So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering “the edge of the galaxy”.  They were referencing this recent paper, which… doesn’t really say that.  But it’s an interesting paper anyway, so let’s discuss.

As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, which is a flat spiral containing several hundred billion stars.  And spiral galaxies don’t exactly have an “edge”.  We can’t see the details of the Milky Way, because we’re inside it.  But we have excellent photographs of thousands of other spiral galaxies, and they mostly sort of gradually blur off into intergalactic space.



So if you travelled outwards from Earth, away from the center of the Milky Way, there wouldn’t be any sudden cutoff where stars just stopped.  Stars would gradually get further and further apart.  At some point, there wouldn’t be any stars anywhere near you. 

But there wouldn’t be any “edge” as such.  No glowing purple force field —

— or golden pillars or anything.


What the paper actually found was the edge of the star-forming region of the galaxy.  And that’s a different kind of interesting.

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In the final comment on my most recent CT post, John Q strategically grants a premise from an earlier comment by poster Matt: John Q grants that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia.” This was not a concession to Matt’s main point, as John Q goes on to point out that it’s “highly unlikely that this fact contributes much in way of meeting people from very different social networks.”

Rather than bringing us back into the substance of this disagreement, I want to go off about something entirely different. As you’ll soon see, I’m far out of my depths on this one.

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The producerist vision of AI seems to assume an endlessly expanding market for reading. And reading. Well. It is rather more than a market.

Warning: this post is a little more sweary than usual. If that bothers you, maybe read something else.

We read aloud in our household. A lot.

We always have.

When my daughter was five years old (she’s now 26) she and I once squished into a beanbag and read Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen aloud. When we got to the end of the story I realised to my horror that we were so absorbed that it was her bed time and we (OK, responsible adult here, I) had forgotten we also needed to cook and eat dinner.

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A number of commenters noted a malware problem with the site.It appears to be a well known attack called ClickFix.

It’s now fixed, thanks again to Doctor Memory

My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length at CT, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion.

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I love Rory Stewart’s memoir about being a politician; its one of the best books I’ve read about British politics. Among his many observations about the dysfunctionality of government is that ministers typically know nothing about their briefs prior to taking their jobs, and don’t stay in post long enough to get any command. There may be worse examples than Education, but I doubt it. The advice is to the newest Secretary of State for Education is simple: before you do anything significant read my dad’s last book, and spend a week talking to some of your predecessors (particular recommendations below).

Now some facts:

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I just learned about The Fandom and Social Connection Initiative and I’m intrigued. The idea is to study the possibility that sports fandom can be an antidote to the “connection recession,” as traditional “third places”—like churches, civic organizations, and bowling leagues—play a diminishing role in our lives. The researchers think their early findings suggest that sports fandom can motivate people to connect, including connecting across racial, economic, and political divides.

Here’s an excerpt from this article, in which one of the studies is described:

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… to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems.

An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can now use emojis, which weren’t even available in Unicode when CT started out.

I enjoy reading over our old posts and discussions, and will enjoy it more now that they are properly readable.

Thanks again, Dr M.

In the UK as elsewhere, we’ve recently seen the far right orchestrate a campaign against refugees, presenting them as dangerous to women and girls and the vanguard of an invasion aimed at destroying Britain. Asylum seekers, forced by the goverment into hotels pending the examination of their claims, have found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, demanding their removal from the neigbourhood. In one wave of riots, a hotel was set on fire, and the occupants feared for their lives. Recently in Northern Ireland there was a violent pogrom against anyone with dark skin, where people were burnt out of their homes. Calls for violence against refugees spread on social media and the perpetrators, when punished for incitement, have been lauded as free-speech heroes. I’ve heard from black friends that verbal abuse and physical assaults have become more common.

A big part of the far-right narrative which is often picked up and repeated by mainstream journalists and politicians concerns the demographic character of those who arrive on small boats, the purported “invaders”, who are described as being overwhelmingly (even “all”) young men, and sometimes as being of “fighting age” or “military age”. Part of this story is a belief that “genuine” refugees would be overwhelmingly women and children, the most vulnerable, and that these are the kind of people who warrant humanitarian concern, if anyone does. There is a presumption, then, that young men are somehow illegitimate refugees, who do not deserve sanctuary but should be removed from the country as soon as possible.

This prejudice against young male refugees is directly contrary to what even a short period of reflection and an examination of the facts would produce. In conflict after conflict, the story is the same. When a town or a city is conquered by one side or another, the first thing they do is to separate the young men (those of “fighting age”) and kill them. It is what happened in Srebrenica in 1995 where around 8000 men and boys were murdered. In the current conflict in Sudan, from whence many refugees arrive in the UK, militias have been rounding up all the males over the age of ten and killing them (before raping the women), as Nicholas Kristof reports.
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As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out

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Academic publishing has long been dominated by commercial players. That fact is well-known, as are many of the problems. But there is a growing movement towards new models, under the labels of “open access” and “open science.” Until two weeks ago, I’ve held a role as co-editor of an interdisciplinary journal, which allowed me to see some of the problems from close. But I’ve also learned more and more about solutions.* What follows are some personal reflections on these issues – if you’re familiar with the problems, you might want to jump directly to the solutions part below.

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Here’s another episode in my memoirs of being an activist. You can read it at substack, or here!:

Between school and college I decided to take a ‘year off’ (what they now call a ‘gap year’). I didn’t have much of a plan, except that I wanted to travel, but not really to earn money (a difficult combination to pull off, frankly, and not one I would recommend). My dad had a brilliant idea, resisting which is something about which I have lifelong regrets, which was to go and live with Harry Ree for a few weeks/months and be his factotum. [1]

But, I did go and work for CND helping prepare for the big October 24th demonstration in 1981. I had two duties that autumn.

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