A nice surprise to read yesterday that Ed Brayton is back on the air with a relaunch of his old radio show Culture Wars Radio.

[I am a long-time fan of Ed’s writing and particularly his radio shows. (So much so that I mirror episodes of his old shows to make sure they remain available.) Intelligent, informed, non-partisan discussion of American politics and law, particularly constitutional law. This time he has a co-host, former professor of constitutional law Dan Ray. The first episode is a discussion of the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, and a bit about Trump’s legal troubles.

I’m super pleased to hear Ed on the radio again.

Check out the podcast via iTunes, or subscribe to the feed directly. It looks like Ed is supporting production of the show through Patreon, so go take a look there too.

Hey!

I just had a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology. It’s on some work I did with the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University. In it, we used a machine model of speech recognition to map phonetic sensitivities in human auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography neuroimaging data.

The paper is open-access, so you can read it here.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the kind of research I do over at my “professional” website.

A while ago I came across a widely-seen Youtube video about the history of the Amen breakbeat, which was a reposting of a recording of a 2004 documentary audio installation by artist Nate Harrison. It details the artist’s view of the rise of the break, as well as what this might tell us about the effects of intellectual property on cultural development.

Can I Get An Amen? — Nate Harrison (2004)

Read more…

Looking through a turn-of-the-century almanac of graphic design, I came across this absolute gem:

I download a load of academic papers in as PDFs from ResearchGate, since that’s often the only place a free version of a paper is available. Unfortunately, ResearchGate prepend downloaded PDFs with a branded cover page, which I obviously don’t want.

On MacOS, it’s easy enough to manually delete pages from a PDF using Preview. But with a bit of help from Hazel, it’s possible to automate it.

Read more…

I’ve just started a new job at Lancaster University, working as a postdoc in Louise Connell’s lab. I’ll be looking at the roles of linguistic representations and sensory simulations in human cognition. You can read more about the lab’s research aims on its website.

Update: Louise has now moved to Maynooth University, and the old lab’s page at Lancaster has ceased to exist. But you can easily find out the kind of things Louise’s colleagues worked on at her new page.

Trying to decide which slogans are best for my sinister anti-Trump/May placards.

Curtain is a short, powerful game by Llaura Dreamfeel, available on their itch.io page.

I won’t say too much about it, other than I played it about a year ago (after Danielle Riendeau recommended it on an episode of Idle Thumbs), and it’s stayed with me for a long time since then. I really recommend it, though take note of content warnings on the website.

Sacramento is a lovely little game by Dziff, available on their itch.io page.

It’s a little, quiet, dreamy watercolour space of sun, wind and wildlife to explore, with accompaniment by Glass Body.

It’s more than worth a dollar and 10 minutes of your time.

(via a Hannah Nicklin tweet)