We've been chatting about algorithms over on a social site that, the owner promises, will never, ever use an algorithm even if the site "grows to 100K active accounts".¹ Instagram created its algorithm to ensure that visitors saw more photos that mattered to them, and the discussion seemed to agree that the algorithm was necessary only because people were following a large number of other Instagrammers.

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Against the prevailing wisdom, I continue to rely on experts to inform me, but when experts disagree, What's a person to think?

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Large parts of the past three days have been spent down the rabbit hole that is modifying a WordPress theme, with extra time recovering from blank screens of death and other assorted niceties, all, thankfully, here at home rather than on the live site.

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Tl;dr I did a silly little thing in WordPress that made me happy.

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Last week was a funny old week for podcast-prompted nostalgia. First, there was an episode of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking podcast: Taking the Long View with the Animal Kingdom. Two very old friends, Phyllis Lee and Tim Birkhead, talked entertainingly and at length about what they've learned from long-term studies of elephants and guillemots respectively. Not a lot of this was all that new to me, and Radio 3 is not exactly the most popular of channels, but it was very good that long-term studies were being given the public airing they deserve and, perhaps even rarer, that scientists were given the time to express themselves.

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