Things I have learned this week:
- That the glorious Lianne La Havas song Weird Fishes is actually a Radiohead cover version. I’m not a big Radiohead fan, and I’m not entirely sure why, because I seem to like their stuff. I’m finding all of this out thanks to the random trip through the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
- Pandas are pointless. Yet, randomly, they still exist. This I have learned from this week’s Random the Book research.
- Talking of which, we might have found a publisher. Premature fowl counting accepted.
- Something I kind of knew, but I’m thinking about again. I can’t “picture” things in my head. I can smell things, hear things, even sometimes feel things. But I cannot bring a picture into my mind. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why I find it difficult to draw things?
- bringing the Play Matrix into the AI age is interesting. Some promising signs from some client interactions already.
- renaming it the Plai Matrix would be naff, though.
- I got really shocked this week when speaking on the phone to a customer service agent at Amazon. They needed me to complete a survey. The first question was whether they had solved my problem or not. They hadn’t – their policies had just pushed me to speak to the product manufacturer. The guy literally begged me to click the “Yes” buttom, though. Goodhart and Campbell raise their heads yet again.
- NotebookLM and Claude are becoming go-to tools.
- A distressing number of the trees in London parks will need to be replaced in the next few decades due to the effects of climate change. We will soon have a climate that is more commonly seen in Barcelona.
- A very proud dad moment when the eldest received a Commendation Award at Scouts.
The week in media:
Listened:
Continuing my Top 500 Albums Odyssey. Currently listening to my 230th.
Watched:
Very little TV this week, but did see the first salvo of Glastonbury, and so begins my annual “Next year I’ll put in for a ticket” regret.
Read:
Read as much as I could bear (not a bad book, just very distressing) of More Everything Forever. Now on to Otto English’s new tome Notorious. It’s excellent.
Next week:
Independence.
The week in photos:
mmitII 