s a lovely thing, especially as you look closer, and discover parts of watches in there...

There’s news of another go at a UK national ID scheme. It might all be about the proof of right-to-work. My knee jerk reaction is that a single database is a bad idea as it’s one place to attack, it’ll be horribly expensive, won’t work, and won’t achieve its aims, and what the heck is right to work anyway.  But who...

Delighted to see a beer labelled with a biscuit paring recommendation. This was on a paper wrapper around a plain bottle from a brewery based in Cornwall. Sadly, I didn’t have a Rich Tea biscuit to hand to try out their suggestion.

This is what EV car charging looks like: When we had a petrol Fiat 500, on a long drive we’d stop at a motorway service station to fill up and then have some mediocre coffee. With the EV version of the same car, we find somewhere slightly weird, plug in, go for a walk, and then have the mediocre coffee while the...

One to practice in a pool:  Instinctively, most people who find themselves struggling in the water will begin to panic, swim, or thrash about. We’re urging people to ignore this instinct and remember to float: Tilt your head back, with your ears submerged. Relax and try to breathe normally. Move your hands and legs to...

It's what made Posterous such a joy—until it was killed. Email clients are kind of designed for writing. Images, links, text formatting, drafts, it's all there. (And if not, copy and paste from something else works.) This stunning realisation of the bleedin' obvious came back to me on a standard afternoon dog walk.

I'm very happy blogging via Pika. It’s a lovely system.  If at some point I want to try something new, or if they change direction or my interests change, I don’t mind exporting and importing elsewhere. I’ve done it quite a few times now: from Blogger, Posterous, WordPress, Hugo, Pika (I might have missed a couple and...

Book economics; LLMs don’t reason; story in politics; UK energy pricing; kidneys. The economics of writing a bookThe BluestockingSelling books via live events and podcasts “now looks as outdated as a pop star going on tour for free and expecting to make money from CD sales. What people are willing to pay for has...

I blog using Pika but I'm keen to use open source products, and Pagecord seems like a very nice option.I'm exploring Pagecord to see if it's missing anything. If not, I can try to explore porting my existing blog into here.I'll copy some posts so I can get a feel for how it works. Must have Export ✅ (but: missing tags,...

What I’d like to do is: (a) gather some stats over time of how our heat pump performs; and (b) optimise the cost of running the pump via automations.  All the good people on the internet point me to Home Assistant—software you can run on a Raspberry Pi to program and tinker with this kind of thing.I finally made a...

LLMs do well on medical benchmarks, but this nice experiment blows a hole in that.  Reading: Fidelity of Medical Reasoning in Large Language Models, JAMA Network, 8 August 2025. The set up The experiment presents an LLM with a medical scenario and prompts it to pick the correct answer from a set of 5 options. LLMs do...

Coursera’s AI for Medicine specialism includes a nice, short, set of videos that explain standard model evaluation metrics. I found it useful, and made a few notes. Interpreting accuracy in terms of probability If accuracy of a model is P(correct), we can break that down as the sum of joint probabilities. P(correct ∩...

I failed to understand user-defined type guard recently and wrote something like: // Don't do this:const dogs = animals.filter( (c: Cat | Dog): c is Dog => true )Nope, that’s not what a type predicate is for. The above expression does nothing. I had Dave explain it to me. It’s an escape hatch for you to hack the type...

Maggie Boden died last month. I was lucky to go to university when I did. At the time Sussex courses ran as lectures, seminars, but also tutorials. Tutorials were made up of 3 or 4 students in the office of a professor, discussing the topic of study that week. For the courses I took, one of those professors was Maggie....