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February 2025

Basically state sanctioned murder of children. They know in advance what the result will be, so there's premeditation. They acted deliberately despite knowing this. But they'll never be held criminally responsible.

Subscribe to Open isn't perfect (IMO), but it is great to see no-fee diamond OA models succeeding and being praised. These are the future.

Today I will dialyse in the daytime. As Mrs Eve is away, I need a safety backup person in case I pass out. A friend has kindly said yes, but it's a slightly strange ask of her. "Would you please sit with me for 3hrs while my blood is cleaned in a machine? Oh by the way, I could pass out."

Frustrating hospital result yesterday in some ways. They found nothing in the blood tests.

So I now have the situation of an unsafe fistula that bleeds excessively - over an hour each time - with no explanation. I can't use it.

I think I'll have to stay on the central venous catheter.

That's got downsides too. Huge infection risk compared to fistula. And it makes showering difficult and swimming impossible. Sigh.

Important hospital results day today. As I've mentioned, I've had real problems in the last 6 months with excessive bleeding. My dialysis fistula took over an hour to stop bleeding so is unsafe and I have to use the central line. Today I will learn if they know why.

I donated. But it's so sickening that we have to resort to donations to fund state school education (I know this isn't a "core" activity, but we should be commending this kind of thing).

I have a number of diverse writing projects in the queue at the moment:

* A chapter on open science and social justice
* A chapter on George Orwell and the atomic bomb
* A book on the dark web

Fun!

Mrs Eve is away for a couple of days, leaving me and the doggos back home.

There's only one thing for it. The dogs requested it.

It's trashy action film time!

A picture of Wesley Snipes as Blade

I love how people are posting that the UK newspapers are showing remarkable "solidarity" or unity on the AI issue, "because it's so unifying" or whatever.

Nah. Their medium just has a massive shared commercial interest in it.

Does the Royal Society perhaps have the contact details of one of its Fellows who might know something about the source of these recent attacks on science?

In the past month, I've started grinding my teeth terribly. It's now causing massive gum pain and working teeth loose. Eek! From today onwards, I have a gumshield guard for it and feel as though I'm off to play hockey rather than building scholarly infrastructure...

I love "easy read" cryptography papers that start with "this has been designed for anybody with a basic understanding of arithmetic". OK, the initial description of modulus was easy and clear. But 2 pages later...

A set of complicated mathematical operations/formulae

This afternoon's activity is going to the cinema to see a filmed version of the National Theatre's production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_, with Ncuti Gatwa.

This week I read Barbara Kingsolver's _The Lacuna_. It took me much longer to get into than her others, but by the end I was hooked.

Also: Kingsolver did it again. 40 pages from the end of _The Lacuna_ and the protagonist suffers a grave injustice that left me outraged and furious! She is excellent at stirring emotional investment and then punching the reader in the face with it!

I was also curious about the Frida Kahlo connection. The protagonist in the book is gay. FK's affairs are documented - but only, as far as I recall, the ones with men. Perhaps the chronologies just didn't align.

I'd like to say that there was something awry with the book's structure, too. At the halfway point, I definitely thought this. But as I said, by the close I was so invested in the text that it turned out to really work.

Emails this morning:

* Patient survey from third-party health app
* Customer survey from pension org
* Customer survey from food delivery company
* Netflix price "update"

Sometimes I think "who invented this thing? And how can I get my hands on them?!"

When you are deciding to get dogs, people say things like "it'll be good for us because it will force us out for walks every day".

When you have them and it's chucking it down - as it is this morning - that suddenly seems like a terrible idea.

Oh well. Here we go!

Luka - a large black dog - photographed in a close up shot

Urgh. Just been for my periodic iron infusion and they couldn't get vascular access - discovering which entailed much painful needling. Now I'm punctured, I have to come back another time, and still anaemic.

My morning wake-up routine is slightly unusual, due to haemodialysis. It takes a long time to get to my desk these days.

Alarm: ~6.30 (15 mins until end of dialysis to prepare)
End of dialysis: 6.45
Off the machine: 7:05
Feed the dogs and make tea: 7:15
Take meds: 7:25
Second tea: 7:35
Up: 7:40

This is absolutely true. Until I needed a wheelchair, I had no idea how bad most pavements are. They're also ALL steeply cambered which causes massive problems.

Without saying anything specific about the actual search I am engaged in, it's fascinating to see the difference in application norms between the tech sector and the academic sector. Length and format of CVs, style and length of cover letters, formatting -- all so different between these spaces.

This morning, for my writing, I'm recapping the social justice history of OA and the many angles therein. Turning back to this volume, wherein we focused on this.

A copy of my edited book, Reassembling Scholarly Communications

I have dropped my morning writing habit for the past few weeks as I have a book under peer review and used this morning time for reviewing and reading others' works. Got back into it this AM, though, writing an invited book chapter on the kickback against open access engendered by LLMs.

I have work out and under peer review, so I feel guilty at this moment in particular if I say "no" to reviewing the work of others, but the volume of requests at the moment is very high.

Realised last night that I have 26 TERABYTES of old OLH backups sitting on drives here.

@ajrbyers.bsky.social said: "can you just upload them somewhere?"

😂😂😂

The book I read for peer review this week was really engaging and enjoyable. Hope the other reviewer agrees and that it will see the light of day.

Today, I intend to tidy my office, write a peer review report, walk with the dogs, and prepare a dossier with all our household/financial details for when I die. Cheerful stuff!

OK, I lied, not quite my last Tor post for a while.

Turns out my relatively new relays are using about 400GB of traffic per day. Pretty hefty.

Something I am learning: Tor relays burn through bandwidth.

"Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 6:00 hours, with 10081 circuits open. I've sent 53.30 GB and received 53.23 GB. I've received 7874 connections on IPv4 and 0 on IPv6. I've made 6427 connections with IPv4 and 0 with IPv6."

I've said it before, but I love @mfenner.bsky.social's Rogue Scholar service. With a bit of help from Martin on the Slack forum, I can now pre-assign DOIs to blog posts that I write and that it aggregates. It's really fantastic. https://rogue-scholar.org/

Its a good question. Peer review: research or service? I have a small research-only university contract, but still consider peer review part of the duties.

So, one of our rescue dogs, Luka, remains really scared of me, 2 years after we adopted him (poor, traumatised doggy). Today is the first day that I will try taking him out on my own for a walk (with a pro dog walker) as a dry run for when Mrs Eve goes away later this month. Wish me luck!

Luka - a large black dog lying down on a cushion

Finished my next Barbara Kingsolver: _Unsheltered_. Also excellent and I greatly enjoyed the historical portions about Mary Treat, whose correspondence with Darwin is apparently available to view.

Next on the reading list is a book manuscript for a university press.

The front cover of Barbara Kingsolver's _Unsheltered_. It shows a series of open doors leading through to one another.

Tempted to add "Trump" and "Musk" to mute lists to improve my Bluesky experience, but I know that this kind of apolitical withdrawal isn't really possible in the world. 😕

The most annoying thing about the Bluesky app is how it doesn't save your place in the feed. Every feed refresh just pings you back to the top of the list.

The hilarious thing about the pureed meals I've ordered as part of my hospital recovery is how they mould the puree into the shape of the food it's meant to be/is.

A pureed sausage, chips and beans Pureed turkey, green beans and potatoes

Had my first power cut while on dialysis last night. The emergency systems cut in exactly as they should and the emergency lighting we have installed came on. Power came back two minutes later and all was well.

So, today's medical appointment was inconclusive. I've got a steroid regimen to try for the next month and we'll reappraise then. The challenge is that I've tried all the biologics and the only one that really worked allowed a virus to destroy my kidneys. Challenging.

Made some really good progress last night and this morning on rewriting the Knowledge Commons profile system - I got SAML SSO working!

Adding visibility options, Bluesky profile, CV upload, and more. This reworking will allow us to change the profile system with far greater ease.

I have to go to hospital and make some grim decisions today.

I think it's either:

* Change my meds and treat the rheumatoid arthritis properly. This will destroy my kidneys. But will stop the bowel paralysis and avoid hospitalisation.

* Stay as I am, in constant pain, and risk bowel perforation.

Educating the working classes was said to be "scattering the seeds of evil".

Sadly, this view covertly remains to this day, every time you hear a politician saying too many people are getting an education at university etc.

Today, Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian financial newspaper of record, wrote a page-long print article about my work on digital preservation.

A picture of an Italian newspaper

Errm.

"OpenAI has announced a new AI agent designed to help people conduct in-depth research."

But...

"The release will be geo-targeted - there are currently no plans to release 'deep research' in the US, Switzerland, or the European Economic Area."

🤔🤔🤔

When I returned from hospital, on the 30th January, I had an invitation letter to attend a medical appointment on the 22nd January. Oh great, the post hasn't got here in time.

I have just reinspected the letter.

The appointment is not until January... 2026. A year away.

Horrendous waiting times.

The other cause for resentment with the forms: I wanted to use this AM's research time to write a book proposal.

Instead, I spent it recapping what I've already done for someone else to monitor me.

I also have a real resentment of annual research monitoring forms.

Why do you need to know back to 2021? I do this EVERY YEAR. You had this info last year.

Why can't I just tell you what's new?

The real problem with the pureed/liquidy diet that I'm on for now is that you never really feel "full". Constant aching for more food!

First world problems, for sure/I know.

If, as part of a research project, you wanted to pay someone with an academic background to read an academic paper/article, score its "difficulty" out of 10 and then come to agreement with 2 other readers: how much would be reasonable to pay them per paper?

I'm not even kidding. Recovery from bowel paralysis involves eating pureed and blended foods for quite some time... Recommended: baby mush. This is my flipping dinner tonight.

Ella's Kitchen baby food Chicken Roast dinner in a pouch.

This weekend I read Barbara Kingsolver's /Flight Behavior/. Never thought I'd be so interested in butterflies! An interesting companion piece to /Demon Copperhead/ for its portrayal of rural poverty. Also, the lambing birth at the end seems to show the violent upheaval we need to fix the world.

The front cover of Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior. It depicts a set of orange flowers seemingly taking off up the sides of the cover.