Tuesday 19 May 2026 to Tuesday 26 May 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “She Knows All the Names” Michelle Jabès Corpora
  Finished Thursday 21 May 2026. More was resolved in this book than I’d expected, but the main antagonist is still there to be dealt with in book 3 of course.
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  I’ve read the chapter on urbanism now – the differences between the studied early civilisations correlate with the city state/territorial state divide and can likely be explained by it. For instance cities in city states are bigger and have a smaller hinterland, because there’s a lot of warfare and for farmers to feel safe they live within the city. But in a territorial state the state protects the whole of its territory and farmers prefer to live near their fields as it’s more convenient – so cities are smaller and have a less diverse population.

Podcasts

• The History of Byzantium
  
  • A question & answer episode covering things from all across the run of the podcast.
  • Another Q&A episode, he’s finished his narrative so the recent episodes have been a lot of wrap up
• Empire
  
  • the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, and Egypt and Israel making peace (which ended up pleasing no-one, fatally so for Anwar Sadat)
  • the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which included the tidbit that the US ambassador to Lebanon called from Beirut to tell the US that there were tanks just outside the city and they told him no there weren’t coz the Israelis had promised they were only going 40km into Lebanon. Despite him telling them he could see these tanks from his window they still insisted there were no tanks near Beirut.
  • the rise of Hezbollah in the aftermath of that invasion, and how for a long time they were celebrated in Lebanon as they’d held off Israel, but much less so now
  • first part of a series telling the story of Simón Bolívar
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • the Labour leadership, and German & Hungarian politics
  • Q&A episode, including quite a bit about Trump’s corruption
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, including stuff about the fluid dynamics of Moroccan teapots and whether the boiling point of water will change if sea level rises (they weren’t sure, a lot of it hinging round whether the atmosphere gets thicker if the volume of the Earth drops, which it would coz ice is less dense than water)
  • an episode about a psychology experiment/task/puzzle that came up in the TV programme Secrets of the Brain that we watched the day before I listened to this: if you have 4 cards labelled A, G, 7, 8 and you are told that the rule is that if there is an A on one side then there must be a 7 on the other, which two cards do you need to turn over to see if the rule is true or not. One of the notable features of it is that it’s a lot easier to get right if it’s framed as about people (e.g. looking for underage drinkers in a bar, so the rule is that if you are drinking beer then you must be over 18, who do you check out of these four people: a 16 year old, a 25 year old, a person drinking beer, and a person drinking lemonade). And then used that as a jump pad to talk about how weird it is that that changing the frame makes it so much easier, logic, the scientific method, confirmation bias, the wisdom of crowds.
  • a Q&A episode, including how to prove you’re a time traveller, what would actually happen if you had a wormhole between Denver & London (it’d act a bit like a vacuum cleaner)
  • episode about how patterns form in nature, by diffusion of activator/inhibitor chemicals as the animal develops, which was something I knew about but didn’t know that Turing had worked the maths out in 1952 and it took biology decades to catch up with that (they dismissed it as not real science at the time as they were essentially looking for “the gene for” any given thing and the sort of emergent order from chaos of his mathematics wasn’t part of the biological paradigm), I also hadn’t realised that the clearest explicit demonstration was a Wnt/dkk system for hair follicles in mice (I worked on Wnt in a different context for about 3 years back in the early 2000s just before the mouse paper was published), they also covered the way that this mathematical method does & does not work in things like prediction of crime hotspots (you send the police where the algorithm predicts, they go looking for crimes & find some which were perhaps otherwise too minor to be reported, which reinforces this as a crime hotspot and can end up with communities being harassed by the police, particularly those who are already at risk of police harassment), and the ethics of using algorithms in that way.
• The History of Philosophy
  Rounding off the discussion of Malebranche’s philosophical ideas by looking at his ideas on representation – where he again leans into God being the source of everything by arguing that we don’t create ideas ourselves instead our minds approach God and it is his ideas we think of & in. I think, I’m not sure I entirely followed this.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Part 2 of the history of the Civil Wars in South Oxfordshire
• The History of England
  The late 1670s, which included the marriage of Mary to William of Orange – very significant later but at the time significant as it represented a moment where Charles II wasn’t so closely aligned with the French. Also a period of a lot of bubbling religious tension, and worries from parliament about quite what the king intended to do with the army given he didn’t march off to war once he’d been voted the money to do so.
• The Rest is Politics US
  Trump’s latest bit of corruption and his paying off of the January 6th rioters as “victims of lawfare”, also Trump backing people in Republican primaries on his own whims with no thoughts as to the good of the Republican party.
• Oh Got What Now
  More on the Labour leadership and on the Makerfield by-election – including the subject of Brexit being reopened
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  • interview with Anas Sarwar, aired before the Scottish elections so he doesn’t yet know how badly Labour (the party he’s leader of) will do
  • interview with Aleksandar Vučić, President of Serbia, who is a thoroughly unpleasant man (some people who I disagree with or dislike come across as charming or personable in an interview, he very very much did not)
• The Bunker
  
  • Weekly Wrap Up, mostly about the Makerfield by-election, but also a bit about Trump’s latest corruption
  • an interview with Liam Byrne who’s recently written a book about the rise of populism & how to defeat it by providing some actual offer from the centre
  • a discussion with the founder of Bellingcat about misinformation & finding truth in what’s out there
  • an episode about the new Hungarian Prime Minister
  • a single episode resurrection of the first Podmaster’s podcast, Big Mouth, which was a culture podcast (that I had never listened to), they covered Kneecap’s current album and a TV series called Margo’s Got Money Troubles
  • Start the Week, talked about the weather first as we’ve beaten the record for hottest May day by about 2°C which is not good, also included the Labour leadership, Farage’s £5million “gift”, the potential end to the Iran war (which I think may’ve been out of date before I listened to it)
• Talk 90’s to Me
  
  • an interview with Goldie, who’s certainly a personality or maybe a force of nature, the host struggled to keep the interview under control, I’d heard of him but quickly realised I knew nothing about him
  • an interview with one of the members of Ash
• The History of Egypt
  
  • an episode about the women of the royal household, including part of an interview with Peter Brand on the subject.
  • more interview with Peter Brand, about the children of Ramesses II this time
• The History of China
  Continuing the story of the Taiping Rebellion – as it grows the new religious movement is no longer totally under the control of its founder, two more people are having visions, with one hearing the voice of God and the other the voice of Jesus Christ.
• Origin Story
  
  • The first part of a two-parter on J. K. Rowling, this took us through her life up until about 2019 when she moved into pretty much only being an anti-trans activist. It also covered the development of that sort of anti-trans activism, which is a pretty deep split within feminism in the UK and was until very recently not where the broader public were at.
  • Second part took us from 2019 to the present day, I knew JKR had gone off the deep end over the last few years, but I don’t think I was quite aware of how much she’d gone looking for deeper deep ends to go off in the last year or so. The point at which Elon Musk suggests you’ve become too obsessed with being anti-trans is way way way past the time you should’ve reconsidered your life choices.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Contextualising Legalism by giving a picture of the overall history of the Qin Dynasty (who unite China at the end of the Warring States Period) and of the historiography (whilst they were indeed a totalitarian regime it’s also true that later Han historians wanted to show them as bad so the Han look good in contrast)

TV

• Scandinavia with Simon Reeve
  This episode was mostly a mix of beautiful scenery (if rather cold for my tastes) and a sense of imminent threat. With some very hi-tech mining thrown in for good measure – actually the show was bookended by mining, the closing down coal mine on Svalbard which was very low tech to an iron mine in Sweden where all the mining is done by remote control & robots. And in between there were Finnish reserves and nuclear bunkers, and Sami reindeer herders whose lives are being curtailed by the infrastructure of the rest of us.
• Secrets of the Brain
  The previous episode got us up to mammalian brains, this one looked at how primate brains evolved and what features & selection pressures shape the human brain. There were two points they were trying to get across – firstly that our problem solving abilities arise from needing to find food in a complex environment and that these in turn have underpinned our development of language, and secondly that we’re social creatures and a lot of our mental capacity is devoted to maintaining relationships

Games

• Diablo IV
  Continuing to make progress with the storyline, we think we’re getting pretty close to the end of it now. Also did a couple of Pits & opened up Torment I difficulty.

Talk

• “Visiting Ancient Egypt? Petrie purchase provenance puzzles.” Stephen Quirke
  I think the two key themes of this long and rambling talk were provenance gives us so much more that we can say about an object, and that Petrie was somewhat gullible and took at face value that something sold to him as ancient was indeed ancient. And we need to look more closely and track down as much info as possible about every object and look at it with a critical eye. Quirke was hard to hear on Zoom (it was a hybrid talk) so perhaps I’d’ve got more from it if we’d been there in person.

Exhibition

• Ipswich Art Society Annual Open Exhibition
  A small selection of art by local artists in a variety of media and styles. Some I quite liked, some did nothing for me.