Blogs

Sebastian Mallaby (2026) The Infinity Machine. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for SuperIntelligence. I thought this almost 400 page book would be a bit of slog. But it reads like a thriller. I loved it. Bill Gates recommends you read it too. Demis Hassabis. You know the type. Genius son of poor immigrants (boat people) who sets out to change the world… Notes . https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm5y5nynl75ko Open AI scraps new model...

A big thank you to everyone who's posted their stories, poems and blogs on ABCTales this week - it's been a real pleasure to read them.

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent My editor called me into his office in the summer of 1948 and told me to find a town in New England that held a lottery every June. I asked him what sort of lottery. He said the sort where the whole town comes out to the square on a fine morning and draws slips of paper from an old black box, and the family that draws the marked slip, somebody in that family is chosen, and the town does something...

If ever I feel lonely, or sad about being single, or am daydreaming about having a husband to nag about the utility room ceiling not being painted, nothing salves that ‘road-not-taken’ longing better than watching two or three episodes of ‘The Ramsey Show’. The financial infidelities people suffer are heart-stopping. Men taking not just their own pension fund, but their wife’s fund too, and losing the lot, day-trading on the stock market...

September gone already. Time to seek out ‘The Great Pumpkin’ and snaffle all the orange creams from the Hallowe’en Quality Street. But first, a review of the various experiments. This last month, since stopping reading the news, and semi-stopping scrolling, and because those tormentors, AppleTV, are only drip-feeding one episode a week of ‘Slow Horses’, have read several books. None of them coursework. Alice Hoffman’s latest, ‘The Witches of...

Integration and Differentiation Differentiation and Tangent Slope dy/dx Straight line and slope m Area and Integral of f

Wisdom of my years: When in doubt. Cop out. Get your game-head on*. Resolved the MFA issue myself. Still got it, baby! (Scottish people can’t get away with using ‘baby’ in any sentence not about actual babies). Changed daily updates from the noticeboards to weekly. Realised was bedazzled by Oxford’s thrall; that am not doing this course to belong, nor to waste time on the unedifying ramblings of others, especially those with terminal insecurity...

First online ’tute’ for the Oxford course was last week. Coursework started the week before. Had bamboozled myself so much going down rabbit holes by day two, had to play hooky on day three, and go to the cinema to calm down. Saw ‘The Death of Robin Hood’, which is brilliant. Now wondering if the main reason for booking some online study was in order to re-experience that sublime state of being, absent in retirement; ‘playing hooky’. There are...

‘Entress’ is an old Scots word meaning ‘an entrance, or the right to enter a place’. It’s also a sublime new ballet from The Scottish Ballet Company. The lead performance in the advertising is ‘Embrace’; the hive mind with, amongst other things, the most impressive ‘ en pointe’ routines I’ve ever witnessed. Kudos to those ballerinas; they took several curtain calls, even in Aberdeen. The place where someone once told Ricki Fulton, about his...

Some time ago I was reading a Dutch literary website which ran a sort of competition. Readers were invited to report on books which they had started, but never finished. The winner with the most votes (if you can call it that) was Donna Tartt's The Little Friend . So I thought it would be interesting to ask the ABC folk to submit their entries, and see if there are any regular offenders. It would have to be a book which you started, and never...