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Please marvel at the description for this garlic variety I just encountered:

(from here)

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I would like to draw your attention to Antrópolis, an absolute BOP for timpani and orchestra, composed by Gabriela Ortíz.

If it is programmed at s concert hall near you, go!

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This is apparently a hotter take than I thought but: hating on lawyers as a profession, calling them inherently dishonest etc. is politically reactionary. It discourages defendants from seeking legal counsel, puts forth the idea that it’s inherently suspicious to insist on seeing a lawyer before you answer police questioning (your constitutional right!) etc. which ultimately just benefits the state in making it easier for them to convict you. This is one of those things that “progressives” who were raised conservative often don’t realize is one of the parts of their parents’ worldview they should question more, but they should. Not only are lawyers not The Problem with “our system,” but having someone who is educated in the law whose job is to represent your interests in court — getting one regardless of your ability to pay, even! — is in fact one of the best parts of it.

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Bellringing! Knitting! Music according to the physical constraints of the instrument! Mathematical craft patterns!

English church bells are rung by teams of people, one person per bell in a room underneath the bell chamber itself. The bells are very big and heavy - the smallest one I've personally rung was a bit under 100kg, I haven't kept track of the largest but I expect it was somewhere north of 500kg, bells exist which are several tonnes. As the bell swings on its wheel you have some ability to speed it up or slow it down (or pause altogether) but not by a huge amount - so when a group of bells 12345678 rings in sequence, the group of ringers can only change the sequence a little bit at a time by swapping some neighbouring pairs of bells, eg 21436587.

This means you can't ring tunes, really, but you can ring complex braided patterns with hundreds of rows and no repeats. And you can interpret that as a cable knitting chart. So in autumn 2023 I spent seven weeks knitting the method Bristol Surprise Major in sock yarn on 2.5mm needles, for a final length of approximately 3 metres or 1792 rows plus border.

The bell picked out in red is bell 1, the treble. It performs the same pattern each time, 32 "changes" long. The other seven bells make the same set of cable crossings each time but they start and finish in different places, thus each one moves through the work of each other bell. Bell 8 (the tenor) is picked out in blue yarn - for the first "lead" it starts in 8th place (brown line on the digital chart) and finishes in 6th place, for the second lead it starts in 6th (turquoise) and finishes in 4th, etc.. After seven leads it is back to 8th place so that is a "plain course" of 224 changes.

"Bob" and "single" are instructions for ways to alter the plain course so that it can take thousands of changes (still nothing repeated!) to come back round to the 12345678 sequence again. I didn't knit any of those because even I don't want a scarf that long. I had to block it in the local church because we didn't have any space long enough at home where the dogs&cat wouldn't get to it!

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Some five thousand years ago, a 27-foot high granite standing stone was erected by the Neolithic people of future Dartmoor. In the 12th century, a monastery was built on the spot, incorporating the stone into its foundations. The monastery became a manor house in the 14th century, then an inn in the 15th, which it remains to this day as The Oxenham Arms.

The standing stone remains in its place, unceremoniously part of the sitting room wall next to the radiator.

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occasionally I am struck dumb by the sublime beauty of the world in the small moments, you know?

egg

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I think some people are writing "Gen AI" to mean "generative artificial intelligence", and some people are writing "Gen AI" to mean "general artificial intelligence".

Those are very different things and only one of them exists (you can say it's not intelligence, and I agree, but it is widely called that).

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One of fandom’s theme songs, or ought to be. 

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It's a Whatamess!

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This is actually cool Babies from three people's DNA prevents hereditary disease

Mitochondrial disease is inherited from the mother. But if you swap things around with a donor egg after fertilisation but before the building-a-body process gets started, you can get a baby that's still genetically the baby of both the parents, and has mitochondria that work. And the benefits should stick in future generations.

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The school across the road is teaching its teens to play cricket. This involves a decent amount of running around and shouting, especially from the teacher.

One of his admonishments:

"You're giving nonsense advice! If you're gonna shout out, know what you're talking about!"

Important life lessons from sports.

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Rewatching the Oceangate hearings, for some reason. It's such an incredible parade of Types Of Guy. The contrast, on this day, between Guillermo Sohnlein, Roy Thomas and Phil Brooks is fascinating. I think it's not only interesting to creative writers, but also to young people entering any trade or profession.

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Fucking hate watching children go “um Actually UwU” about AO3. saw someone say that fixing a bug with bookmarks isn’t a good reason to close a site down for a couple hours and they’re all lying about what they spend money on

meanwhile this very week my actual day job shut down the internal programmes for idk how many hours to fix a minor bug that popped up out of nowhere. I mean??? I don’t know shit about IT but “shut down all functions while we fix a problem” is so damn common. And “oh this took longer than we said” as well.

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This is great. In principle it should be great for the standard because so much more talent and artistry will be available when they're not arbitrarily required to include a man: and also I can't wait to see what all same-sex pairs do physically and artistically when they get good choreography. And it would be very beautiful to see another high level sports competition where gender just wasn't relevant.

There are sports which don't technically have a gender separation, but they don't need to because they've been professional (i.e. not Olympic) sports all along, so you don't need a rule excluding women, it can be dealt with by a combination of hostile environments, not paying women equally for the same results, and just not supporting girls to do the intense long-term early training needed. Motor racing and snooker, for example. There are others where the competition is separated unnecessarily and contrary to tradition, like modern Olympic archery, because the organisation fears, possibly rightly, that the women would win. And there are sports so extreme and niche that no one cares if women win on equal terms, like single handed circumnavigation of the Earth in a sailing boat, or extreme ultramarathons.

This one is interesting to me because a lot of the dynamics are exactly the same as social dancing, in which I dance both roles, and the dynamics of that are complicated, sometimes unsatisfactory, but generally really fun.

As I say, I can't wait to see what they come up with.

learned that finland has a same-gender junior ice dance team and this is everything to me

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I've done this before, but - these are the opening paragraphs of Chapter 5 of HMS Surprise.

The sun beat down from its noon-day height upon Bombay, imposing a silence upon that teeming city, so that even in the deepest bazaars the steady beat of the surf could be heard - the panting of the Indian Ocean, dull ochre under a sky too hot to be blue, a sky waiting for the south-west monsoon; and at the same moment far, far to the westward, far over Africa and beyond, it heaved up to the horizon and sent a firey dart to strike the limp royals and topgallants of the Surprise as she lay becalmed on the oily swell a little north of the line and some thirty degrees west of Greenwich.

The blaze of light moved down to the topsails, to the courses, shone upon the snowy deck, and it was day. Suddenly the whole of the east was day: the sun lit the sky to the zenith and for a moment the night could be seen over the starboard bow, fleeting away towards America. Mars, setting a handsbreadth above the western rim, went out abruptly; the entire bowl of the sky grew brilliant and the dark sea returned to its daily blue, deep blue. "By your leave, sir," cried the captain of the afterguard, bending over Dr Maturin and shouting into the bag that covered his head. "If you please, now."

I don't know what else to tell you.

But those were the first paragraphs I read, and the craftsmanship does not drop.

the thing about the aubrey-maturin series is that if you enjoy star trek tos largely but not exclusively for spirk reasons and you also like jane austen, then it was specifically written for you. come join me on my heterosexual dad literature journey

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Calvin and Hobbes visiting different works of art 🎨

I made this zine with an old Calvin and Hobbes book (already torn), and some old postcards and art books.

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So I heard tumblr dot com likes Mini mum?