iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Excellent book, available second hand in UK: The colour book of knots Floris Hin www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/Sear...

Book cover for "The colour book of knots" by Floris Hin. The cover is illustrated with several examples of knots tied in coloured rope.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Just what we don't want if the US is putting weapons in orbit, an idea which is even more stupid than Trump's ballroom.

Kessler Syndrome is a theoretical situation in which space around Earth becomes so crowded that collisions between objects cause a cascade of debris, eventually making orbital space inaccessible. A ballistic weapon that could generate a cloud of space junk is therefore less than ideal

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

"Beach window" Amber Dickson Architecture category, 2026 British Photography Awards

Photo of a beach & blue sky, seen through a window divided up into rectangles by black bars

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Here's an example of Haring's work:

A Keith Haring painting, called "Growing II", from https://www.artnet.com/artists/keith-haring/growing-ii-a-h7AgFtUF-IkL9FWlCe1I1Q2

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

A nice semi-abstract photo from the selection below.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Much more sensible than the amateurish way that the UK Brexit referendum was organised. Do it in stages, with explicit approval needed for an actual negotiated deal.

Crucially, the referendum will decide only whether the government of Iceland should restart accession negotiations with the EU; it is not a vote to determine whether the country should join the EU. That decision would need to be put to a second referendum, as well as being ratified by the 27 EU member states.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I've added Alt text to the screenshotted poem in the quoted post. Extracted with Google Lens & checked by eye.

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R.S. THOMAS

From 'Laboratories of the Spirit', 1975

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Very like "Early Sunday Morning" by Edward Hopper. whitney.org/collection/w...

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Stevie Wonder anticipated this with the cover for "Songs in the Key of Life"

Album cover of the Stevie Wonder album "Songs in the Key of Life"

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Auto-generated headline, indistinguishable from Allister Heath ones.

Allister Heath
Why Andy Burnham is the final, fatal symptom of Britain's moral collapse
[parody headline, generated by website
https://stirring-fox-7e1fab.netlify.app/

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Includes this interpretation of the Mahmood appointment, which sounds very plausible. Don't abandon hope yet.

The Mahmood re-appointment is obviously terrible. It is a big loud warning sign flashing above this project. But the most realistic interpretation is not that Burnham will pursue the ‘fuck-liberals’ agenda. That runs contrary to nearly everything we know about him. It is that he thinks Mahmood has become talismanic of Labour’s reliability on immigration to more socially conservative voters and must therefore be retained, but that her proposals should be softened and moderated.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Amusingly, this is still on the FT front page. For the FT, it appears that Ed M as Chancellor would signal the end of the world. It campaigned for Mahmood as the alternative.

"The Burnham era begins: Mahmood set for chancellor"

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Map showing location of UAE proposed new port, outside Strait of Hormuz:

map showing proposed location of new UAE port, on UAE east coast, which would remove the need for using the Strait of Hormuz to reach their current port on their west coast.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Note: this really is a parody, generated by a website.

Allister Heath:

Count Binface is the ultimate weapon of the Britain-hating metropolitan elite

[PARODY WEBSITE]

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

This statement appears to be in denial about the actual situation in the US. "each generation has pushed us a little closer to its ideals" - so that's how you ended up with Trump? "celebrating the country we have" - the one with Trump as dictator-in-chief?

Dave Cavellv
I still believe America can be what we dream it to be. Not because we’re blind to its flaws, but because each generation has pushed us a little closer to its ideals.
Here’s to celebrating the country we have & working toward the country we need.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

This is the key point, but it's not just the PLP that don't support the performative hostility, it's rafts of voters who've abandoned Labour because of this ridiculous stance from Starmer's government. Burnham has to put a stop to this nonsense.

“This is Labour’s reset moment when we can consign to the past some of the appalling language used by politicians to describe refugees: ‘invaders’, ‘an island of strangers’, ‘tearing our country apart’. We can’t reset by bringing with us policies that many in the PLP do not support"

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Makes me think of this meme

Winnie the Poo meme, looking bored "With James" but looking smug "With Cat Sitter"

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Boosting this important point from Stephen's very good piece, with alt text added.

There is a reasonable debate to be had about how suspects are treated. But we should be clear that the issue here wasn't that the Hampshire police decided that an accusation of racism was more serious than a stabbing. It was that, faced with two people giving a false account of what had happened and one person telling the truth, they sided with two over one. As a result they treated the victim as a suspect, and in England, being treated as a suspect by the police meant he was treated in ways that made his last moments worse. Whatever we think should be done differently has to start by grappling with that truth.

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Philosophical cartoon in Private Eye

Two anthromorphised trees on a forest. One is wearing a watch-like device on its wrist/branch. The other tree, meant to be younger one says
"It's a wrist alarm, Grandad, in case you fall and nobody is there to hear you"

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Extract from article. Text in ALT.

"OpenAI used a new reasoning model (not yet released) to help identify a counterexample that disproved a conjecture from discrete geometry first proposed by Paul Erdos 80 years ago. The model was tuned for so-called chain-of-thought reasoning where the model endlessly “thinks out loud” about whatever it is trying to solve, an approach that lets you approximate something like memory and dynamic computation using LLMs, which are otherwise static and feed-forward. Professional mathematicians identified the counterexample from within a long transcript of the model’s reasoning, and then extracted the key parts and rewrote it as a more succinct proof in a more standard style."

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Very good, detailed piece about how UK governments have failed to be honest with voters about the need for immigration. Text in ALT.

"This is the migration doom loop. The government responds to political pressure by promising to reduce numbers. The easiest reductions come from routes that are economically useful and administratively controllable: students, skilled workers, dependants, care workers. The fiscal and labour market costs then show up elsewhere, in weaker public services, lower tax revenues and more pressure on universities and care"

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Stark example of FPTP distortion in recent local elections, from this article

"And in Sutton, the results are stark. The Liberal Democrats have taken almost all the seats on the Council with a minority share of the vote.

[pie chart showing Lib Dems got almost all the seats in Sutton]

These are very different political stories, but they point to the same problem: First Past the Post distorts election results no matter which party benefits. Ultimately, the voting system is just failing to deliver for the voters."

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Alan Rew @alanrew.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Still worth noting that the UK overall tax burden is smaller than in many other countries. Looks like a headline talking about a relative, rather than absolute, change to make it look worse & hence more click-worthy?