!markdown ( Read more... )

You may have seen this image, on a poster or a fridge magnet or a birthday card or some other flat surface:


( Read more... )

Here's the current state of play with the Assyriology:

( Doom, gloom, failure, sheep and kurtosis )

• Do not try to wget -m the whole of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. There's rather a lot more there than you'd expect. Why they couldn't just provide a zipfile and/or tarball of the XML they store in the backend database is anyone's guess. I can't be the only geek who's read Snow Crash and wants to contribute.
• Other than that, I'm ( Read more... )

So I was down in Cambridge last week, as part of an exercise in convincing mathematics Part 3 students that there are other universities in the UK, and that some of them are even worth doing PhDs at. I didn't manage to see everyone I'd have liked to, but I did get to see Antarctic Mike for the first time in nearly two years (as the name suggests, ( Read more... )

I went to see STAG's production of Gogol's The Government Inspector on Thursday with Philipp and wormwood_pearl. It was great: the production was good, but the play's excellent, and you should go to see it if you ever get a chance. The plot is as follows: the corrupt officials of a small town in provincial Russia receive word that a government inspector, ( Read more... )