Over five years I’ve been reading all the SF Masterworks, about 188 books in total. Read in fairly random order, with preference for authors I’d not read before. Not a bad one amongst them, and plenty of surprises

Here’s a top twenty, in reverse order. Feel free to disagree 20) Raft, by Stephen Baxter.

Veers into YA territory, but the second best imagining of a high gravity world. You break a leg if you fall a foot. Features a black hole I think

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_(nov…

White and Common (yellow) Rockrose (Helianthemum apenninum and nummularium), Purn Hill, Somerset, and, drum roll… … the hybrid Sulphur Rockrose (Helianthemum × sulphureum), Purn Hill, Somerset #wildflowerhour

Why, in 2000, did Blair approve the building of an expensive synchrotron at Didcot (Harwell, near Oxford) and not Daresbury (near Manchester)?

Why the South and not in the North?

Anyone want a thread on the story, with archive docs?

I promise to be rude about Oxford profs… Let’s start: what is it?

Synchrotrons accelerate particles (electrons) which when made to follow a constrained path produce intense, useful electromagnetic radiation (X-rays, UV, light etc)

You can use this light etc to probe molecular structures & do lots of good science

Couldn't resist taking a peek at the second-place file in the January vote: just what was the Disaffection Act of 1934, and what had the student done? thread... It is the case, or as the Yorkshire Evening News has it, the ‘tragedy of young Hugh Phillips’, a 18 year old student of Leeds University, sentenced for 12 months at Leeds Assizes on 9 March 1937