Mastodawn

Fun random fact of the day: Spar (the supermarket chain) is Dutch. Its name means "spruce", a coniferous tree. This also i spired the logo.
However, its name comes from much earlier, when it was called "de spar" ("de" being Dutch for "the"). Besides meqning "the spruce", it also was an acronym for "Door Eendrachtig Samenwerken Profiteren Allen Regelmatig" : "through united collaboration everybody profits regularly". Yes, it is as clunky in Dutch as it is in English, but what do you expect from a name from 1932.

Mike Prior-Jones 5d ago

Today I had a genuine Dad Joke setup in real life: My partner and I went to a local restaurant for dinner and the waiter who served me had an embroidered bat on the front of his teeshirt. And he brought us our dinner dinner dinner dinner!

Mike Prior-Jones 5d ago

Will Harcourt 5d ago

New review of surging glaciers in Svalbard!

I am pleased to share our new paper in which we review the current distribution of surging glaciers in Svalbard! Published in Earth Science Reviews, you can find the full paper here: The surging Borebreen in 2024. In this review, we analyse the methods use to detect glacier surges in the past and present using remote sensing techniques, geophysical methods, and palaeo-glaciological analysis such as landforms, historical…

http://williamharcourt.co.uk/2026/03/19/new-review-of-surging-glaciers-in-svalbard/

New review of surging glaciers in Svalbard!

Research Page: William D. Harcourt

Mike Prior-Jones Mar 15

I highly recommend this book, which is a collection of vignettes of the suburban life of LGBTQ people in the UK. The author is from Croydon, so that part of outer London features strongly. Made me laugh and cry.

Mike Prior-Jones Mar 14

Enfys J. Book [they/them]Mar 14

I'm pleased to share with you the greatest advancement in bottom-sheet technology since the invention of elastic.

Mike Prior-Jones Mar 12

I love this, so I Mar 11

RE: https://chaos.social/@gigabecquerel/116210611432201720

“Courier transform” ahahahahahahaha!

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Mike Prior-Jones Mar 12

@christianp when I was an undergraduate at York, they had three ten-week terms with the weeks numbered from 0 to 9. Week 0 was a special case because it contained no teaching- it was Freshers’ week or exams. Very logical system, probably designed by a computer scientist. Then they got new timetabling software that couldn’t cope with Week 0 and had to renumber to 1 to 10…

Mike Prior-Jones Mar 12

Nanoraptor Feb 3

Some terrifically titled papers from a discovered collection of NASA research documents found in a skip

(with thanks to @JuliaRez for the original pic)

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Mike Prior-Jones Mar 12

@ChrisMayLA6 this is one of the central points of Will Hutton’s mid-90s book The State We’re In, where he argues that the UK’s banking sector works very much against the interests of capital-intensive industries, by contrast with Germany (state-backed banks) and the USA at that time (regional banks with a strong interest in the health of their region’s economy)

Mike Prior-Jones Mar 11

@gendor great to meet you yesterday! I’d love to have a longer conversation about open science hardware sometime if you’re interested?

Personal webpage	https://www.randominformation.co.uk/
Work profile page	https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/1439317-prior-jones-michael