Matthew's Journal

1. Jaws (1975) | Modern Trailer

(tags:movies trailer sharks video )

2. Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong

(tags:noses health )

3. Edinburgh's GDP per Capita now outpaces London

(tags:edinburgh london gdp economy scotland uk )

4. Microsoft claims their new AI framework diagnoses 4x better than doctors. Here's why this is both impressive AND misleading

(tags:ai medicine Microsoft )

5. China is cracking down on young women who write gay erotica

(tags:china censorship LGBT OhForFucksSake )

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

We did finally meet with the university senior management on 10th June, over a month after we originally requested a meeting. It wasn't a complete success, but we did come out of it with assurance that the existing policy on gender reassignment was still in place, and trans people can continue to use the toilets that match their lived gender, that no-one should be challenging people in the toilets, and that any changes to the policy would not happen until after the EHRC guidance is published in the autumn, and would involve a proper consultation, and a full Equality Impact Assessment of the changes

We asked them to respond to the EHRC consultation as an institution, and gave them a deadline of 20th June to communicate the above facts with all members of staff, including information on how to seek advice and support (other than just the staff counselling service!)

Instead they published a statement on Sharepoint on Tuesday (24th June), which did not meet our requests. The unions have put out a joint statement today (drafted last week, but it took a while to get it online) as a result:

https://www.ucu.cam.ac.uk/joint-trade-union-statement-on-the-supreme-court-ruling-on-the-equality-act/

Finished my response and submitted at 11:30 last night, having had to start from scratch on Sunday because a browser refresh had lost my previous attempt. I copied and pasted my responses into a document before submitting, as I'd been warned it wouldn't save them or send them to me. Tired now, and too hot today too, but glad I got it done.

Not sharing it all here, but from the final question:

Overall, as a trans inclusive feminist woman, I find this Code of Practice to be incredibly upsetting. I want to be able to include trans people in my life. I want to accept them in their lived gender. I'm happier with women's places which include trans people than I am with ones which exclude them. I want to have advice on how I can do this, and it's completely lacking here.

The Code is unclear in many places not just on how trans inclusive policies can work, but also on how the suggested trans *exclusive* policies can work in practice. It relies too much on the idea that you can always tell which people are trans and which people are not, and it seems willing to change existing practice significantly even where this will disadvantage trans people.

I don't think this is what the ruling in the Supreme Court was trying to achieve. The changes here are so incredibly broad, and so much at odds with other legislation, that they seem to go far beyond what is necessary, and it feels like an ideological stance to exclude trans people. If this is not the intention than it needs re-writing considerably.

1. The uncomfortable truth about Glastonbury

(tags:festival music business employment OhForFucksSake )

2. Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated

(tags:reviews OhForFucksSake books )

Regrettably, we have to go home again this afternoon. I am packing with the intention of leaving our luggage at the hotel while we do one last amble along Southsea beach.

Swag count:

• 11 pens
• 9 commemorative guidebooks (to the various ships, museums, and the dockyard as a whole)
• 2 notebooks
• 2 postcards
• 1 travel mug
• 1 fridge magnet
• 1 birthday card from the Spinnaker Bar staff

Also some chocolate from the Lindt outlet store. My suitcase was fairly full when we came. I'm sure I can make it all fit ... somehow.

The seed for choosing Portsmouth for this getaway came from seeing a sign for "Explosion Museum" while driving a bunch of hockey players to Gosport rink back in May. I'm very glad I went with that impulse, it's worked out well.

Reading. ( Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )

I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!

Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.

More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.

Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.

Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!

Cooking. Bread? Bread.

Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)

Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.

We had a nice day on the beach in North Berwick. A few of Sophia's old nursery friends, getting back together, with a few siblings thrown in. They got on like it wasn't mostly a year since they last saw each other, and they had a ball digging holes, wading through seaweed and climbing on rocks. The weather was just as fabulous as it looks here.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

1. The RAF Squadron Targeted by Palestine Action is Owned by a Hedge Fund

(tags:UK airplanes military investment )

There has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.

You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.

We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????

And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)

Friday:

• Mary Rose, worth the admission fee all by itself, thoroughly absorbing exhibition of the many many objects found within the wreck, and amazing to see the preserved timbers themselves from lots of different angles.
• lunch
• dockyard boat tour, including a good look at the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier currently in dock (I cannot look at aircraft carriers without Danger Zone playing in my head)
• HMS Victory, audioguide version with dramatic retelling of the battle of Trafalgar. Very absorbing, impressive amount of the ship available to visit even while restoration is ongoing, very tiring.
• back to hotel and flop for a little
• walk, ferry, bus to Gosport ice rink, disco skate, bus, ferry and walk back to hotel; ice is rather worse than Cambridge, but ferry+bus beats 2x Cambridge buses any time

Saturday:

• sauna and swim for me
• walk to the dockyard, waterbus to the Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower
• lunch
• walk ~2 miles to Submarine Museum
• walk through of HMS Alliance, also a look around HMS Holland 1 (the first ever Royal Navy submarine)
• my body in full rebellion against "museum walking" by this point, we took the waterbus back to the main dockyard, got cold drinks, and got back on the dockyard boat tour - different guide, different focus, well worth it
• little wander around Gunwharf Quays and a little shopping in the outlet stores; having forgotten to bring my ereader, I resorted to buying a newspaper and we sat quietly ignoring each other in a curry gastropub for a while. Eventually we ordered some curry, which was really rather good, and then toddled back to the hotel
• I decided I'd had enough moving for the day, so now I'm lying on the hotel bed with Glastonbury on the TV, life is good

Tomorrow I think we'll do a couple of brief museum things at the historic dockyard, and then perhaps go for a wander through Southsea. I'm going to watch England v Jamaica tomorrow afternoon (I think R has less than zero interest in football, women's or otherwise) and we've a reservation in the Spinnaker Tower for sunset cocktails tomorrow evening.

physical issues

My leg muscles, especially the ones that stabilise hips, knees and ankles, have been giving me some grief since I went clubbing after the Kodiaks won playoffs at end of May. I'm reasonably sure it's muscular fatigue and not joint/ligament damage. Rest helps, but so does gentle movement: if I sit still too long everything has seized up a bit when I stand up, but loosens up again as I start moving. Skating and hockey are fine once I'm warmed up. Yoga and general stretching seem to help, as do hot baths and sauna. Steady walking is a lot better for me than the stop-start of museum walking, as the last two days have made clear. I love museums but right now the spirit is willing and the flesh has Had Enough.

I bought some plain black shoelaces through eBay, as part of my effort to buy not-Amazon where I easily can. eBay would now like me to take a two-minute survey about my experience. I really don't think I have that much to say: the shoelaces turned up in an envelope, they were entirely as expected, I laced my shoes accordingly. There was no disappointment, surprise or delight at any point. It's rather like when I buy, say, some screws, and a little bag of screws turns up, and it feels a stretch to ascribe superlative excellence to any part of the experience. Any missing stars in a rating is taken as suggesting some problem, which leaves no room for giving extra credit for those times when a purchase truly exceeds expectations.

My usual "go to sleep" tactic is thinking about something interesting but unstressful, e.g
"What would I do first if I won the lottery?", "what tracks would I pick for desert island discs?", "can I think of perfectly normal backgrounds for RPG characters (rather than the cliche traumatic ones like [bad force] murdered my village and I want revenge!)"

Recently I was thinking about my favourite fantasy and SF authors and noticed a funny disparity - see below.
( The lists )
My fantasy list is pretty gender balanced. My sci-fi list... is not. I think a lot of it comes from sub-genre preferences: I'm mostly into military SF which I can imagine being less common for female SF authors. ("Some Desperate Glory" by Emily Tesh was one of my favourite books last year but I won't put her into the favourite author list while I've only read one book!)

Interested to hear if other people have similar differences between genres or if it's just me!

1. Map Projection Transitions - see which one upsets you the least!

(tags:maps visualisation viaMyBrotherMike )

2. How 'Sex Matters' is shaping UK policy on trans rights

(tags:UK bigotry government LGBT transgender )

3. Israeli soldiers say they are ordered to shoot at unarmed Gazans seeking aid

(tags:Israel genocide gaza Palestine )

4. Plans to help benefits recipients into work 'a mess', say DWP officials

(tags:jobs UK government )

When I am Emperor anyone selling bowls, plates, etc will have to certify whether you can microwave food in them without them getting hotter than the food.

Is microwave transparency really too much to ask?

I have been resisting buying a number of great hoodies from the assorted Historic Dockyard museum shops, on the grounds that I already have More Than Sufficient Hoodies, related to either ice hockey or musical theatre. R said obviously I need to wait for an ice hockey musical and get that hoodie.

Suggestions welcome for the topic / plot of such a musical.

1. Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
2. Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
3. Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
4. Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
5. Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")

1. The first non-opioid painkiller (for acute pain) has taken 27 years to produce.

(tags:pain research medicine )

2. UK asylum plans shows post-Brexit Britain is 'in very dark place', Albanian PM warns

(tags:uk migration OhForFucksSake )

3. Reading one book on a subject will put you ahead of the vast majority of people

(tags:experts learning )

4. One in four LGBTQ+ pupils may drop out before finishing secondary school

(tags:lgbt school bullying )

5. India High Court rules trans women are women

(tags:India transgender LGBT GoodNews )

6. A newspaper reported that Arthur Conan Doyle went to a local pub. Turns out to be completely made up (but the history is fascinating)

(tags:journalism fraud Edinburgh history )

7. The transfers between parties in yesterday's Edinburgh council election are fascinating!

(tags:edinburgh elections voting politics scotland )

8. You can now buy The Hobbit in 5 different Celtic languages. (I'm sure people will have great fun comparing them)

(tags:languages uk ireland TheHobbit )

9. Make AI Mediocre Again

(tags:satire ai video advertising )

Uni buddy R and I made it to Portsmouth last night, despite the best efforts of signal failures to scare us off. (Half the trains were showing as cancelled around 3pm; by the time we actually got to Cambridge station at 5pm things were looking better; by the time our train got to Finsbury Park it looked like service was nearly restored and we continued to change at Three Bridges as originally planned.)

I was working up until about 4pm, with a couple of colleagues very amused that a) I didn't start packing until a gap between meetings at 2pm, and b) my "girls weekend" consists of naval museums and ice skating.

We had an easy walk to our hotel in the midsummer twilight, and settled in to our respective rooms. I'm doing admin until R texts me she's ready for breakfast. And then: the Mary Rose! (who else has formative childhood memories of watching it being raised?)