A friend chucked me an old Crumar Bit99 synthesizer from the 1980s. It’s a beast! Lovely bass sounds. Totally unusable interface. See figure A. However, when I received it, the unit was in a bad state. Terrible fuzzy white noise sound along with every note. It sounded as though it was totally wrecked. It’s actually, though, very easy to restore.

I’ve got great news! I have now released LanguageLab, my free, open-source software for learning languages and music, to the public on GitHub. I wish I could tell you I’ve got a public site up that you can all use for free. Unfortunately, the features that would make LanguageLab easy for multiple users to share one server are later in the roadmap. There are a few other issues that also stand in the way of a massive public service.

Non-vulnerable people perhaps don’t understand why the government advice to shielders is so frightening. I think I can give a flavour though: Shielding is to be eased on the 1st April. Nobody in the “extremely clinically vulnerable” group – whom the virus would likely kill – will have had their second jab by this point. Infection levels are still around 5,000-6,000 new cases per day, nationwide. This is not low.

I have to admit, today, that I was wrong about the risk of others reprinting open-access monographs produced under a Creative Commons license. An outfit called “Saint Philip Street Press” has reprinted (on demand) the entire catalogues of Open Book Publishers, Ubiquity Press, UCL Press, and others. Here’s my Literature Against Criticism for sale, for instance.

I have, this afternoon (on a day off – I know, I know) been playing around with the LRB archive, looking for fun patterns in the chain of “who reviews whom”. Some preliminary thoughts… If, in careerist terms, essay writing is a network that is about social mobility, concerned with how authors affiliate themselves with one another, then we can possibly understand a little how the industry works – and how writers’ careers benefit – by

The Publisher’s Association has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to the publishing sector.

Viewers of the Crown may have noticed a brief scene where Prince Charles practices Welsh by sitting in a glass cubicle wearing a headset.  Some viewers may recognize that as a language lab. Some may have even used language labs themselves. The core of the language lab technique is language drills, which are based on the bedrock of all skills training: mimicry, feedback and repetition.

Today I have written to the University of Leicester tendering my resignation as an external examiner. The text of resignation is below: Dear Professor Canagarajah, I write, following my previous correspondence of the 22nd January, to tender my resignation as an external examiner in the department of English at the University of Leicester. I wish to reiterate the concerns that I made in that email, to which I have had no response.

This morning I had to have a call with our accountants that I was somewhat dreading: does Brexit have tax implications for the Open Library of Humanities, a company limited by guarantee with charitable objects (a UK charity)? An important point about our model: OLH is not a supply.

This week opened with the distressing news that Lord Sumption, supposedly someone whose judgement is entirely sound, having been a Supreme Court justice, had told a cancer sufferer live on air that her life was less valuable than others. Pretty disgusting stuff that, to me, seems to show a type of thinking that is similar to eugenics;