Home: That nice warm feeling

Welsh couple bereft after bomb squad detonate ornamental garden missile | Wales | The Guardian

A couple who kept a live bomb as a garden ornament have said they were sorry that their “old friend” had been detonated by a disposal unit.

The missile, which had been outside the home of Sian and Jeffrey Edwards, is thought to date back to the late 19th century. The couple, from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, had thought it was a “dummy” bomb with no charge. Sian Edwards said she used to bang her trowel on the bomb to remove earth after gardening.

On Wednesday, a police officer informed the couple he had spotted the bomb and would need to alert the Ministry of Defence. An hour later, the officer told the couple the bomb squad would arrive the next day.

Jeffrey Edwards, 77, said: “We didn’t sleep a wink all night. It knocked us for six. “I told the bomb disposal unit: ‘We’re not leaving the house, we’re staying here. If it goes up, we’re going to go up with it.’”

Just a little container of precious

The best way to invest in gold

All the gold ever dug up would fit inside a 20 by 20 metre box.

Is that all there is? I feel richer already.

All about catching thermals

Small publishers are sweeping the Booker and Nobel prizes

On this years’s Booker by Philip Lynch (Prophet Song)

What is the secret to big success for small presses? Nothing new, the editors say, but rather something as old as the book trade: picking worthy titles, editing them carefully and promoting them well. It often comes down to money—in particular, not thinking too much about it.

Publishing, by its nature, is a gamble. The recent renaissance of independent presses may fade with the changing tastes of prize committees or the fickle fancies of readers. “Sometimes you catch a thermal,” Ms Mabey says, and a book soars. “Sometimes you don’t.” But small publishers can adapt to changing winds. And with another Booker in the bag, Oneworld, like so many of its peers, is flying high.

Which is once the way academia worked. All about being the right size for the job in hand.

On the importance of not achieving anything

Psychology Lost a Great Mind – Nautilus

At a dinner one night, a first-year graduate student noted how he preferred his new intellectual freedom to the pressure for immediate results he had endured in industry:

“I like coming home at the end of the day not having accomplished anything.”

John replied, “Young man, you have a bright future in academia.”

Steve Pinker writing about John Tooby who died earlier this month.

On not being properly confused

I like orderly confusion very much. But this is neither orderly nor properly confused

Dieter Rams

His German is a pleasure to the ear.

Via John Naughton 10 November 2023 link

Departure time 2023, arrival 1943

Timothy Garton Ash in the NYRB

When I started writing my book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe five years ago, I thought that in order to bring home to young Europeans the horrors against which postwar Europe has defined itself, I must hurry to track down some of the last surviving elderly Europeans with personal memories of the hell that was Europe during World War II. So I did, in Germany, France, and Poland. But today all you need do to experience such horrors firsthand is take a train into Ukraine from the southeastern Polish town of Przemyśl. Departure time 2023, arrival 1943.

The (not so) strange case of Katalin Karikó

The 2023 Nobel prizes – What they mean for higher education

The strange case of Katalin Karikó

Dr Katalin Karikó, joint winner of the physiology-medicine award, has received much comment in the media. Born and educated in Hungary, she has spent most of her career in the United States. But she has also held appointments in three other countries at a variety of institutions, and has most recently been senior vice president at BioNTech, a biotech company in Germany.

The debate stems from her time at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked from 1989 to 2001, in positions ranging from scientific assistant professor, to senior head of research, to adjunct associate professor.

During that period, she was demoted from a tenure-track position in 1995, refused the possibility of reinstatement to the tenure track and eventually ushered into retirement in 2013.

Meanwhile, her close collaborator and fellow prize winner, Dr Drew Weissman, whom she met in 1997, remains at the University of Pennsylvania as professor of medicine, as well as being co-director of the immunology core of the Penn Center for AIDS Research and director of vaccine research in the infectious diseases division.

Some have pointed out that Karikó was working on risky or unconventional scientific themes, and that the usual funding agencies and senior academics were unable to see the promise in her work until recently, when she and her colleague Weissman have been recipients of multiple prizes. The fact that she received her doctorate from the University of Szeged in Hungary and not a prestigious institution in a major country may not have helped.

None of this story is surprising nor strange.

Robert Conquest’s third law of politics

The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. (Robert Conquest’s third law of politics)

I tend to think the NHS is directed by people who don’t like it.

SLS: things that don’t appear in medic final’s

Which goes with that other common disease christened by the late Sydney Brenner (yes, the same Brenner): MDD or spelled out, money deficiency disease)

The Enlightened Economist | Economics and business books

The over-burdened welfare state is not quite coping with people suffering from what (I learned here) doctors describe as “Shit Life Syndrome” when they go to their GPs for help with depression or other mental ill-health conditions. And there will not be enough money to fix any of this unless growth picks up. But that would require a competent, effective government able to take clear decisions, build cross-party consensus, devolve money and powers, and stick with the plan without changing ministers and policies every 18 months.

All is power and all is politics

Daniel Trilling · Not Much like Consent: Crisis at the Met · LRB 30 March 2023

In the​ 1980s, the Met was a key part of the coalition of interests that underpinned the Thatcher government. Together, the Conservative Party, the police and the right-wing press successfully undermined the power of the unions, by legislating against them, physically attacking their members (as officers from the Met and other forces did at Orgreave and elsewhere during the miners’ strike) and persuading just enough people that this was necessary to maintain law and order. Not every officer approved of the role the police played: Dick wrote an essay during her training arguing that the Thatcher years created ‘the impression that the police had been reduced to the status of political tools’. But the Tories bought goodwill among the rank and file – and boosted recruitment – by implementing a 45 per cent pay rise soon after taking office in 1979. ‘Most of us in the police thought [Thatcher] was simply magnificent,’ Ron Evans, a former Met protection officer, told Harper.