RIP. An amazing body of work, but, for some reason, I've always thought his greatest triumph was the moment in the TV adaptation of Police at the Funeral when he successfully delivers an entirely undeliverable line: "Because it mewed at me, it said 'meow, meow'".

RT @MancHSTM: JOB KLAXON: We are hiring a Lecturer in History of Medicine and/or Health (FT & permanent); we're encouraging applications fr…

(The moral case for abandoning Twitter outright is not trivial, and I wish certain citizens would give it a REST with all the SCOLDING. At the practical level, though, it does seem clear that the platform is spiralling towards pointlessness for many purposes including mine)

@NigelSommelier @HookyBrewery @Adnams Many thanks for the recommendation! And really nice to see it being read in a suitable setting... It's still in print: the publisher's in the US ( but the usual retailers over here should be able to get it easily enough.

@NagingtonUoM Personally I won't be happy till they've built the Picc-Vic Tunnel. And then filled it in again.

RT @hansmollman: yeah maybe if you’ve not been paying attention to anything in the last 5-10 years

Yes well on the one hand I'm not exactly coping, but on the other hand it would be pretty worrying to be coping at the moment. If you know anyone who shows signs of being OK, now would be a good time to check in with them in case they've lost all sensory function or become evil.

Going against ingrained habits, I deliberately avoided the news today till I'd finished teaching. This was the correct call. Students received three hours of reasonably competent lecture delivery and seminar co-ordination instead of intermittent glassy staring and mumbling.

RT @MikeDrucker: when you accidentally write the most pro-Kamala tweet of the election

I will admit I didn't consciously categorise him as "unfit for office" until I found out he was running for office.

I'm literally unable to understand why serious analysts use these geographical maps instead of hexmaps. This ( is serious analysis by anyone's standards. Data being visualised: 308 blue, 230 red. (308 is more than 230) Colour of map: basically red.

@NagingtonUoM Good question. Not that I've seen, but I image it's only a matter of time...

RT @davidhuyssen: AI was always already a scab

RT @MedHistoryMan: If you're in Manchester on 5 November, you can forgo the usual fireworks display for a display of intellectual fireworks…

Heroic Resistance Leader: "After ten years of brutal attritional combat with the Death Robots, we may finally have found a way to defeat them." Death Robot Human Stooge: "You can't just ignore the Death Robots, you know. That would be silly."