Bank Holiday Grantchester Picnic
Aug. 12th, 2025 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Bring general picnic things, anything you're likely to want. I will bring some general things to get us started.
If the weather is hot some people may also swim.
Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Jeannie Di Bon, Helena Attlee, Louis MacNeice, friends misc. )
... and several of the magazines that have been sat around causing Guilt and a sense of Obligation, subsequent to which I have happily recycled them. Favourite fact from the three so far: Garden Organic/the Heritage Seed Library are trialling using tuning forks to pollinate their tomato crops! ( Facebook | Instagram )
Bonus: sifting through a pile of notebooks etc to try to work out who the hell they belong to, mostly salvaged from the pile that was due to go out to event-freecycle on the basis that SURELY I could do something useful with them if, you know, I sat down with them at a time that wasn't in a field under Significant time pressure while Very tired. And I could! One and a half remain unidentified (I say "half" because We're Working On It).
Writing. A lot of lost property e-mails.
Cooking. One new recipe from East: paneer, spinach and tomato salad, accompanied by the herbed naan from the Leiths How to Cook Bread book (this is probably on my To Cook Through list). I was into this!
Also vaghareli makai ("spiced Indian corn") by way of David Lebovitz, and a slightly underwhelming lemony fennel and broccoli pasta (significantly improved by the addition of pine nuts).
Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Blackberries. Local plums are starting to be ripe!
Exploring. Poked around the green belt a bit to see how the plums were doing! And I think that's most of it?
A very brief poke around the entrance to the Pimp Hall Nature Reserve following a successful drop-off of Objects to the adjacent Household Waste Recycling Centre; tragically the signs on the gates claimed that they'd be locked at 4 p.m., which we had not quite anticipated, and we only reached them at 3.58. Next time, perhaps!
Creating. Hmm. Does sitting around knolling for the purposes of the big lost property post count? I think it probably does; certainly while the photos still aren't good (am I contemplating a lightbox and a tripod of some kind of this specific terrible hobby? to my slight horror, I kind of am...) the arrangements are getting much easier to parse visually, I discovered upon going back through a bunch of them, which I am pleased about.
Growing. Found a surprise pocketful of dried Sugar Magnolia pods, so I am definitely in the black when it comes to number of seeds for next year, which is a pleasant surprise!
Pretty big fire on Arthur's Seat.
(The kids were just discussing whether the volcano had erupted, which
I think we're pretty safe from.)
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Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."
-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.
So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)
(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)
Last ever nursery drop off for Gideon.
He has Monday and Tuesday in a holiday club and then from Wednesday he's in school!
We've had a child in this nursery since 2019, it's going to be weird
to not be there any more.
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I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".
(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)
Work's "Active Staff" programme through the university sports centre is mostly dormant in August, but has just acquired a regular "give it a go" session for women's football on Thursday afternoons. (Hmm, I wonder what recent event might have prompted such a thing ...) Unfortunately this session clashes exactly with my favourite free exercise class, which has just rebranded from "yogalates" to "stretch and relax".
One of these activities will help my knee mobility and one of them is highly likely to mess up my knees further. Much as I want to be as tough as Lucy Bronze, I regretfully skipped the football and stuck with the stretches.
It was bath day, and I needed a physical book to read in the bath.
Thoughtfully my friends have written one and it was published a few days ago.
(The Needfire, MK Hardy. I'm two chapters in and rather enjoying it.)
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Books on pre-order:
Books acquired in July:
Books acquired previously and read in July:
Borrowed books read in July:
Rereads in July:
I continue to enjoy all of Celia Lake's books, and I still adore the Teixcalaan books by Arkady Martine, whether reading or listening to them. Stuart Turton wrote the entirely gripping groundhog-day country house murder mystery, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and I found The Last Murder at the End of the World another very gripping science-fictional murder mystery, this time in weird post-apocalyptic flavour.
Fourth Wing is a massive fantasy tome (21 hours of audiobook!) about a lethal military college for aspiring dragonriders, which piles a great many tropes onto some rather wonky worldbuilding. It is very entertaining and I can see why it is hugely popular. I am part way through the even more massive sequel and I regret nothing.
[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited
For Redactle reasons, yesterday I wound up working my way through Wikipedia's List of oldest continuously inhabited cities.
This turned out not to be helpful for Terrible Game Purposes, but it did mean that I came across a city in Anatolia, Turkey, "founded by the Phrygians in at least 1000 BC[E], although it has been estimated to be older than 4,000 years old".
The name of this city? Eskişehir.
"Eski" is the Turkish (and possibly Turkic?) word for "old" (antonym of "new" -- antonym of "young" is a different word). "Şehir" means "city".
We are so good at this.
https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-06-p-fast-trie.html
Previously, I wrote some sketchy ideas for what I call a p-fast trie, which is basically a wide fan-out variant of an x-fast trie. It allows you to find the longest matching prefix or nearest predecessor or successor of a query string in a set of names in O(log k) time, where k is the key length.
My initial sketch was more complicated and greedy for space than necessary, so here's a simplified revision.
( Read more... )
Today was Lower Limb Class #2, as ongoing follow-up for the most recent ankle reinjury. (On which status is: still a biiiit weaker when I'm pushing to limits, but not really noticeable in day-to-day life, e.g. I'm no longer regularly wincing when I jar it getting off a bike; definitely still feeling the work up the outside of my right leg when doing e.g. isometric holds on double heel raises.)
I am very amused by how "???!!!" the physios got when I tried to faint from things that "shouldn't" have been significant cardio and indeed aren't by my standards for cardio but crucially involved a lot of moving around and position changes while upright: sit-to-stand, lunges, crab-walking with knees bent. Apparently I have carefully selected for exercise done while seated or prone for really solid reasons, i.e. that would be the orthostatic hypotension. Which I apparently hadn't told the physios about as its own thing. ...whoops.
( notes )
https://dotat.at/@/2025-08-04-p-fast-trie.html
Here's a sketch of an idea that might or might not be a good idea. Dunno if it's similar to something already described in the literature -- if you know of something, please let me know via the links in the footer!
The gist is to throw away the tree and interior pointers from a qp-trie. Instead, the p-fast trie is stored using a hash map organized into stratified levels, where each level corresponds to a prefix of the key.
Exact-match lookups are normal O(1) hash map lookups. Predecessor / successor searches use binary chop on the length of the key. Where a qp-trie search is O(k), where k is the length of the key, a p-fast trie search is O(log k).
This smaller O(log k) bound is why I call it a "p-fast trie" by analogy with the x-fast trie, which has O(log log N) query time. (The "p" is for popcount.) I'm not sure if this asymptotic improvement is likely to be effective in practice; see my thoughts towards the end of this note.
( Read more... )
Celebrating. Two birthdays! Both, conveniently, in Cambridge.
Reading. The Age of Seeds, Fiona McMillan-Webster (finished). Cannot articulate why this turned into a bit of a slog (kept running off to look other things up? suspicion about the materials science fluency? difficulty engaging with The Climate Situation for leisure purposes? lots of other things going on?) but I did finish it and I have learned things. Sort of. I at least now have more of a vague outline about how seed dormancy works (on multiple levels) than I did previously, even if I did spend a lot of the explanation going "okay but what does that MEAN???"
Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh. Two chapters left!
I also continue to take steps towards getting my head around neuroanatomy; today I have been particularly annoyed by (1) the terminology of "ganglion", and apparent variation in whether it is used strictly to refer to the peripheral nervous system, and also (2) Nerve and Muscle cheerily providing an incomprehensible-to-me introduction to the concept of action vs resting potentials, and the difficulties inherent in measuring them. This is possibly going to be another case of "read three pages, then go and do a lot more reading elsewhere to fill in". Have also been poking at a couple of wikibooks on neuroanatomy.
Listening. Bats! More than seeing, really.
Cooking. Birthday cake! "No, really, don't use pre-ground hazelnut meal, your mother prefers a more Rustic texture" now firmly established.
Eating. FIGS. SO MANY FIGS. MY MOTHER'S FIG TREE IS RIDICULOUS. We have brought about a kilo home? I think we have genuinely brought about a kilo home and that's after the quantity I've eaten in the past 36 hours.
(Schwarzbrot + Yarg + fig: yes excellent thank you.)
Exploring. Small adventures around Darwin Green and various other Cambridge back streets. Tragically the known black mulberry tree is not quite ready for Significant harvest yet, and also there was someone sitting (and smoking) on the bench once needs to climb upon to reach the majority of the branches that overhang the public highway.
Growing. Greenhouse chillis potted up before vanishing to a field: not dead! Sugar Magnolia: continuing to produce more pods! Tomatoes: still not ripe!
Observing. Many bats. Good dragonfly. Lots of red admiral butterflies on the buddleia. A SQUIRREL in a WALNUT TREE the existence of which I had not previously been cognisant: the pitter-patter of little bits of walnut fruit was somewhat perplexing until the involvement of Horrid Little Hands and Horrid Little Teeth dawned upon me, whereupon I was absolutely delighted to get to watch this creature in Action.
Spent the day at a kids festival. Sophia's favourite act was the fake
Taylor Swift.
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