Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Traditional to have a beer with the #LIFF2025 short film awards winners.

November 13, 2025 at 7:32 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Probably a good idea Police and Crime Commissioners are being abolished, but former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott running for PCC in Humberside then losing on reallocated second preferences is an underrated weird UK election result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_England_and_Wales_police_and_crime_commissioner_elections#Humberside_Police

November 13, 2025 at 4:38 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

An early start at the coal-face down the film-watching mines.

The art-deco clock at the Hyde Park Picture House says it’s about five to nine.

November 8, 2025 at 8:55 AM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Trying to helpfully answer a student query about how to revise effectively.

I always feel like a bit of a fraud giving advice about revision and exams: I did my last set of important exams around the time that you were learning to walk, while you did your last set of important exams a few months ago! You’re the expert here, not me!

November 6, 2025 at 10:38 AM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Happy day-after-Halloween, everyone!

Tweet from Agnes Callard:

9yo: mama you DIDN'T throw out the halloween candy?!---

[background: we have a halloween tradition where after the kids go to bed, I throw all their candy in the garbage. The next morning, they are filled with rage.]

---thank you SO much!!! [hugs & kisses]

Reader, I forgot.

November 1, 2025 at 1:31 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

#LIFF2025 It’s that time of year again…

October 30, 2025 at 5:55 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

A nice parenthetical drive-by in the introduction to the latest Chotinering. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

(Jean-Pierre, who served for more than two years in her role, which consisted of defending the Administration to the press and explaining its policies, also blames the Democratic Party because it “couldn’t articulate the achievements of the Biden/Harris administration well enough.”)

October 27, 2025 at 9:45 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Here’s a kind-of-corrected version. (It’s Everyman on Thursday 13 November.) #LIFF2025 @leedsfilmfest.bsky.social

October 26, 2025 at 5:36 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Belatedly realise I have caught myself in a #LIFF2025 clash due to a subtle typo in the timetable in the back of the guide. (Cc @leedsfilmfest.bsky.social)

October 26, 2025 at 4:51 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Here are some the BFI have mentioned on their Twitter account. x.com/search?q=fro... (links in alt text)
But you can nominate suggestions too! www.bfi.org.uk/bfi-national...

* Mr Weebl, Badgers (2003) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
* HDCYT, Charlie bit my finger (2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM
* Paul Weedon, I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This (2007) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKbU8B-QVZk
* WhispersRed, Binaural ASMR Ear Massage & Ear Brushing (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-wKbUYNt60
* Integrate UK, #MyClitoris (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq6v-kIcG_Y
* Charity Shop Sue (2019) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4vm6PRqbR9XBj5gfpq8ygw
* Dr Nathan Robinson, Life Through A Sea Turtle's Eyes! (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f41ekEDtHGY
* Tom Scott, This Video Has X Views (2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0
* RNLI, The RNLI’s Seaside Safety Song (2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmSM_Caw7yw
* Limmy, Some Scots can't say "purple burglar alarm" (2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC__o1UxDl8
* Andy Holden, Cat-tharsis (2022) https://x.com/BFI/status/1953442125976055830
* Daily Star, Liz Truss lettuce (2022)
* Norwich City Football Club (2023), Check in on those around you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8TgVR33KM
* Lucy Edwards, Asking Birmingham what they think I can't do as a blind person (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNUUeBYJN64
* Food with Chetna, Mums Punjabi Kadhi (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCwSepKafGg&t=4s
* work by Jenn Nkiru https://x.com/BFI/status/1930593558311883200

October 21, 2025 at 9:50 AM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

I haven’t seen it announced formally anywhere, but it looks like a lot of The New Yorker’s archive has been properly digitised on their website.

As part of an effort to make The New Yorker’s archive more accessible to readers, this story was digitized by an automated process and may contain transcription errors.

October 19, 2025 at 8:29 AM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Strong evidence that the film-nerds are getting the #LIFF2025 ticket booking done first.

Instagram post from @leedsfilmfest: Resurrection is the most popular film in the #LIFF2025 programme so far - screenings are almost entirely sold out!

October 17, 2025 at 11:38 AM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

lunchtime view

October 11, 2025 at 1:16 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Hello, #LIFF2025!

Programme for Leeds International Film Festival 2025.

October 9, 2025 at 4:26 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Is it OK to point at stuff in lectures using your feet?

Me in a lecture pointing at something with my foot

October 6, 2025 at 12:04 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Too many Nicks!

“At 5.30 the next day Jamie arrived at my flat with his editorial colleague Nick Davies. (Mental health warning: there are two Nick Davies in this story. This one worked for Canongate; the second is a well-known reporter for the Guardian.)”
From https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n05/andrew-o-hagan/ghosting

September 24, 2025 at 8:39 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

(epigraph to Crudo by Olivia Laing)

"The cheap 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind speaker at UN always bothered me. I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me."

September 23, 2025 at 3:28 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

Sounds a bit like web.archive.org/web/20100809... or maybe paw.princeton.edu/article/mind..., although no “friendly firehose” quote.

Candès, with the assistance of postdoc Justin Romberg, came up with what he considered to be a sketchy and incomplete theory for what he saw on his computer. He then presented it on a blackboard to a colleague at UCLA named Terry Tao. Candès came away from the conversation thinking that Tao was skeptical — the improvement in image clarity was close to impossible, after all. But the next evening, Tao sent a set of notes to Candès about the blackboard session. It was the basis of their first paper together. And over the next two years, they would write several more.

In 2004, Emmanuel Candes, a mathematician at the California Institute of Technology, was trying to find a way to reconstruct images taken by an MRI machine with the smallest amount of data. By serendipity, Candes’ and Tao’s children attended the same preschool, and the two mathematicians would often talk at drop-off. Candes explained his problem to Tao, whose reaction, as Smithsonian magazine later put it, “was vintage Tao. First he told Candes the problem was unsolvable. Then a couple of minutes later, he allowed that Candes might be on to something. By the next day, Tao had solved the problem himself.”

August 30, 2025 at 5:44 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

This, from a 100-year-old statistics paper, amused me. (Something about the ironic use of capital letters seems very modern.) www.jstor.org/stable/2341482

Fig. 1 gives a very good illustration. The full line shows the proportion of Church of England marriages to all marriages for the years 1866-1911 inclusive: the small circles give the standardized mortality per 1,000 persons for the same years. Evidently there is a very high correlation between the two figures for the same year: the correlation coefficient actually works out at +0.9512.
Now I suppose it is possible, given a little ingenuity and good-will, to rationalize very nearly anything. And I can imagine some enthusiast arguing that the fall in the proportion of Church of England marriages is simply due to the Spread of Scientific Thinking since 1866, and the fall in mortality is also clearly to be ascribed to the Progress of Science; hence both variables are largely or mainly influenced by a common factor and consequently ought to be highly correlated. But most people would, I think, agree with me that the correlation is simply sheer nonsense; that it has no meaning whatever; that it is absurd to suppose that the two variables in question are in any sort of way, however indirect, causally related to one another.

August 22, 2025 at 3:17 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

"Bagehot" (Duncan Robinson) is obviously the best political columnist writing today. But treating "social media" as a plural is truly sick behaviour. www.economist.com/britain/2025...

So far, no one in British politics has come close to harnessing the full power of social media, three decades after their invention. Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist who said “the medium is the message”, argued that people cannot comprehend their current media environment, even though it shapes everything about them. Instead people “look at the present through a rear-view mirror”, meaning they “march backwards into the future”. Nowhere is this more true than Westminster. In July Sir Keir Starmer hired a former editor of the Sun, a once-mighty tabloid, to gee up the government’s comms. By contrast, Mr Skinner is a prophet for the present. Dyslexic, he happily admits he uses ChatGPT to turn garbled Essex prose into synthetic poetry, in order to convert internet fame into political power. McLuhan would have loved it.

August 21, 2025 at 3:51 PM

Matthew Aldridge

@mpaldridge.bsky.social

A 2015 biography of a mathematician and a 1990 journalistic account of torture in South America are two pretty different books to have with me. Yet the author of the latter has just appeared in the former.