Last week I was sorting through my recipe folder — the physical one, which is a mess of printed, scribbled and ripped bits of paper — and came across a bread that I had not made before and that for some reason called to me.

It was very good, so I wrote it up at the other place: flaxseed currant c...

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I’ve ranted many times here about the wanton misuse of biological scientific names. Those are the things, generally in italics, that name a species in such a way that we can all agree what it is we are talking about; Rudbeckia hirta, for example, rather than black-eyed Susan.

People are forev...

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For us, another good month. Things are slowly becoming easier; making sure I have gloves and a mask in my pockets when I go out is becoming a habit. Washing hands when I get back in has been for a long time. It’s great that the park is open, even if it is overrun most of the time. Children being at home can’t be easy. Everything has really been rather good. I missed the travel I had booked, but the online Dublin Gastronomy Symposium was very enjoyable and not nearly as difficult as I feared it might be.

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My online chum Lewis Coles has, like everybody and their dog, been baking bread in these troubled times, and he’s not happy.

Lewis is a software engineer. I can’t be sure, but I guess that he thinks that if you follow a set of instructions, you should end up with the same result every time. So he’s understandably peeved.

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The Wayback Machine, part of The Internet Archive, is an absolutely essential part of the open web and, as it happens, my work. I use it for all sorts of things, most visibly finding archived versions of web pages that have vanished for whatever reasons. I support them with an annual donation, but today I felt compelled to give more, after The Guardian reported that Dominic Cummings falsified the record of what he said when about coronaviruses. The prompt:

First spotted by Jens Wiechers, a data scientist, the edits are verifiable through periodic snapshots of the blog saved by the Internet Archive, which shows the change occurring between 9 April and 3 May this year. A hidden record on Cummings’ own site shows the post was edited at 8:55pm on 14 April, the day he has told the public he had returned from his trip to Durham.

Cummings’ weblog is hosted by WordPress.com, so I’m guessing that the “hidden record“ is one of their secrecy-by-obscurity URLs that shows revisions, but I don’t honestly care. The Wayback Machine’s smoking gun is good enough for me.