Curated thinking on art and science
Things will be quiet here for a little while - 8,500 papers don't filter themselves. Elsewhere: Mazowe convalesces under his own fan, the garden is being kept alive by bucket, and a wildfire visualisation is quietly taking shape.
A conference on wildfires, a terrier on bed rest, and Europe's first pyrocumulonimbus — the week refused to rank them. Fire, convalescence, and a full English.
Mazowe, our indomitable Welsh Terrier, turned 14 in May. He earned the moniker 'table shark' when he was younger — partly for his habit of circling a meal table, partly for his slightly recurved tail, evoking a shark's dorsal fin.
Every heatwave, the cameras find the same shot: ice cream, paddling pools, sunbathers in the park. In May and June that imagery sat alongside 2,700 estimated heat deaths in England and Wales. Representation doesn't just describe risk - it decides how seriously we take it.
Freezing in an emergency isn't fear — it's a failure to retrieve a behavioural template. A go-bag simulation with Year 10–12 students proved the point: only one packed a toothbrush, and almost nobody thought to bring a bag. Try my virtual version built on the train home.
Benton End, once home to Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines and the Colchester–Ipswich art school they ran from it, has reopened its Walled Garden — renewed in collaboration with Sarah Price.
The last week has been faintly intolerable in the UK as temperatures climbed to 37.5 degrees and every social
A heatwave outside, a conference inside asking what cities must become to survive the next one.
This week, between Cambridge Tech Week, the Centre for Risk Studies Symposium, and agreeing to help run a UCL STEM day for teenagers — made newly urgent by a Scientific American piece on US science — I also wrestled my dissertation's quantitative core through UCL's HPC cluster.
Marking 200 years of mathematics at UCL - a symposium that reminds us research only becomes useful when it leaves the journals and is made accessible and inclusive. Expect the maths that unmasked Banksy and caught a serial killer, plus UCL's "Godless institution" origins.
The Climate Change Committee published its fourth assessment of UK climate risk a matter of weeks ago and a couple
It has been a week of suffering in some form - through travel, allergy or exposure to the relentless misery of