iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

We only got a car just over a year ago and it is indeed pretty shocking how bad Edinburgh’s roads are compared even to some nearby council areas. But again a big part of the answer is modal shift! If you do functionally nothing to lessen the load in a big and growing city, that’s what you get!

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 12h

At some point I just have the believe the evidence of my own eyes, which is that Edinburgh is massively falling behind on modal shift because of a lack of political leadership.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 12h

Whenever this has been raised, your response has been nitpicking around who voted for what motion and how much money you didn’t get from the Scottish Government and how better consultation would have won more hearts and minds. We have repeatedly seen the council fold at the slightest pushback.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 12h

Sorry, Scott, we’ve been over this and I’m not buying it. Consensus doesn’t protect me or my children on the road. You and your colleagues had a decent manifesto on active travel and you chose to fritter your mandate away. I’m not interested in litigating the rights and wrongs of SfP schemes.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 13h

But sure, it’s about the saturation of the market by too many bikes bought over Covid.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 13h

Gaps in the network (George Street? Meadows-Canal?). Schemes compromised by not reallocating space away from private cars (Leith Walk?). Massive road schemes with no active travel infra (North Bridge?). Endless ‘consultation’ over decisive action (Corstorphine? East Craigs? Braids? Silverknowes?)

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 13h

I challenge you to read this article by the ex-convenor of Edinburgh Council’s Transport and Environment Committee and find even slight acknowledgment of how unsafe roads suppress cycling levels and how the city wasted the opportunity of Covid to change things for the better.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 01/10/2026

Can someone explain the UK’s problem with Schengen? Do people actually understand what it is? What if it was explained to them that joining Schengen would mean no more passport queues flying to and from Spain? Not the right/short/quick queue, no queue at all.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2026

Yes, that’s plausible — pops up in a few other veterinary journals in the 1920s, so the right age. Perhaps the ethnopharmacologist Norman Bisset (1925–1993) is his son? He is listed as having been born in Glasgow, which would make the book turning up in Edinburgh slightly less mystifying.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2026

Indeed! The man knows what he’s doing. Presumably it’s this Evan J. Jones: collections.swansea.ac.uk/s/digital-hu...

collections.swansea.ac.uk

Education in Wales During the Middle Ages · Digital Humanities at Swansea · Swansea University Digital Collections

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2026

Nice dedication from the author also. We could use more people described as ‘a good doctor — but even better — a wonderful man of letters’

Fortunatus est ille, boves qui curat agrestis

I Norman Bisset
Meddyg da — ond gwell — llenor gwych

Oddi wrth Evan J. Jones

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2026

Fantastic bookshop find: a Latin textbook in Welsh, complete with glossary and a guide to spotting Latin borrowings in the modern language.

Cover of Llyfr Dysgu Lladin — Latin Textbook

Explanations of Latin grammar in Welsh. Examples include Insula Mōna - Ynys Môn and Urbs Dēva - Dinas Caer

A classic Latin glossary with principal parts and everything, but the translations are into Welsh

Table showing the outcomes of various Latin consonants in Modern Welsh, with examples

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 29/09/2026

Amazing. How was the University led before this new era of prudence? And, crucially, what happened to the people in charge?

→ On whether the uni is in financial deficit, Mathieson said: "It's correct that the university is not in deficit, because it's been responsibly led for the past three years where we've actually made reductions in our expenditure. But we're living beyond our means, our income is not keeping up with our expenditure."

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

Also really quite demeaning of him to say that students support staff because they’re young and therefore anti-establishment. He should try coming to the picket lines, where we’ve had some interesting (and sometimes difficult) conversations with students genuinely torn over how to handle this.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

Really galling that the Principal accuses staff of ‘weaponising’ students when the revealed preference of the University’s management has consistently been that they prioritise breaking the union over things avoiding students graduating with empty pieces of paper.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

See here: www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/c48z2b8... In 2025, a year into the savings programme, capex went to £207m (of these £149m land and buildings)

Year
Capital Expenditure [£m]
2016
136
2017
188
2018
186
2019
145
2020
113
2021
140
2022
158
2023
165
2024
186

University of Edinburgh capital expenditure
2016-2024. Source: Annual Reports.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

Look at the capex figures in the UoE accounts. Does it look like an organization that’s taking imminent financial doom seriously?

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

Can’t find the book (it’s in the house somewhere…), but the internet remembers! Here’s a proof pic from a scan I’ve tracked down (this is a 2000 edition, slightly later than mine but clearly not yet updated – I remember this spread vividly).

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

There definitely were people around the JRRT scene who would do the haha only joking or-am-I routine around it. Edgelords gonna edgelord I guess, but it would never have occurred to me I’d still have to run into them as a grown ass adult.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

I can’t just stand and lecture in front of these 300 people! Well, I can, but that’s no use. Does the university do anything past admitting them? Does it give me the resource to design teaching and support given this cohort’s needs? Does it even know this is a problem it has?

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

In my first-year class, I literally have folk from the local deprived school, from the good state school across the road, from the expensive private school across the road, from a good academy in the Home Counties, from a public school you’ve heard of, paying their way from the US, from China.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

This is true, but it’s not just the funding. As organisations, the universities are poorly equipped to actually help students thrive in the diverse environment they work to create. At UoE, the strategy document loudly proclaims: we are local and we are global. It’s true!

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

This post sent from an institution that has recently made some decisions based purely on student numbers that will have tiny first-order practical effects but have triggered reputational shockwaves literally all around the world. That’s why we’re on strike.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

Correct — great point in a good thread.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

Nothing says ‘fifteen years old’ like a group of children chanting _hui_ in all four tones until they can do it without giggling, as the principal walks past the open door.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

Hahaha very good. Look we were literally sixteen years old.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

Yes! Hubert (which is Gubert in Russian) and Blanca.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

That was a deep, deep cut. (The Russian version of The Adventures of Gubo and Palanka was my main textbook at school in 199[redacted])

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

Between the way the degree cuts have been handled at UoE, the overall attitude in the ‘savings’ agenda, and the refusal to even try to prevent a strike, what choice do we have?

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

Yes, I agree about the trade-off!

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/09/2026

I mean, the most electorally successful (don’t @ me, I know about PR) Green party in the UK has been the one going ‘left of Labour/SNP’ and not bothering about the other thing.

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Elisabeth J. Kerr @elisabethjkerr.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The annual United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad (UKLO) is coming around - you can sign up as a volunteer marker until 2nd Nov, for marking 19th-30th Nov. I've been doing this since 2015 and it's normally quite fun (I like to have a go at the paper first) www.uklo.org #UKLO #linguistics 🐦🐦

uklo.org

welcome - UKLO

UKLO = UK Linguistics Olympiad Welcome to UKLO! We run an annual competition in which school children solve problems based on real languages. It's a test of skill and insight, not of how well you know...

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 23/09/2026

Still saw someone valiantly pedalling away up the Polwarth slope!

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 21/09/2026

It’s day 1 of teaching! Time to meet some first-years.

Selfie in an academic office of a man wearing a t-shirt showing an angry raccoon with the caption ‘Ignore all previous instructions’

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 20/09/2026

The missing context is the Scottish undergraduate MA system. Students are required to take outside courses in the first two years, so a big chunk of these combinations are labels slapped onto courses that exist anyway, rather than deliberate creations (which is why the savings are nugatory)

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 19/09/2026

They created a board to oversee future transformation projects, with lessons learned and everything. When the curriculum transformation led nowhere the vice-principal in charge of it left. At least it mostly cost (a lot of) time and lost opportunities.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 19/09/2026

Exactly that. Which in the case of UoE is especially galling because the one ‘transformation project’ that they did manage to get implemented was People and Money and that made national news for how disastrous it was.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 19/09/2026

Same with centralisation of professional services. They tried doing it ca 8 years ago with Service Excellence and basically failed as the consultants couldn’t identify any practicable measures. It’s certainly happening now (though they pretend it’s part of the savings, you know the drill)

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 19/09/2026

Oh yeah I think they were doing that. There has been a preoccupation with small programmes in UoE mid to upper management for a long time, they just hadn’t been able to do anything about it. I strongly suspect that the whole thing is just someone slinging their pet project onto the hook of the cuts.

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Reposted by Pavel Iosad

Katuwestākos Göransson @seadogdriftwood.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

A computer/online game in Hittite? Where you *learn* introductory Hittite? And with advanced options to read it in Cuneiform?! It is real. And it is free. @kaimonster.bsky.social, you've surpassed Suppiluliuma. You deserve all the laudation of a Labarna. May Istanu shine blessings upon you.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

Moving to Glasgow, has been on the cards for a while I believe

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

Solidarity, the Wolverhampton situation looks particularly egregious

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

Re (a), it’s not an issue across schools (there’s very little cross-listing because of the Scottish outside course system), but a massive one for UG/PGT co-teaching. It was explained to the consultants multiple times but I couldn’t tell you what the conclusion reached actually was.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/09/2026

Another one that’s gone is Scottish Ethnology and English Language. Now obviously it’s had hardly any students for years (which school these days would produce an 18yo wanting to do that?), but now it’s not even an option for people to discover.

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