Curated thinking on art and science
The Dunwich Heath fire is being used to attack rewilding. Yet climate change, not rewilding, drives UK wildfires. Rewilding and fire safety aren't opposing goals - resilient landscapes take time, so active management and firebreaks remain essential in the meantime.
Things will be quiet here for a little while - 8,500 papers don't filter themselves. Elsewhere: Mazowe convalesces under his own fan, the garden is being kept alive by bucket, and a wildfire visualisation is quietly taking shape.
A conference on wildfires, a terrier on bed rest, and Europe's first pyrocumulonimbus — the week refused to rank them. Fire, convalescence, and a full English.
Mazowe, our indomitable Welsh Terrier, turned 14 in May. He earned the moniker 'table shark' when he was younger — partly for his habit of circling a meal table, partly for his slightly recurved tail, evoking a shark's dorsal fin.
Every heatwave, the cameras find the same shot: ice cream, paddling pools, sunbathers in the park. In May and June that imagery sat alongside 2,700 estimated heat deaths in England and Wales. Representation doesn't just describe risk - it decides how seriously we take it.
Freezing in an emergency isn't fear — it's a failure to retrieve a behavioural template. A go-bag simulation with Year 10–12 students proved the point: only one packed a toothbrush, and almost nobody thought to bring a bag. Try my virtual version built on the train home.
Benton End, once home to Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines and the Colchester–Ipswich art school they ran from it, has reopened its Walled Garden — renewed in collaboration with Sarah Price.
The last week has been faintly intolerable in the UK as temperatures climbed to 37.5 degrees and every social
A heatwave outside, a conference inside asking what cities must become to survive the next one.
This week, between Cambridge Tech Week, the Centre for Risk Studies Symposium, and agreeing to help run a UCL STEM day for teenagers — made newly urgent by a Scientific American piece on US science — I also wrestled my dissertation's quantitative core through UCL's HPC cluster.
Marking 200 years of mathematics at UCL - a symposium that reminds us research only becomes useful when it leaves the journals and is made accessible and inclusive. Expect the maths that unmasked Banksy and caught a serial killer, plus UCL's "Godless institution" origins.
The Climate Change Committee published its fourth assessment of UK climate risk a matter of weeks ago and a couple