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July 2025

Had a totally realistic hallucination during dialysis last night. Exclaimed aloud to my wife "there's a tiny dog in the room!"

I love that the model number of my dialyser includes the word "PRO". As though there might be a "DIACAP AMATEUR 19L".

Another day. another medical catastrophe.

My phosphate levels are too low. My nurse says: "having levels as low as yours can have serious and detrimental effects on your heart health, brain function and energy levels".

So now I must scale back the dialysis, which means increased fluid restriction.

It also means decreased toxin clearance, which probably means worse nausea. The whole thing is a tightrope walk of balances.

The new journal is published by... @openlibhums.bsky.social.

This rarely gets mentioned in these press releases, but if you ever subscribed to Journal of Political Philosophy and appreciate the move away from for-profit publishers to an OA model, then your institution should support OLH.

Excited to hear about the inaugural SHARPIES festival of Book History, running July 6–10th in 2026. Health permitting, I hope to participate.

In a fun technological situation where making the automated tests pass breaks the actual functionality, and making it actually work breaks the tests.

I know, I know: that means the automated tests are bad/wrong. But I inherited them and now have to track down what they are doing.

This is the no-fee open-access model for books I designed and worked on with @scholtom.bsky.social -- real-world impact from authors who benefited from it.

It is surprising to me, actually, that publication peer review hasn't learned more from our internal university marking processes and gaining consensus that way. Because, of course, we do this, too. So why not for peer review?

I suspect nobody wants to add extra labour to the review process.

The MORPHSS project is conducting a really interesting experiment in article peer-review process, getting reviewers to meet after their final individual report writing to produce a synthetic agreed final version. Will it work? I don't know. Is it interesting: definitely.

I particularly like the code of conduct as to how feedback should be relayed; with sensitivity and critical kindness. Anonymity makes it _so_ easy when reviewing to slip into fangs-bared meanness, say if you are having a bad day.

Of course, re the picture I posted yesterday, I do know the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. It still reads humorously.

I've said before but want to rearticulate the sentiment. Kidney failure patients with hope of a transplant approach their disease very differently to dialysis lifers (as I am). It seems almost worse... The constant hope, the constant sense of pause until it happens. Yes, it's the hope that gets you.

And then the courts will rule it was transformative use all along and such deals won't mean a thing 🤔😕

This article:

If AI succeeds, millions of people will lose their jobs.

If it fails, it will take down the market.

The "struggle is real" meme featuring a cartoon of a man sweating and not knowing which of 2 buttons to press.

I see there is a nascent movement, I don't know how serious, that wants to revert to print for scholarship... because AIs/Big Tech can't consume it.

A kick in the teeth for disabled people who struggle to/can't get a library. It would also be terrible for knowledge dissemination in general.

This is a really exciting metadata development. Collaborative stewardship and distributed assertion models are the right way to go and some smart people are working on it.

The proofs are through for CRITICAL INFRA­STRUCTURE STUDIES AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES. Exciting. Grateful to the editors for the massive effort shepherding this. Editing books. *shudder*

Going in for a reread of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Read the Everett pastiche recently and felt it worth returning to the original.

The cover of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Shows a drawing of a river paddle boat.

One of the most frustrating things about having a central venous catheter in your neck/chest is, surprisingly, showering. Whenever you wash, you have to seal up the tubing using one of these pouches. Even then you don't want it to get directly wet. Swimming is out of the question, of course.

A pouch for protecting a central venous catheter line when showering

Yes, but sometimes it was totally obvious that they were using an LLM in our search. The "[INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE]" placeholder seemed to give it away.

The funniest thing is that the profile Warwick seems to have paid for in Vogue of an SMT member is just AI word slop that says nothing. Zero. My dogs could produce more meaningful prose.

During a university funding crisis.

An article that says "My approach to leadership is rooted in clarity, trust and purpose. At Warwick we've moved from siloed ways of working to a space where ideas flow, people are empowered and there's a shared sense of pride in what we're building. I place a strong emphasis on psychological safety, creativity and accountability as I believe that when people feel supported, they deliver their best. I champion a culture where feedback is valued, diverse perspectives are celebrated, and people are encouraged to lead from wherever they sit. Leadership, to me, is not about control, it's about creating the conditions for excellence and belonging.

Did an APC write this?

(I'm kidding - there are some nuanced arguments in here. Not sure I agree with them all, but the headline is too blunt to capture it properly.)

Hmm. This seems compelling on the surface, but I don't think it's historically true. SOP merely means that untrusted JS can't exfiltrate data. Companies could BY CHOICE allow data export and interop, but they have business reasons not to. It's that, not the security policy, that I'd blame.

Morning, all. Tuesday. Could scream with pain at whatever the rheumatoid arthritis is doing to the muscles in my torso. A twisting sprawling mess of inflamed pain hell. Feels like several ribs are broken. Badly. Nonetheless, I persist.

An early programming start today, particularly since I have a break at about 11am when we will finalize the spec for my powered wheelchair with the dealer.

Honestly, now I've decided to go for this, I just want it to hurry up and arrive so I can travel about again without immense pain.

The other thing I wish the Remarkable did was to convert my scrawled annotations to OCRed text!

This is probably because my handwriting makes me appear to be an idiot.

Up early to read one of my PhD student's work on irony and sincerity in contemporary film, through the generic conventions of "cult", "camp", and "cringe".

To give an idea of the logistical challenge of managing supplies for my health, three injections are all delivered by three different companies: Braun, Sciensus, and Healthcare at Home. They all operate on different schedules. Then there's the dialysis supplies themselves.

These are delivered by Braun once monthly and you need to get it right. Then, certain components are delivered direct from the hospital (tegos, curos, biopatches) every three months, so require a lot of planning.

Then I have my "ordinary" meds. Upadacitinib needs to be collected from the hospital.

This happens once every 3 months. They can courier from London if you can get through to them. But again on a different timetable. Then I have about 30 pills to take each morning. Not a joke. These all have different doses and the GPs rate of repeat prescription never matches the reality.

For example, pregabalin is prescribed as though I take 2 pills per day. But I was told by the consultant to start there and taper it up. So very quickly it becomes difficult to track when you will run out of specific meds. Friday morning before work is the time I dedicate to sorting this.

All of which is to say that it is an ENORMOUS challenge to keep on top of the drugs and supplies. It sounds silly, but the meds are also crucial. I CANNOT run out of steroids, pregabalin, or bisoprolol. Consequences very bad. This is the kind of thing that can be very difficult to manage

When you are going through the stress and worry (and physical symptoms) of kidney failure. Thank heavens I have Mrs Eve to help me. She is a total star.

Mrs Eve completes the "World of James Joyce" jigsaw, with notes and detail for the puzzle provided by my Birkbeck colleague, Prof Joe Brooker.

A picture of the jigsaw, which depicts a town, with a grassy area at the bottom right. There is too much complexity to capture here, but suffice it to say that there are significant liner notes that explain each part of the puzzle.

I can state my "opposition" to AI quite bluntly.

I have spent years working to get scholarship to be available openly and freely so that the benefits of education and research are available to all.

The backlash against AI is engendering a copyright maximalist approach that threatens that vision.

Unsure if that's an opposition to AI or an opposition to the opposition of AI. But the culture of backlash it has created is a real danger that could undo 20 years of utopian thinking, argumentation, and implementation.

This sounds like a panel I would love to have been at/contributed to. The danger to open (and its benefits for the world) posed by the backlash against AI is substantial and damaging.

A morning of wrangling software test cases concluded, I now head to hospital for a DEXA scan to determine my bone density. En route, I intend to read a couple of academic books about Star Trek.

“For our universities, we’ve taken important decisions to put them on a firmer financial footing, so that they can continue to deliver excellence" - Bridget Phillipson

Research Fortnight notes "this may come as a surprise" to universities given that gov has raised risk of bankruptcy to critical.

Today, I have bitten the bullet. My mobility has got so bad that I have opted for a powered wheelchair. I am not strong/well enough to self-propel in my manual chair. This should give me more freedom to get out and about. It should arrive in about 4 weeks.

A picture of the medical sunrise q300 powered wheelchair

A friend posited an experiment to me, where you train an LLM or other AI on physics or chemistry but ONLY up to a specific cutoff date. So no material beyond a specific point in time. Then see if the AI can infer what comes next. That is: can it remake the discoveries we know? (I'd guess not.)

That's alongside all the other obvious points that AI doesn't do empirical research in labs etc. Sure, theoretical physics is theoretical. Various forms of maths, too. But most sciences require observation and experiment. It's not pure logic.

Cover art unveiled for Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, the forthcoming /SHADOW TICKET/. Design pattern follows /INHERENT VICE/ and /BLEEDING EDGE/, so perhaps this is a pastiche stoner-noir trilogy of sorts? (with hat tip to Tore Rye Anderson on this front)

The cover for Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. It shows a grayscale brightly lit street in Hungary (?) with a noir-ish vibe.

A survey asks me "whether you might support a new publishing system concept with marketplaces for peer review and replication services that could compete against the private journals".

Do we want *more* marketplaces and competition?

I use Linux for all my day to day work; writing, programming, communicating. But occasionally you need a Windows box and I've really got into Proxmox running VMs over the network for this. Using SPICE it's seamless. Feels as though I'm on the machine. Incredible, really.

Does anyone have any advice re the motability scheme/what to get? Perhaps @naomijacobs.bsky.social? Or someone else? Please do repost.

Birkbeck - an institution designed for flexible, evening education for working-class Londonders - says that the government's "flexible learning" framework for loans is pretty bad.

Today is the actual day of my step-mother-in-law's memorial. She died just before Christmas and we're now all gathering to celebrate her life and to pay our respects.

One of my favourite photos of Birkbeck College - studies continuing during the Blitz in WW2. If your classroom gets bombed, study outside!

A picture of students and a teacher studying outside amid the wreckage from a WW2 bomb.

"If users don’t want to verify their age, or if they’re under 18, they will still be able to have an account with certain features limited. Bluesky will block “adult-appropriate content” and turn off certain features, such as direct messaging."

As the US heads towards sanctioning training as fair use under "transformative use" provisions, the EU heads towards strict opt-in provisions. This will prove internationally tricky.

Something I have been musing on for ages. The Turing/imitation test assumes that language is the source of intelligence and reason. But what if it's wrong and it's possible to pass that test by a purely surface version of language simulation? Cannot people without language - aphasics - think?

I'm sure there's already lots of secondary literature on this, but it should definitely, in my view, be a larger part of the debate, given that contemporary "AI" is built on Large *Language* Models.

I got a bit tongue-tied accepting the #SHARP2025 DeLong Prize. I wanted to say: this prize means the world to me as the book was written in the shadow of terminal kidney failure. It has made me feel part of a community. I can't travel due to my haemodialysis need, so I appreciate all remote options.

Wow! I won the SHARP Book History Prize for my last book with Stanford University Press, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History!

#SHARP2025

A slide featuring the book cover, showing that I had won

Was just thinking: what I really need for my next bit of writing is a really good chapter on terrorism in Star Trek. Then my book fell open at this page.

A book chapter called "Terrorizing Space - Star Trek, Terrorism, and History"

I had a successful haemodialysis session, "away from base", yesterday!

When you start HD, they emphasize the possibility of breaks, using remote dialysis facilities. But *so few* HD centres have capacity to take remote patients. Where we are is one of the few. But I can't visit my mum, say.

If you look at the map of kidney centre, you get the impression that it's going to be relatively possible to travel. I mean, look at the map!! When they send the list of centres with space/capacity/holiday slots, it's a different story.

A map of UK kidney centres. There are so many of them. But you can't use these all.

Really interesting. I wonder if what this post on interdisciplinarity is missing, though, is a distinction between "multidisciplinary" and "interdisciplinary". This has been made several times in the background literature. I remember it in Joe Morgan's book, INTERDISCIPLINARITY.

Which might complicate the findings. Because what does a citation between fields "mean"? Here it's taken to mean "interdisciplinarity" but unsure it's that straightforward.

Nonetheless, a really interesting attempt at mapping!

Joe *Moran*!! Not "Morgan". Doh.

Every morning at the moment is like a form of paralysis on waking, as I am so stiff and sore from this rheumatoid arthritis flare. I then do my best to get some strong painkillers and steroids down and try to get moving. But it's extreme pain. Can't get up and downstairs without Mrs Eve's help.

Something that never occurred to me is that most kidney patienta see dialysis as temporary before a transplant. Their perception is sort of like "I'm here by mistake for a bit". My view is different with no transplant possible. But this changes how they see disability as temporary misfortune.

Although I have benefitted from this culture, I think that, in research circles, we celebrate the award of grants way too much compared to the research outputs that arise. That is, I see celebratory lists of the grants awarded, but little mention of the results of grant-funded work.

Getting grants is not "doing research". Publishing outputs is the result of research. We should focus more on seeing what the research funding has done as opposed to speculating on what it will do.

Jealous not to be at #SHARP2025 but it looks like a fab event remotely. Sending my thanks to the everyone who adds digital accessibility to their events. And thanks to everyone posting about it.

Another thing about this mini break w/ remote dialysis is that I will be doing far less dialysis than normal. In-center is 3-4hrs while I do 8hrs at home. Dialysis removes fluid from you as you can't urinate with kidney failure. With the shorter sessions, I have to restrict my fluid intake heavily.

Just as it gets REALLY hot too! It's like a form of torture as people constantly offer you drinks or say "fancy a cup of tea".

Of course I do! I'm dying for a cuppa! But I have to restrain myself!

Oh. And I walked into a table. I bruise SO MUCH. This bruising and bleeding is why we can't use my AV fistula for dialysis.

A leg with a MEGA bruise

As a result, I'm missing, with permission, the Cambridge MPhil Examination Board and have submitted written comments. I will also try to poke my head in on the SHARP meeting this week, not least to hear the book history prize announcement for which I'm nominated 🏆😊

Off to visit family and for my step-mother-in-law's memorial. There should be lots of her art up. I'm also doing haemodialysis away from base, which is SUCH a challenge to organise as the remote unit has to accept guest patients and most don't have capacity. Most of the country is out of bounds.

A painting of lilis on a dark blue background

Just unbelievable. Many people on dialysis cannot work because they are so sick. They do not have $5k per year sitting around. But they'll die without 3x sessions per week. Voting to kill.

Reddit post "Congress set to approve $35 co-pays per dialysis session for Medicaid patients".

Having just got over "hope you get better soon" (I won't), I've hit another new frustrating kidney platitude - this time from other dialysis patients. The new one is "hope you get a transplant soon" or "it's coming" etc. Nope - I can't have a transplant. I'm a dialysis lifer. Deeply frustrating.

All these people mean well. But it's like a punch to the gut each time.

Her tears are a source of shame because she wanted to impoverish vulnerable and disabled people but didn't get to.

A picture of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves with Reeves crying in the House of Commons. The headline reads "Crying in the Commons: why are women's workplace tears a source of shame?"

Amusingly, the hospital dietician has, with some reluctance, suggested that Coke could boost my very low phosphate levels. Healthy recommendation. Also, I have to eat much more cheese. Oh what a hardship.

A question for people with disabilities/disabled people I know: when you get a pip letter confirming your result, does it have your "score" against the categories?

The other day, while waiting in the dialysis clinic, I was recognised by someone I don't know. They came over to say hi and it was a really nice interaction.

But I also feel famous now 😂

Bonus points: they wore a mask.

Yes. And wrong things are written down too...

But this is why LLMs seem to work especially well for computer code: it's a more limited subset of language and most problems have already been solved before and written down.

I am now heterosanguinous after my blood transfusion and, wow, placebo or not, I'm bouncing off the walls. Amazing actually to have some energy. Feel pretty darn good even though I'm still anemic.

Polysanguinous?

I am, in fact, O negative! This means, though, that I can only receive O negative blood. It's the universal donor and the singular receiver.

(And there's no way I can donate sadly.)

Thank you to Liz and the many others who donate. It's much appreciated. We're about to start my transfusion now. Please do donate blood if you can.

We're going through this process as we speak. Feels very strange. Seeing how others have interpreted the funding brief differently is alarming!

And now I'm off for my blood transfusion.

They will do the preparatory blood test that determines whether I can have it raw. If not, they need to do some work on the blood and I'll have return on Thursday or Friday.

Then I have to be dialysed while being transfused to clear the donor's potassium.

Sigh. I have to go to hospital tomorrow (and possibly Thursday or Friday) for an urgent blood transfusion to correct the anaemia. Obviously, everybody wants to avoid blood transfusions, but it's got to the point where I no longer can.