Reading

Cranking Up Protein Expression to the Limit

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/cranking-protein-expression-limit

I found this to be an interesting though experiment that’s been brought into reality. In chemical biology and protein research we spend a lot of time getting cells to express particular proteins for us (and indeed this is a very important commercial process for protein-based pharmaceuticals). It’s a bit of an art form. We know some general principles of how to get this to work - particular types of cells, promoters to use next to the sequence of your protein to make it get expressed more strongly, where in the cellular genomes you’d want to insert these constructs, and so on. But these don’t always work (to put it lightly) and even when they do there’s often tweaking needed to get high expression levels of properly folded proteins. Get some factors wrong, all the way down to what sort of vessels you grow the cells in, and you can end up with very low levels of those desired proteins, or perhaps very respectable levels of misfolded junk. Some readers have surely experienced both of these outcomes, perhaps even with the same damn protein.

And there’s always a limit in how hard you can press those engineered cells. You are, after all, forcing them to use their metabolic energy to produce something that they don’t want and don’t need. The key is to maximize that without killing them off, and that level will vary widely depending on the protein and the cell line. The paper linked above is trying to ask what happens when you get cells to produce higher and higher amounts of the least intrinsically cytotoxic protein that they could find to see what the stress pathways really are.

The authors settled on a fluorescent protein that was mutated not to fluoresce (mox-YG) and a glycolytic enzyme that was mutated to be nonfunctional (Gpm1-CCmut). These could be revved up to rather high levels without doing anything on their own (other than hogging cellular resources and physical space). That really is one of the recognized categories of trouble at high expression levels, “resource overload”. That is, the systems responsible for protein production are so tilted towards making the foreign protein that production of essential proteins for the cell start to be disrupted. Then there’s “stoichiometry imbalance”, especially found when you’re expressing a whole protein complex, as well as “pathway modulation”, and “promiscuous interaction”. These can overlap a bit or be linked together, but involve the large amounts of foreign protein interacting with existing cellular proteins to the detriment of their natural functions. The model is that the expression limit hits one of these barriers, and if you find a way to remove that, then it will go up until it hits the next one, and so on.

The Final Boss of this process might well be the restraints on protein synthesis itself. That’s a massive ongoing general process, whereas particular transport or degradation pathways have more specific subtrates and functions. If you’re overloading the capacity of the ribosomes and transfer RNA pathways, you’ve pretty much pegged the system on the far right side of the meter. (The manuscript has a number of references to studies over the years investigating these).

In yeast cells, things seem to max out at about 15% of the total protein concentration of a cell, which you have to admit is rather a lot for a single protein to be taking up. But no one has been sure that this is the real limit. The authors here note that some proteins have more efficient mRNA pathways than others, for example, putting a burden on transcription. If that’s well-lubricated, then you might run into limits on translation! And so on. Where do the bolts start to come loose?

Well, this paper got the levels of that formerly fluorescent mox-YG protein up to over 40% of total protein in the cell, which certainly shatters the old record. And at those levels the limiting factors seemed to be outright amino acid depletion, problems with ribosome expression, and an apparent metabolic switch from glycolysis over to more oxygen respiration. But they also got their other “benign” protein (Gpm1-CCmut) up to these levels without seeing those signs of nitrogen starvation or increased oxygen usage (!)

So this is certainly progress, but the fundamental questions remain open. The authors note that it will take a better and more continuously “tunable” expression system to learn more (for example, at what point does that respiratory switch start to kick in?) And we still need to understand more about how the effects of overexpression, even at these severe levels, can still be so distinct. There’s a lot that can go wrong!

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/cranking-protein-expression-limit

Architecture Converges with the Human Form in Antony Gormley’s ‘Body Buildings’

Posted by Kate Mothes

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/08/antony-gormley-body-buildings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=460777

Architecture Converges with the Human Form in Antony Gormley’s ‘Body Buildings’

In Edinburgh, along a stream known as the Water of Leith, six bronze figures known as “6 TIMES” stand amid the current and beside bridges, peering enigmatically down the urban waterway. Similarly, in Liverpool, “Another Place” comprises 100 life-size sculptures made from 17 molds that artist Antony Gormley (previously) took from his own body, installed permanently along Crosby Beach. In fact, the artist has dozens of permanent installations throughout the U.K. and all over the world, the majority of which interact with shorelines, parkland, and historic sites.

Gormley has long been fascinated by the relationship between humans, landscape, and the built environment. While many of his figurative sculptures retain natural, muscular curvatures and a true-to-life scale, he also ventures into abstract territory, incorporating cubist and brutalist elements into geometric, three-dimensional forms. In spite of their blockiness, which we associate with built structures of rigid materials like concrete and steel, his pieces are anything but soulless.

an aerial overview of a room-size art installation by Antony Gormley of blocky terracotta forms resembling human figures in various positions — “Resting Place II”

Gormley’s recent solo exhibition, Body Buildings at Galleria Continua in Beijing, ran from November 2024 and April 2025 and forms the basis of a new monograph of the same title. Forthcoming from SKIRA, the volume is slated for release on October 7.

Using terracotta clay and iron for pieces like “Resting Place II” and “Buttress,” Gormley taps into materials often found in construction in the form of bricks or angular frameworks. He describes his approach as a means “to think and feel the body in this condition.” Whether arranged on the floor in various positions or leaning against walls, his figures are simultaneously independent of the architecture and indelibly connected to it. “Buttress,” for example, prompts us to inquire whether the wall is holding up the person or the other way around.

New scholarship published in Body Buildings by Hou Hanru and Stephen Greenblatt explores Gormley’s engagement with China over the course of the past three decades. And a photo essay by the artist traces his interactions with the region, sharing never-before-seen archival photographs that document a 1995 research trip, where he visited the phenomenal army of terracotta warriors in Qin Shi Huang’s tomb in Xi’an.

Pre-order your copy of Body Buildings on Bookshop, and explore more of Gormley’s work on his website.

a gallery with two visitors standing near an overlook, with a sculpture by Antony Gormley installed on the wall to the left, of a blocky abstract figure resembling a human leaning face-forward on the wall — “Buttress” (2023), cast iron, 176.8 x 54.5 x 67.2 centimeters

a detail of a room-size art installation by Antony Gormley of blocky terracotta forms resembling human figures in various positions — Detail of “Resting Place II”

a sculpture by Antony Gormley installed in a white gallery space, depicting a blocky, abstract figure resembling a human with their head in their hands — “Shame” (2023), cast iron, 161.7 x 59 x 42.9 centimeters

a sculpture by Antony Gormley installed in a white gallery space, depicting a blocky, abstract figure resembling a human lying prostrate on the floor — “Circuit” (2022), cast iron, 29.3 x 201.3 x 122.4 centimeters

people walk through a room-size art installation by Antony Gormley of blocky terracotta forms resembling human figures in various positions — Installation view of Detail of “Resting Place II”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Architecture Converges with the Human Form in Antony Gormley’s ‘Body Buildings’ appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/08/antony-gormley-body-buildings/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=460777

Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al

Posted by fromtheheartofeurope

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hyperion-by-robbie-morrison-et-al/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62920

Second frame of third issue:

Doctor!
Ah, There you are, Clara. About time too.

A tale of two parts, a one-shot by George Mann with a twist punchline that you can see coming from a mile off (apology for spoilers, but you probably weren’t going to read it anyway):

And a much better four-parter by Robbie Morrison, picking up the story of the sun-like Hyperion creatures from Fractures, featuring also a heroic fireman and a very venal (“I for one welcome…” politician. I felt that the art sometimes din’t quite get the Doctor and Clara, but otherwise quite enjoyed it.

You can get Hyperion here. Next up is The School of Death by Robbie Morrison et al.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/hyperion-by-robbie-morrison-et-al/

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/?p=62920

The Big Idea: Jane Harrington

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/21/the-big-idea-jane-harrington/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56923

Author Jane Harrington has more in store today than a book. In her Big Idea she brings us a history lesson, one that will change how you see the entire genre of fairy tales. Follow along to see how teaching this lesson to college students led to the creation of her new book, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance.

JANE HARRINGTON:

The desire to restore the legacies of marginalized women writers in history was the impetus for this book. And anger.

Some years ago I was called upon to teach a college literature course, and though I’m generally more comfortable teaching writing than lit, I thought, Okay, how about fairy tales? I knew my Perrault, Grimms, Andersen, and Disney, so I could put together something decent enough. It would be fun! But it wasn’t long into the first term before not-so-fun questions started poking at my brain.

One was Why do male writers overwhelmingly dominate the history of fairy tales? The only so-called classic tale with female authorship is “Beauty and the Beast.” And Why do we even call these stories fairy tales? I mean, you can count on one hand how many fairies appear in the combined works of the aforenamed fathers of the genre. Turns out the answer to both questions is the same: because the women writers who were responsible for the popularity of fairy tales—and who coined the term itself, contes de fées (because they were French)—were axed from the canon in favor of male writers. And, yes, there were fairies in every one of their seventy-plus tales.

My first glimpse of these women was in the margins of English-language folklore scholarship, which tends to focus on German, i.e., Grimm-ish, roots, and thus can lack depth in other areas. What was said about them was scant, somewhat dismissive, and (I would only learn later) often inaccurate. But they were female fairy-talers—conteuses, they called themselves—and I wanted to include them in my course.

So began my quest, which involved walls of books growing around me, thanks to an excellent university library and charming librarians who conjured up dozens of physical volumes from beyond the collection. And then there were all the electronic texts, archival and otherwise. Much of what I had to read was in French, a language I’m far from fluent in, but I wasn’t going to let that get between me and the stories of these writers. Truth is, it’s hard for even the fluent to nail down these histories, but more on that in the book.

Some broad strokes of what I learned: The conteuses wrote not only fairy tales but novels, historical fiction, plays, essays, and poetry. Their works were wildly popular, as were the writers themselves, who hosted literary salons in Paris. There they crafted the contes de fées that would usher in the first fairy tale vogue. Charles Perrault attended these salons, too, writing his “Mother Goose” tales from the prompts offered by these women. He produced one slim book, which came out at the same time as the women’s voluminous output, and yet he is the one history remembers from that birth of a genre.

Why were the women left out of the fairy tale canon? Well, all I’ll say here is that it mostly had to do with the misogynistic, homophobic, and ultra-conservative religiosity of Louis XIV’s reign. The conteuses were always under threat of not only losing their pens but their physical freedom. Exiles from Paris were common, as were lengthy stints in convents for mauvaise conduite—being an unruly woman.

Examples of unruliness: writing poems that insulted the king, trying to stop the abuse of a husband (with no recourse in the law), gambling, cussing, engaging in same-sex relationships. For the latter, one of the women was imprisoned in a cell in a medieval castle-turned-prison. Yes, in a tower. And yes, she’d written tales of young women trapped in towers. Only in her tales—and unlike her—the characters eventually prevailed over despotic forces.

So, anger. Probably no surprise here, but the more I learned about these women, the more incensed I became over how men of the patriarchy had disrupted their livelihoods and their lives, some even chipping away at their legacies long after the women were dead (think Voltaire). I kept a list, and before I’d even finished Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance I had a plan: The conteuses would get vengeance on their oppressors in a salon in the afterlife—a quirky novel of the speculative-historical-literary variety. My working title: Women of the Fairy Tale Revenge.

Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Facebook|LinkedIn

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/21/the-big-idea-jane-harrington/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56923

Bite Me, Anita Bryant

The total import value in June of fresh orange juice from the U.S. into Canada was $5.78 million, compared to nearly $12 million in June 2024.

Anaphoric macros introduce hidden bindings in Lisp.

Posted by Tony Finch

https://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap6.html

https://dotat.at/:/G4ZRH.html

2025‑08‑16 - Anaphoric macros introduce hidden bindings in Lisp.

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In Milwaukee, Four Artists Unravel Trauma to Move Toward Collective Wellness

Posted by Grace Ebert

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/08/no-one-knows-all-it-takes/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=460424

In Milwaukee, Four Artists Unravel Trauma to Move Toward Collective Wellness

In a world riddled with injustice and predicated on privilege for the few at the expense of the many, what does it mean to be well? An exhibition opening Friday at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee considers the effects of concealed trauma and the inextricable ties between personal health and collective wellness.

No One Knows All It Takes invites four artists—Bryana Bibbs, Raoul Deal, Maria Gaspar, and Swoon (previously)—who utilize art-making to grapple with complex emotions, imagine solutions to widespread problems, and share their stories and those of others. The timely exhibition, curated by Colossal, brings forth pressing issues like addiction, incarceration, immigration, and a lack of support for caregivers, conveyed through visually arresting works across media.

a weaving with a deck of cards — Bryana Bibbs, “1.25.24-1.26.24” (2024), handwoven Papa George hospital blanket, Papa George playing cards, gifted pants, 11.5 x 14.5 inches

No One Knows All It Takes opens with portraits by Deal, intimate renderings made through hours of conversations with the subjects. Paired with his wooden sculptures, the elaborate carvings explore the central role of immigration in American history and culture. Bibbs’ weavings and monotype prints—created while she cared for her dying grandparents with many of their belongings— follow as a sort of ghostly archive of what remains after death.

Swoon’s “Medea” fills the fourth gallery space, a deeply personal installation that the artist made, in part, to confront her mother’s lifelong struggle with addiction and mental illness. An exposed tarantula mother, portraits of Swoon’s own family, wooden windows, and audio elements layer personal artifacts with recurring motifs about intergenerational trauma.

The Wisconsin iteration of Gaspar’s Disappearance Jail series tucks into a smaller, more confined space at the end of the exhibition. Featuring images of 113 prisons, jails, and juvenile and immigrant detention facilities throughout the state, the project invites visitors to use hole punches to literally remove and obscure the carceral spaces. Because incarceration has historically been the only manner in which society addresses harm and trauma, Gaspar’s work tasks each person with the abolitionist exercise of imagining other possibilities.

a woodblock print of a snack reaching out toward a child — Raoul Deal, “Trenzas” (2023), woodcut with deckled edge, 28 x 42 inches

The title, No One Knows All It Takes, came from a conversation with Bibbs, in which she described the emotional, mental, and physical toll of caring for her grandparents in their final months. Referencing the intersecting and multilayered effects of trauma, the phrase is also multivalent: it invokes the immense amount of energy needed to function while ill, the wide-reaching impacts of trauma on an individual’s life, and the social, political, and cultural costs of unaddressed issues.

No One Knows All It Takes will be on view from August 22 to December 20. The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

hands holding an image with innumerable punched holes

a large grid of images — Maria Gaspar, *Disappearance Jail* series (detail), (2021-ongoing), hundreds of perforated archival Inkjet prints on rice paper, 5 x 7 inches each

a black and white woodcut print of a man with a cowboy hat and text in spanish surrounding him — Raoul Deal, “Immigration Series #8” (2013), woodcut, 40 x 26 1/4 inches

an installation with patterned wallpaper, figures, vignettes, and a tarantula woman at the center — Swoon, “Medea” (2017), wood, hand cut paper, laser cut paper, linoleum block print on paper, acrylic gouache, cardboard, lighting elements

a weaving with two boxes and a playing card — Bryana Bibbs, “12.27.23” (2023), handwoven Papa George casino playing cards, Papa George hospital blanket, 14 x 9.25 inches

a weaving with synthetic flowers — Bryana Bibbs, “8.26.24” (2024), handwoven Papa George athletic tee, Papa George gifted pajama pants, Mema decor flowers, 25 x 9 inches

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article In Milwaukee, Four Artists Unravel Trauma to Move Toward Collective Wellness appeared first on Colossal.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/08/no-one-knows-all-it-takes/

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/?p=460424

A recipe for creating random fractals

Posted by John

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/08/21/random-fractals/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246435

Last week I gave an example of a randomly generated fractal and mentioned that it was “a particularly special case of a more general algorithm for generating similar fractals found in [1].”

Here’s the general pattern. First, create a non-singular matrix M with integer entries and let k be the determinant of M.

Let P be the parallelogram spanned by the columns of M. Choose a set of column vectors r_i for i = 1, 2, 3, …, k from the two columns of M and from the interior of P.

Pick a random starting vector v then iterate

v = M⁻¹ v + r_i

where i is chosen at random on each iterations.

Here’s an example suggested as an exercise in [2]. We start with

$M = \begin{bmatrix} 2 & -1 \\ 1 & \phantom{-}2 \end{bmatrix}$

and look at the parallelogram spanned by the columns of M.

Then the algorithm described above is implemented in the following Python code.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

A = np.linalg.inv(np.array([[2,  -1], [1, 2]]))
R = np.array([[2, -1, 1,  1,  0],
              [1,  2, 0, -1, -1]])

v = np.random.random(size=2)
for _ in range(100000):
    i = np.random.choice([0, 1, 2, 3, 4])
    v = np.dot(A, v) + R[:, i]
    plt.plot(v[0], v[1], 'bo', markersize=1)
plt.gca().set_aspect("equal")
plt.show()

This produces the following fractal.

[1] Darst, Palagallo, and Price. Fractal Tilings in the Plane. Mathematics Magazine [71]:1, 1998.

[2] Lorelei Koss, Fractal Rep-tiles and Geometric Series. Math Horizons. Vol 30, Issue 1, September 2022.

The post A recipe for creating random fractals first appeared on John D. Cook.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/08/21/random-fractals/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=246435

JetPack Prompt Response

Posted by John Samuel

https://piratesobg.wordpress.com/2025/08/21/jetpack-prompt-response-9/

http://piratesobg.wordpress.com/?p=11485

Where did your name come from?

I’ll answer this in terms of the blog name, which came as a suggestion from an old friend in Canberra lo these many years ago as a fairly obvious play on Pirates of The Caribbean. As I recall we were at a picnic near Lake Burley Griffin at the time.

There is an anime connection as well – my two accounts for Fate/Grand Order are Arcadia (as in Captain Harlock’s ship) and Marika (as in Marika Katou, the lead character in Bodacious Space Pirates).

https://piratesobg.wordpress.com/2025/08/21/jetpack-prompt-response-9/

http://piratesobg.wordpress.com/?p=11485

LEGO 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory officially unveiled!

Posted by Jay Ong

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-21360-willy-wonka-the-chocolate-factory-officially-unveiled/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77301

You’ve won the golden ticket to build 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, a gorgeous LEGO homage to Gene Wilder’s 1971 classic! This 2,025-piece LEGO model celebrates comes with 9 minifigures including Willy Wonka, Charlie, Grandpa Joe (all my homies hate Grandpa Joe), Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee and 2 Oompa […]

The post LEGO 21360 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory officially unveiled! appeared first on Jay's Brick Blog.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-21360-willy-wonka-the-chocolate-factory-officially-unveiled/

https://jaysbrickblog.com/?p=77301

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Project Farcry by Pauline Ashwell

Dr. Jordan's weird kid Richard is the key to unlocking first contact... and much more.

Project Farcry by Pauline Ashwell

Entry tags:

事务 | administration

(no subject)

damn, I meant to post this in the previous entry and forgot: I will be traveling shortly and will miss a day's posting, would anyone be able to make a post at the normal time if I send you the text for it? (I know it really wouldn't matter to miss a day, I just get obsessive about these things.) The timing in question would be in the general neighborhood of 36 hours from now (I will make one more normally scheduled entry and then there's the gap). Let me know? Appreciated. <3

What next in programming languages?

Posted by Tony Finch

https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/253769.html

https://dotat.at/:/SYRGQ.html

2025‑08‑16 - What next in programming languages?

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Phone, again [me, tech]

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

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micropost

An auspicious beginning

So far today, I was woken up at 4am because the children had been playing with an old alarm clock yesterday (I got back over though).

And Sophia hurt her wrist falling off of a swing yesterday and it still hurts this morning so we're off to the Sick Kids at 10am for her to get checked out.

Happy birthday to me!

Edit: No break. Possibly minor sprain. Just needs to take it easy and stay off the monkey bars for a few days.

Aerial Square

Posted by Unknown

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/08/aerial-square.html

45 Squared
29) AERIAL SQUARE, NW9
Borough of Barnet, 80m×20m

God I hate Colindale, most soulless of the suburbs, and all its horrible stacky boxes. Not the old part but the new cuboid dystopia near the station, a hellhole devoid of flair whose architects should have been forced to live there in perpetuity. Whichever way you look are bland apartments meeting minimal criteria, also scraps of lawn and prairies of public realm littered with concrete blocks masquerading as character, all shoehorned into a tiny part of Barnet as part of an "area of intensification". What hurts is that so much of this was public buildings and what it's become is private assets, benefitting the few rather than the many. This is the 21st century we're sleepwalking into and I despise it. Welcome to Aerial Square.

central Colindale

Where we are is opposite Colindale station, currently under reconstruction to create a portal to this upthrust hellhole. To the northwest a former hospital has been mulched to create 714 homes. To the southwest the British Newspaper Archive was unceremoniously replaced by 395 flats after its contents were despatched to West Yorkshire. And to the southeast what's been expunged is the majority of the famous Hendon Police Training College, skidpan and all, to be replaced by 2900 residential receptacles of varying sizes. It's a vast site, the Met Police having worked out they could consolidate all their operations into two buildings rather than 25, squeezed into 11 acres rather than 73. The capital's recruits still get trained so they're happy, and thousands of new Colindale residents get somewhere to live for good measure. Aerial Square is the gateway to this underwhelming crush.

Essentially the square is a broadened walkway, a funnel to feed folk from the farthest-flung blocks through to the main road. You can tell how far you are from civilisation by the letter your block of flats begins with, so Ashbrook House, Bronze House and Blackheath House are up front by Aerial Square, while Xenon Court, Youlston Court and Zambra Court are hemmed back by the railway and the M1. Ashbrook House is owned by UNCLE, the gratingly-upbeat rental company who prioritise facilities over square metres, this their largest project with 347 serviced hutches. According to their blurb the block comes with a wellness room, gym and movie room, this because they can upsell a few communal spaces for several extra pounds a month. Spaffing out on BoConcept designer furniture costs extra. It saddens me that London keeps building concierge stacks with fripperies for better-off renters rather than affordable flats unencumbered by extortionate extras.

I looked in vain for a sign saying Aerial Square because what's spelled out instead on the front wall is Colindale Gardens, the name of the estate. Gardens my arse, it's mostly hardstanding, towers and locked courtyards. Aerial Square includes half a dozen wedges of not especially lovely grass, some with raised edges to encourage people not to walk on them. Three further shards include patches of shrubbery with scrappy plants lifted from the underwhelming end of the horticultural catalogue, also a couple of rings of stunted birches providing the absolute minimum of elevated greenery. The artist's impression will have suggested a verdant nirvana but the reality is more a cityscape in greys and browns, thus depressingly less inspiring. You might consider sitting out here in nice weather, but having watched an owner allowing his dog to defecate down the far end I wouldn't recommend it.

Aerial Square

What's missing at present is a vibrant frontage, no company yet having taken advantage by renting New Commercial Units 3, 8 or 11. I'm surprised a coffee shop hasn't moved in yet, but maybe that's because New Colindale already has its fair share of anodyne refreshment and snack-based opportunities nearer to the station. When the sales office finally packs up I expect a froth and pastry merchant will descend, and cup-clutching residents unbankrupted by their service charges will then be able to assemble on the fake stone polyhedra dumped out front. I note that these are blocky enough to sit on but with faces carefully angled to ensure overnight sleeping is impossible, because being a public realm engineer these days requires embedding hostility by default.

One day, if we let it, more corners of London will look as nondescript as Aerial Square. It could be anywhere, rather than a former police college and aerodrome, the only nod to variety being that they used three shades of fake brick to create the cladding. We desperately need more housing so it's great to get some, but without character and charm this mesh of flats risks becoming an insipid ghetto and future slum. God I hate Colindale, most soulless of the suburbs, and all its horrible stacky boxes.

http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2025/08/aerial-square.html

The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web

Posted by cks

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebIsKindOfFragile

These days, more and more people are putting more and more obstacles in the way of the plague of crawlers (many of them apparently doing it for LLM 'AI' purposes), me included. Some of these obstacles involve attempting to fingerprint unusual aspects of crawler requests, such as using old browser User-Agents or refusing to accept compressed things in an attempt to avoid gzip bombs; other obstacles may involve forcing visitors to run JavaScript, using CAPTCHAs, or relying on companies like Cloudflare to block bots with various techniques.

On the one hand, I sort of agree that these 'bot' (crawler) defenses are harmful to the overall ecology of the web. On the other hand, people are going to do whatever works for them for now, and none of the current alternatives are particularly good. There's a future where much of the web simply isn't publicly available any more, at least not to anonymous people.

One thing I've wound up feeling from all this is that the current web is surprisingly fragile. A significant amount of the web seems to have been held up by implicit understandings and bargains, not by technology. When LLM crawlers showed up and decided to ignore the social things that had kept those parts of the web going, things started coming down all over the place.

(This isn't new fragility; the fragility was always there.)

Unfortunately, I don't see a technical way out from this (and I'm not sure I see any realistic way in general). There's no magic wand that we can wave to make all of the existing websites, web apps, and so on not get impaired by LLM crawlers when the crawlers persist in visiting everything despite being told not to, and on top of that we're not going to make bandwidth free. Instead I think we're looking at a future where the web ossifies for and against some things, and more and more people see catgirls.

(I feel only slightly sad about my small part in ossifying some bits of the web stack. Another part of me feels that a lot of web client software has gotten away with being at best rather careless for far too long, and now the consequences are coming home to roost.)

(One comment.)

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WebIsKindOfFragile

Entry tags:

第四年第二百二十四天

部首
口 part 11
含, to contain; 听, to listen; 启, to start ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=30

语法
人 vs 男人
https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/ren2-vs-nan2ren2/

词汇
演, 表演, to perform; 演唱, to sing; 演唱会, concert; 演出, show; 演员, actor; 导演, director ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-3-word-list/

Guardian:
你们没有迷路，而且即将开启新世界的大门, you are not lost, rather you have opened the portal to a new world
你有没有看见一个脸上留着胡子，然后嘴里可能含着棒棒糖的这样的一个男人, have you seen a man with stubble on his face and maybe a lollipop in his mouth?
你们这么喜欢演戏去当演员啊, if you like play-acting so much go off and be actors

Me:
他的演唱真的好听。
男人嘛，没办法啊。

Enjoying the Dog Days

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/20/enjoying-the-dog-days/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56918

And who better to enjoy them than Charlie? Honestly, this is a master class right here in making the most of a waning summer season. Get to it, Charlie!

How are you?

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/20/enjoying-the-dog-days/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=56918

spinning on a spinning wheel

Watch on YouTube

Spinning at a spinning wheel - not a tutorial or demonstration of good spinning, and most of the wheel is out of frame so you can see the main ~action. I am still a beginner, and I think I foxed up some of the terminology. But my advisor was curious so I recorded this.