Oops!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/28/cornish-lighthouses-fog-alarm-has-been-going-off-every-13-seconds-for-past-week

Basically state sanctioned murder of children. They know in advance what the result will be, so there's premeditation. They acted deliberately despite knowing this. But they'll never be held criminally responsible.

Government's decision literally killing children.

"Hundreds of thousands of children in the world’s poorest countries will die if the UK cuts back funding for a hugely effective vaccination programme as part of its significant reduction in overseas aid"

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/feb/28/cuts-to-uk-vaccine-funding-could-lead-to-huge-numbers-of-child-deaths-overseas

Subscribe to Open isn't perfect (IMO), but it is great to see no-fee diamond OA models succeeding and being praised. These are the future.

This is a really nice summary or aide-mémoire of the python programming language

https://mouhamaddev.github.io/Code-Memo/

Today I will dialyse in the daytime. As Mrs Eve is away, I need a safety backup person in case I pass out. A friend has kindly said yes, but it's a slightly strange ask of her. "Would you please sit with me for 3hrs while my blood is cleaned in a machine? Oh by the way, I could pass out."

"A lot of the systemic oppression that disabled people face is neglect. It may not be outright vitriol. If you don’t take the action to make the space accessible, we can’t be there, or we can’t be there safely. We have to risk our lives" https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/ng-interactive/2024/dec/02/matt-mcgorry-long-covid

That's definitely the way to do it!

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/27/im-still-dancing-derbyshire-woman-has-105th-birthday-rave-at-care-home

Frustrating hospital result yesterday in some ways. They found nothing in the blood tests.

So I now have the situation of an unsafe fistula that bleeds excessively - over an hour each time - with no explanation. I can't use it.

I think I'll have to stay on the central venous catheter.

That's got downsides too. Huge infection risk compared to fistula. And it makes showering difficult and swimming impossible. Sigh.

"having to convince people that accessibility and disability justice are social justice issues in the first place is incredibly dehumanizing and exhausting and usually very fruitless"

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/ng-interactive/2024/dec/02/matt-mcgorry-long-covid

Orbit is an open-access journal of American literary studies. We have no fees. We are digitally preserved. All thanks to @openlibhums.bsky.social

Our next special issue is on indigenous speculative fiction. We recently had an issue on Percival Everett

Check us out at https://orbit.openlibhums.org/issues/

New article at Orbit.

"NOT WHO BUT WHAT: WHAT IS SHE?" Disembodied Quests for Utopia and Retrotopia from Mkrtich Armen’s Yerevan (1931) to Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963) https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.17522

Important hospital results day today. As I've mentioned, I've had real problems in the last 6 months with excessive bleeding. My dialysis fistula took over an hour to stop bleeding so is unsafe and I have to use the central line. Today I will learn if they know why.

I donated. But it's so sickening that we have to resort to donations to fund state school education (I know this isn't a "core" activity, but we should be commending this kind of thing).

The Developer Experience in Early 2025

https://gbilder.com/posts/2025-01-25-the-developer-experience-in-early-2025/

I have a number of diverse writing projects in the queue at the moment:

* A chapter on open science and social justice
* A chapter on George Orwell and the atomic bomb
* A book on the dark web

Fun!

Mrs Eve is away for a couple of days, leaving me and the doggos back home.

There's only one thing for it. The dogs requested it.

It's trashy action film time!

I love how people are posting that the UK newspapers are showing remarkable "solidarity" or unity on the AI issue, "because it's so unifying" or whatever.

Nah. Their medium just has a massive shared commercial interest in it.

Does the Royal Society perhaps have the contact details of one of its Fellows who might know something about the source of these recent attacks on science?

It's almost as though these venues that tout free speech in the name of "debate" don't want an actual debate.

Robyn. My sweet little doggie.

A really interesting piece on ipv6 transition https://blog.apnic.net/2024/10/22/the-ipv6-transition/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

I'm not sure this is something of which to be proud

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/24/uk-universities-educate-the-most-national-leaders-globally-analysis-shows

In the past month, I've started grinding my teeth terribly. It's now causing massive gum pain and working teeth loose. Eek! From today onwards, I have a gumshield guard for it and feel as though I'm off to play hockey rather than building scholarly infrastructure...

This week's research and reading time will be dedicated to a PhD thesis for examination.

This article is very depressing for the positive comments solicited about Doge, but it gets this right: "Musk, the world’s richest man, has blocked food and medicine for the world’s poorest people by gutting the agency responsible for delivering US aid".

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/23/cpac-elon-musk

A very camp Earnest! Great fun! Realised it is 20 years or so since I last saw it.

I love "easy read" cryptography papers that start with "this has been designed for anybody with a basic understanding of arithmetic". OK, the initial description of modulus was easy and clear. But 2 pages later...

This afternoon's activity is going to the cinema to see a filmed version of the National Theatre's production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_, with Ncuti Gatwa.

This week I read Barbara Kingsolver's _The Lacuna_. It took me much longer to get into than her others, but by the end I was hooked.

Also: Kingsolver did it again. 40 pages from the end of _The Lacuna_ and the protagonist suffers a grave injustice that left me outraged and furious! She is excellent at stirring emotional investment and then punching the reader in the face with it!

I was also curious about the Frida Kahlo connection. The protagonist in the book is gay. FK's affairs are documented - but only, as far as I recall, the ones with men. Perhaps the chronologies just didn't align.

I'd like to say that there was something awry with the book's structure, too. At the halfway point, I definitely thought this. But as I said, by the close I was so invested in the text that it turned out to really work.

I am advised, with my health conditions, to go to A&E much sooner than a healthy person.

But my last trip almost killed me. They had no dialysis capacity for emergency patients and my potassium reached critical levels, risking heart attack.

Fund the NHS.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/22/three-four-people-uk-fear-failed-ae-services-nhs

Emails this morning:

* Patient survey from third-party health app
* Customer survey from pension org
* Customer survey from food delivery company
* Netflix price "update"

Sometimes I think "who invented this thing? And how can I get my hands on them?!"

When you are deciding to get dogs, people say things like "it'll be good for us because it will force us out for walks every day".

When you have them and it's chucking it down - as it is this morning - that suddenly seems like a terrible idea.

Oh well. Here we go!

Scottish Labour: let's find the worst thing that's happening in the world right now and promise we'll implement it here.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/feb/21/scottish-labour-would-set-up-musk-style-doge-department-says-sarwar

HP decides that all tech support callers have to wait 15 minutes, hoping they'll go off and solve it themselves. Urgh.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/hp_deliberately_adds_15_minutes/

This morning, I've mostly been thinking about the relationships of open source scholarly technical platforms and their parent or partner projects. I wrote this https://eve.gd/2025/02/21/swimming-upstream/

Then I saw that rOpenSci has a very recent post on a similar theme https://ropensci.org/blog/2025/02/20/forks-upstream-relationship/

How cynical do you have to be to come to this conclusion?

Sure, he will destroy the globe by abandoning all global warming/green policies -- and he's going to wreck people's lives through discrimination -- but at least our universities will be funded!

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/21/trumps-re-election-to-boost-uk-universities-as-fewer-students-choose-us

Still thrilled w/ @shawnaross.bsky.social's review

“A champion of OA scholarship and prolific writer in book history and digital humanities, Eve supports his grand scope with his enviably broad knowledge of the subject & relays it approachably to book history scholars” https://sharpweb.org/sharpnews/2025/02/14/martin-paul-eve-theses-on-the-metaphors-of-digital-textual-history/

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/20/doctors-in-london-cure-blindness-in-children-with-rare-condition

tl;dr: Clarivate wants to make it impossible for academic libraries to buy books once and own them forever and wants instead to make it a recurring subscription payment. They're also trashing demand-driven acquisition, so libraries have to guess what readers want.

https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-582/opinion-a-librarians-summary-of-and-response-to-the-clarivate-announcement/

Urgh. Just been for my periodic iron infusion and they couldn't get vascular access - discovering which entailed much painful needling. Now I'm punctured, I have to come back another time, and still anaemic.

New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-book-sorting-algorithm-almost-reaches-perfection-20250124/

Anyway, this morning I am preparing my talk for the University of Oxford's OxFOS 2025 conference.

My morning wake-up routine is slightly unusual, due to haemodialysis. It takes a long time to get to my desk these days.

Alarm: ~6.30 (15 mins until end of dialysis to prepare)
End of dialysis: 6.45
Off the machine: 7:05
Feed the dogs and make tea: 7:15
Take meds: 7:25
Second tea: 7:35
Up: 7:40

Quick lunch break with some Telemann on Radio 3. Far from unpleasant.

This is absolutely true. Until I needed a wheelchair, I had no idea how bad most pavements are. They're also ALL steeply cambered which causes massive problems.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/19/eu-accused-of-leaving-devastating-copyright-loophole-in-ai-act

Without saying anything specific about the actual search I am engaged in, it's fascinating to see the difference in application norms between the tech sector and the academic sector. Length and format of CVs, style and length of cover letters, formatting -- all so different between these spaces.

This morning is search/hiring committee work for me. #fun

Write by W.A.S.T.E.

More seriously: this looks like a really interesting postal history 😁

I'll also be speaking here. Better start planning that!

Looking back, I'm really proud of this book. It was an extremely challenging experience to edit with a huge range of voices. We focused on colonial influences, epistemology, politics, archives, infrastructures, and communities. Available OA at The MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536240/reassembling-scholarly-communications/

This morning, for my writing, I'm recapping the social justice history of OA and the many angles therein. Turning back to this volume, wherein we focused on this.

I can't read it, but this looks classic.

"Donkeys are ‘misrepresented’ in movies, new university module teaches"

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/18/donkeys-misrepresented-in-movies-university-module-teaches/

In Wales, £19 million to support the higher education sector. But it's capital funding, not for the main cost: paying staff. Bit of a sticking plaster for an easy good-news story https://www.gov.wales/19-million-support-higher-education-sector

Martin Paul Eve, "Getting external access to BuddyPress's notifications (for Knowledge Commons)", https://eve.gd, February 18, 2025, https://doi.org/10.59348/gpbaz-kx09.

This is such an important point. AND people on disability benefits are among the most impoverished in the UK.

On average, disabled households need an additional £1,010 a month to have the same standard of living as non-disabled households.

https://www.scope.org.uk/campaigns/disability-price-tag

https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/resource-reviews/2024/archiving-the-scholarly-internet

Very well said

Rogue Scholar starts subject area communities https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/rogue-scholar-subject-area-communities/

I have dropped my morning writing habit for the past few weeks as I have a book under peer review and used this morning time for reviewing and reading others' works. Got back into it this AM, though, writing an invited book chapter on the kickback against open access engendered by LLMs.

This is bonkers. The REF is the mechanism for assessing the QR spend.

This perfectly illustrates just one problematic aspect of marketised teaching provision: it's not just some elastic resource that you can expand and contract instantly on a whim. It takes a lifetime of study to be able to teach in HE. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/more-engineering-applications-doesnt-make-for-more-engineers/

I feel sorry for the paper I'm reviewing this AM because I have horrible toothache and it's making me grumpy...

I have work out and under peer review, so I feel guilty at this moment in particular if I say "no" to reviewing the work of others, but the volume of requests at the moment is very high.

Now moving on to copyediting articles for Orbit. Yay! https://orbit.openlibhums.org/

Realised last night that I have 26 TERABYTES of old OLH backups sitting on drives here.

@ajrbyers.bsky.social said: "can you just upload them somewhere?"

😂😂😂

There we go. That's about as tidy as this room will get.

Hate tidying so much that I ended up procrastinating by getting IPv6 working on my home connection (v4 only) using Wireguard to a box with native v6 support. Horrible NAT setup, but better than nothing. @virginmedianews.bsky.social really need to get IPv6. https://www.havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/

Says it all

The book I read for peer review this week was really engaging and enjoyable. Hope the other reviewer agrees and that it will see the light of day.

Today, I intend to tidy my office, write a peer review report, walk with the dogs, and prepare a dossier with all our household/financial details for when I die. Cheerful stuff!

Good on @scurry.bsky.social for starting this letter, now covered in the Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/14/elon-musk-royal-society-open-letter-academics

New at Orbit, open access: Fast Times at Buckley High: The Assault on 1980s Nostalgia in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards

https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.10524

A fantastically engaged review of my /Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History/ from @shawnaross.bsky.social. Everything you want from a reviewer, really. Very pleased!

https://sharpweb.org/sharpnews/2025/02/14/martin-paul-eve-theses-on-the-metaphors-of-digital-textual-history/

OK, I lied, not quite my last Tor post for a while.

Turns out my relatively new relays are using about 400GB of traffic per day. Pretty hefty.

Friday new record day! Celebrating 15 years of A Love From Outer Space with this compilation.

Last Tor post for a while, but just got my second relay online and grouped in a "family" so that no circuit will use two relays that I own https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/family:5DFBBB3E6A8D500328428D1983226C5611B9D277

Something I am learning: Tor relays burn through bandwidth.

"Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 6:00 hours, with 10081 circuits open. I've sent 53.30 GB and received 53.23 GB. I've received 7874 connections on IPv4 and 0 on IPv6. I've made 6427 connections with IPv4 and 0 with IPv6."

I've said it before, but I love @mfenner.bsky.social's Rogue Scholar service. With a bit of help from Martin on the Slack forum, I can now pre-assign DOIs to blog posts that I write and that it aggregates. It's really fantastic. https://rogue-scholar.org/

Its a good question. Peer review: research or service? I have a small research-only university contract, but still consider peer review part of the duties.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/10/benefits-system-should-protect-not-punish-vulnerable-people

A new article from @scholtom.bsky.social, E Sykes, and me: “How can we achieve sustainable funding for open access books?,” Insights, 2025, 38: 4, 1–9; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.673

This morning's research time is devoted to the peer review of a book manuscript. It's good work so far!

If you want to see my ugly mug talking about open access and why it matters to me for a couple of minutes, here's a video I did with UKRI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfSPdgupMbw

"The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without consent?"

I think it might be "racism".

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/11/the-coventry-experiment-why-were-indian-women-in-britain-given-radioactive-food-without-consent

Researchers' experience of publishing academic books open access -- a set of case studies for UKRI, including me with my researcher hat on! https://zenodo.org/records/13944972

It went well!

So, one of our rescue dogs, Luka, remains really scared of me, 2 years after we adopted him (poor, traumatised doggy). Today is the first day that I will try taking him out on my own for a walk (with a pro dog walker) as a dry run for when Mrs Eve goes away later this month. Wish me luck!

“What Eve accomplishes is making these otherwise difficult, technical, and confusing concepts accessible for humanists. For any student or scholar looking to begin their studies into digital textuality, I recommend Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History”

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61117

Finished my next Barbara Kingsolver: _Unsheltered_. Also excellent and I greatly enjoyed the historical portions about Mary Treat, whose correspondence with Darwin is apparently available to view.

Next on the reading list is a book manuscript for a university press.

Tempted to add "Trump" and "Musk" to mute lists to improve my Bluesky experience, but I know that this kind of apolitical withdrawal isn't really possible in the world. 😕

The most annoying thing about the Bluesky app is how it doesn't save your place in the feed. Every feed refresh just pings you back to the top of the list.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/feb/08/health-minister-andrew-gwynne-sacked-over-whatsapp-comments

A small tool I wrote today for use within MESH Research. Give it an AWS ECS cluster name and it will tell you the IP addresses of all associated EC2 services. https://github.com/MESH-Research/knowledge-commons-tools

Whenever I sit down in our sitting room, the dogs think it's time for treats 😂

The hilarious thing about the pureed meals I've ordered as part of my hospital recovery is how they mould the puree into the shape of the food it's meant to be/is.

A rare masked outing/treat this evening: Macbeth with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo at the local Vue

It seemed the time.

My website is now available via TOR. This should provide a backup mechanism against any attempts at internet censorship.

You need the TOR browser to access this link, but your visit will then be totally anonymous.

http://lz7fxwg7lcc6pyehczacrunyu2gk32dcxcierwtjxqnyil3ohrfdcfyd.onion/

Had my first power cut while on dialysis last night. The emergency systems cut in exactly as they should and the emergency lighting we have installed came on. Power came back two minutes later and all was well.

So, today's medical appointment was inconclusive. I've got a steroid regimen to try for the next month and we'll reappraise then. The challenge is that I've tried all the biologics and the only one that really worked allowed a virus to destroy my kidneys. Challenging.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/labour-cuts-benefits-tories-vulnerable

Made some really good progress last night and this morning on rewriting the Knowledge Commons profile system - I got SAML SSO working!

Adding visibility options, Bluesky profile, CV upload, and more. This reworking will allow us to change the profile system with far greater ease.

Courtesy of @ernestopriego.com

I have to go to hospital and make some grim decisions today.

I think it's either:

* Change my meds and treat the rheumatoid arthritis properly. This will destroy my kidneys. But will stop the bowel paralysis and avoid hospitalisation.

* Stay as I am, in constant pain, and risk bowel perforation.

Educating the working classes was said to be "scattering the seeds of evil".

Sadly, this view covertly remains to this day, every time you hear a politician saying too many people are getting an education at university etc.

Since I reconfigured my life to accommodate kidney failure and to work on the projects I value, things have changed a lot. So far, this year, I have spent just 11 hours handling email. A few years ago, I spent 42 hours per month handling them. https://eve.gd/2022/01/01/last-year-i-spent-506-hours-answering-emails-how-i-hope-to-do-less-of-it-this-year/

Locked in a frustrating tussle with SAML authentication systems!

Today, Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian financial newspaper of record, wrote a page-long print article about my work on digital preservation.

Errm.

"OpenAI has announced a new AI agent designed to help people conduct in-depth research."

But...

"The release will be geo-targeted - there are currently no plans to release 'deep research' in the US, Switzerland, or the European Economic Area."

🤔🤔🤔

When I returned from hospital, on the 30th January, I had an invitation letter to attend a medical appointment on the 22nd January. Oh great, the post hasn't got here in time.

I have just reinspected the letter.

The appointment is not until January... 2026. A year away.

Horrendous waiting times.

The other cause for resentment with the forms: I wanted to use this AM's research time to write a book proposal.

Instead, I spent it recapping what I've already done for someone else to monitor me.

I also have a real resentment of annual research monitoring forms.

Why do you need to know back to 2021? I do this EVERY YEAR. You had this info last year.

Why can't I just tell you what's new?

The real problem with the pureed/liquidy diet that I'm on for now is that you never really feel "full". Constant aching for more food!

First world problems, for sure/I know.

WHEN YOU'RE A PROFESSIONAL PIIIRATE...

You don't have to wear a suit.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ebooks-and-real-books/A95E740629283173536CF0C65A36E424

DeepSeek might not be as disruptive as claimed, firm reportedly has 50,000 Nvidia GPUs and spent $1.6 billion on buildouts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/deepseek-might-not-be-as-disruptive-as-claimed-firm-reportedly-has-50-000-nvidia-gpus-and-spent-usd1-6-billion-on-buildouts

Quoting the architect and implementor of tuition fees - the root cause of the disaster in UK HE - is quite something.

Available to buy on Bandcamp! https://joshuaidehen.bandcamp.com/album/mum-does-the-washing-ep

If, as part of a research project, you wanted to pay someone with an academic background to read an academic paper/article, score its "difficulty" out of 10 and then come to agreement with 2 other readers: how much would be reasonable to pay them per paper?

I'm not even kidding. Recovery from bowel paralysis involves eating pureed and blended foods for quite some time... Recommended: baby mush. This is my flipping dinner tonight.

This weekend I read Barbara Kingsolver's /Flight Behavior/. Never thought I'd be so interested in butterflies! An interesting companion piece to /Demon Copperhead/ for its portrayal of rural poverty. Also, the lambing birth at the end seems to show the violent upheaval we need to fix the world.