Izzy

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk You have all of my sympathy and best wishes in doing this. I myself tried to lose weight by radical means like this for a long time, so I know how hard it is. I really hope you manage to make it work.

This petition to move the 2026 ICM out of the United States and pledge to boycott it if it is not is a perfect statement of the problem, and I urge anyone having a substantive connection to the mathematics profession to sign it.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdHJhc8X83b8oL6rH2KDX0I730eraum5I8_IlWY23F82mHuag/viewform?pli=1

@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk From what I know of family law, it probably would have been a lot more harrowing, and would definitely have required you to do a lot more emotional labour. Also, you would have spent your career explaining to people that legal aid doesn't cover them and that a second opinion isn't going to tell them anything different.

Personally, if *every* time I added a feature [X] to my software it prompted my users to immediately google "how to disable [X]", and *especially* if the answer invariably ended up being "You can't", I would rethink my whole approach to designing my software, and indeed my whole attitude towards my users.

Three days on from the Twickenham Massacre, I have some thoughts about England.

Firstly, Borthwick must go. At the end of the Six Nations, we have to replace him. It isn't too soon; the Borthwick project has had three years to prove itself, and it just hasn't managed it.

After our barnstormer of a year in 2025, in which we came a convincing second in the Six Nations and found convincing wins against New Zealand and Argentina, I could hear the music. I was gearing up to eat an entire concrete mixer full of humble pie over Borthwick. If we had won this Six Nations, if we had won next year's World Cup under his tenure, then I would have happily admitted that I was wrong and hailed Borthwick as a genius.

But instead we've followed up one of our best years in recent times with one of our worst Six Nations performances ever. We conceded our biggest defeat to Ireland at Twickenham; we got rolled over by Scotland; a win against Italy in the next round is far from assured; and the less said about Le Crunch this year the better.

Borthwick's management just isn't working. It cannot reasonably be said to be working when we're so wildly inconsistent, when we have absolutely fuck-all idea which England is going to show up from year to year, month to month, or week to week. We have to replace him, and the absolute latest we can do that is at the end of this tournament, otherwise the new guy isn't going to have enough time to fix things in time for the next World Cup.

1/n

#SixNationsRugby