This entry unfortunately has to start with the obligatory remark on the miserable political news, which is that one of the worst human beings on the planet has somehow managed to again be elected to the most important job on the planet. The exact repercussions of this are unknowable but range from bad to really bad to catastrophic. Somehow even ( Read more... )

It's been a while, hasn't it? I can't recall the last time I took two months between entries - probably this is the longest gap since I started writing here 20 years ago. It's been something of a perfect storm, as these things go: being extremely busy, yet without anything extremely notable happening, and meanwhile something of a different ( Read more... )

I returned to the UK on Tuesday evening, and after a few days of trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to catch up at work it was once again the weekend. Specifically: my birthday weekend ( Read more... )

My original plan at the end of the Aspen workshop was simply to fly back home, but a look at the convention calendar presented another possibility: Denfur, the Colorado furry convention, was coincident with the end of my stay and only an hour's flight (or four hours' drive) away. Furthermore, in my discussions with Riff earlier in the summer it ( Read more... )

I'm wrapping up a three-week stay in Aspen, Colorado, for another summer workshop. This is my fourth time attending one of these events (previous visits were in 2019, 2015, and 2014) and without a doubt they are some of the most pleasant academic activities out there. For several weeks I'm able to gather with twenty or thirty other experts in ( Read more... )

After my visit to the Lake District last weekend I headed directly to London and flew out on Tuesday - first to Denver, where I picked up a connecting flight to Albuquerque for my usual New Mexico summer trip ( Read more... )

My return to Liverpool did not last for long: I returned home on Sunday night, and was off again Friday morning. Most of this time was devoted to work catch-up: meeting PhD students, meeting master's students, reading paper drafts neglected over the preceding weeks of travel, and closing out the official results from resit assignments given out ( Read more... )

The scheduling of my trip to California provided an opportunity: I'd be flying into London the day before the London Furs' big summer weekend party, which consists of a four-hour ride on a "party boat" up and down the Thames river, followed by an extra long furmeet at their usual pub venue. I attended regularly during the first few years after I ( Read more... )

After my short Bay Area vacation over the Fourth of July weekend it was time to shift the trip back into work mode - the rest of the trip would be devoted to a stay in Southern California. Largely this would be to devoted to a research group visit to Caltech (something of an annual tradition of mine), but the first item on the itinerary was a task ( Read more... )

The flight to the US was long and mostly spent working through a backlog of e-mails over the satellite wi-fi, but I touched down in San Francisco mid-afternoon on the Fourth of July (a little ahead of schedule) and was quickly collected by my hosts Mynx and Hours to be shuttled over to a nearby furry house party to initiate what was now in effect a ( Read more... )