I wanted to visualise Britain's state spending ahead of the Budget, so I've vibe coded an app which presents it as a disk drive. Take a look at the tradeoffs and see if you can make the budget fit: britains-disk.pages.dev

In musical tuning and harmony, the Tonnetz (German for 'tone net') is a conceptual lattice diagram representing tonal space first described by Leonhard Euler in 1739

I'm imagining a student supposedly intelligent and driven enough to receive an education at Oxford, but apparently so stupid they cannot work out the meanings of common English idioms from context and so poorly read that they haven't encountered them in English literature

After studying classical music and then spending years raving in Bristol, I’ve developed the somewhat niche opinion that a lot of symphonies could benefit from a wheel up

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective. worksinprogress.co/issue/the… The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking: - A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine. - Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints. - Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week. - Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’. - Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’. This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team. Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

You know that feeling when you book a flight for 50 quid and somehow it ends up costing 100? Getting seats together, correcting a typo, another charge here and there, it all adds up. When the cost of living is already squeezing people, those endless extras can feel relentless. So we're changing the rules for you. Parents won't need to pay a penny extra just to sit next to their own children. You'll be able to fix any name errors on your booking free of charge. And because the last thing you want once you're on the plane is more stress, we're working with the industry to make sure that disruptive passengers who have been banned from one airline can be banned from flying with other airlines too. I know holidays are expensive and these are small things, but hopefully they'll make your trip just that little bit cheaper and easier. That's exactly the kind of thing I want this government to keep on fixing.