Tuesday 13 January 2026 to Tuesday 20 January 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  
  Delving into the paradoxes that Gödel demonstrated exist within mathematics, despite Bertrand Russell’s best attempts to develop a formal system that eliminated them, which is relevant to Hofstadter’s broader point because they are strange loops. And then turning back to link this in to the discussion on levels of abstraction, and to explore how our sense of “I” arises from how our brains work without having a structure that is clearly where the “I” resides.

Podcasts
Note that I’m up to date on topical ones, but anything less tied to right now I’m about a month behind.

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  The whole let’s invade places thing, the ICE thing, Trump flipping the bird at a factory worker, will the Republican party ever return to its pre-Trump conservative roots, more focus on Greenland, is there a developing split between Joe Rogan & Trump (they think not really, it’s about tactics). Katty Kay was away for two episodes, and the guests were both ex-Republicans so there were two episodes of despair at what has been done to their party.


• Empire
  
  V. S. Naipul, who I knew nothing about before, Heinrich Hoffman (who photographed Hitler), Karsh (who photographed Churchill amongst others)


• Journey Through Time
  
  More on Black GIs in Britain during WW2 (where apparently one semi-official strategy was to try & persuade the British to be more racist, so as not to upset the white GIs), includes actual gunfights between parts of the US army in English villages and cities.


• The Rest is Science
  
  Binary, error correction in barcodes & QR codes, what planet would you like to live on if not earth; are we made of stardust, cosmic rays; drawing ellipses, planetary motion, which famous scientists (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party.


• Starship Alexandria
  
  The Royle Family, Greenwing, Invincible, Black Sails, The Thick of It, Arcane, The Leftovers, The Good Place, Avatar: The Last Airbender (animation), Blake’s 7


• The History of Egypt
  
  The colossal statues of Ramesses II (including the one that inspired Shelley).


• The History of Philosophy
  
  Two 17th Century CE resurrections of the idea of atomism as a break from Aristotelian ideas of how the universe was constructed (and pushing back against Decartes too).


• The Bunker
  
  Charles James Fox (a late 18th Century populist politician with some parallels to Farage or Trump but with a nicer attitude), Weekly Wrap Up, how & why the last 25 years have been full of chaos in British politics, Tommy Robinson in the context of his pivot to Christian nationalism, Start the Week, the Chinese biotech/biomedical boom.


• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  John Swinney.


• The Rest is Politics
  
  Right wing attack on Rory Stewart, Minnesota, not visiting the US.


• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  Iran, and how it isn’t necessarily about to fall apart (it’s not a binary).


• Oh God What Now
  
  How the Tories keep defecting to Reform (entertainingly dropped just after Jenrick defected but they’d recorded it before Badenoch sacked him), corruption in the UK political establishment; another episode which was supposed to be entirely about leaders of the Labour party, but in light of events it was half about Jenrick’s defection.


• The History of China
  
  How China is primed to decline during the 19th Century. Which mostly boils down to being too successful to adapt easily, including in producing people who are highly enough educated for the bureaucracy in numbers that exceed the available jobs (which leads to corruption and dissatisfaction).


• Talk 90s to Me
  
  Stay Another Day, and East 17 in general (I had no idea this song was actually about the writer’s brother dying).


• Literature & History
  
  The Rashidun Caliphate (the current season of the podcast is early Islamic literature and he’s leaning heavily into the history angle at the moment).


• The History of Byzantium
  To mark the 1000th anniversary of the death of Basil II an episode about evidence about his sexuality.


• In Our Time: On Liberty
  
  First one hosted by the new presenter, Misha Glenny, which was promisingly had the same feel as the Melvyn Bragg ones (tho obviously not entirely the same). About John Stuart Mills, and the essay On Liberty that he & his wife Harriet Taylor Mills wrote in the mid-19th Century.


• More Jam Tomorrow
  
  Changing attitudes about women wearing trousers (it only became illegal to force women to wear a skirt to work in 2010 – well, you still can but you have to force everyone you employ to wear a skirt).


• The History of Philosophy in China
  
  About the differences between the Mohist & Daoist approaches to language. Interesting juxtaposition with the book I’m reading – the Mohists try to do something akin to Bertrand Russell’s systematisation of mathematics but to language, whereas the Daoists are more comfortable with the paradoxes & fluidity of categories.

TV

• Newcastle v. Man City (Carabao Cup, 0-2)
  


• episode 4 of Guitar Heroes at the BBC
  A selection of music performances from the BBC, themed around having good guitarists (tho sometimes rather tenuously). This episode was nearly all from the 70s, so there was quite a lot of “what on earth is he wearing‽”.


• episode 6 of The Age of Uncertainty
  
  The Rise and Fall of Money: what money is, why we use it, how it moves from metal coins to bank deposits with the addition of paper money, how it all goes wrong when everyone realises the bank doesn’t have enough money to give everyone what they “have” in their deposits, and how the central banks attempt to control that.


• episode 4 of The War Between the Land and the Sea
  
  We’d dragged our heels on getting back to this despite ep 3 having ended on a cliff-hanger last time, but were sucked back into enjoying it. I do think it likely won’t bear much prolonged thought, it’s something to enjoy on a surface level.


• episode 2 of Valley of the Kings: Secret Tomb Revealed
  
  Good series overall, the archaeology of KV11 was interesting, but a bit padded (particularly the segment stuck in about Howard Carter half-inching stuff from KV62, which didn’t seem to link in to the overall programme anything more than tangentially – there was a bit of oooh could Carter have hidden stuff in KV11, but that was resolved really quickly as “no.”).

Music

• Yard Act “The Overload”

Games

• Diablo IV
  
  Did a Tier 60 Pit so we’ve attained Rank VI of the Season Journey, also ticked off killing Bartuc in the Infernal Hordes and did a bunch of Chaos Rifts so now we’ve ticked off that chunk of the Season Journey too. Some stuff on the way to Rank VII looks vaguely plausible, and we maybe have enough time to get to a Tier 75 Pit to finish up that rank.