Fergus Murray

@oolong.co.uk

8390 Followers 6475 Following

Monotropic writer, science tutor, Autistic community organiser and independent researcher. Based in Edinburgh. they/them. https://linktr.ee/0olong

A riband wave moth - beautiful, understatedly golden thing with several dark wavy lines across its wing.
A very happy dog in the sunshine. She's missing at least one of her front teeth.
Two sycamore (maple) seed pods ('helicopters') on the ground, crossed over each other as if they're playing footsie.
The head of a feathery plant - something in the grass family - lies on the street. The sun, low in the sky, shines through it.
Black ants mobbing a bigger ant.
A large brown any being mobbed by black ants, on a section of rough pavement, next to a crack.
Screenshot: The editor’s corner 711 players asked for downlight. John said no.
Screenshot: "OOLONG" isn't in today's pile
A dog just tall enough to peer over a low garden wall stands on her back legs, doing so. The garden is sunny and bursting with life, but there is no sign of a cat.
A spider web waving in the breeze. With the angle the sun is hitting it, it produces waves of shimmering rainbow colours.
A hawkweed growing in a gutter, reflected in a red car.
Daisy-like flowers growing from the dank depths of a drain, through the bars of its cover.
The deep red, backlit leaves of another tree. It's possible this one is an apple?
Kifl-dog pressed into the fairly narrow space between Sonny's legs and a stone wall, peering out uncertainly.
Deep reddish beech leaves, backlit by the sun.
Small dark dog with a red harness, standing on a green. Her tongue is protruding, but only a little.
A teasel in bloom, hundreds of long purple flowers poking from between its spikes. Quite a few of the flowers have detached and are just scattered across the remaining, orderly flowers.
A great big curl of fluffy cirrus clouds in the sky, over a line of houses.
A screenshot from the Met Office weather app showing an icon for each coming day plus high and low temperatures, along with an hour by hour breakdown for the chosen day showing those plus chance of rain and wind speed and direction. Today is expected to be sunny but not warm where I am.
Dog bobbling down the road in a cone
The Nelson Monument, a tower on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, is just visible through fog. Lower down, the air is clear and we can see the buildings and trees of Waterloo Place.
A small thistle plant, covered in tiny balls of water, growing in a roadside.
Kifl-dog wearing a cone for self-protection, lying on the carpet looking up at us, tongue hanging out.
Dog face (upside down) on a whitish background (her cone) that fills the frame. You can just make out the rest of her body through it at the top, looking very relaxed.
Several Pineappleweed flowers growing through asphalt, with a dog on a rainbow lead standing just on the other side of them.
Dog in a cone. One ear is up, one ear is down. She may be asleep. We are viewing her head-on, so the cone looks like a circle.
A Facebook error dialog box: Something went wrong Please try again. OK
Kifl-dog staring head-on at me (just above the camera), ears fully horizontal, body rigid.
Kifl, a terrier, stares intensely at the person sitting to the right of the photographer. Her ears are erect, to listen out better for any further mentions or details of breakfast.
An extremely bleary-looking Kifl-dog accepts petting.
A lamp post swamped with ivy and surrounded by buddleias.
Oxalis plant in a pot with a face, backlit by the low morning sun, with a printed Pride flag behind.
Kifl, a venerable-looking terrier with a grey beard and world-weary eyebrows, looks us straight in the eye while facing off into the distance with a haunted air.
Mike Lesser introduces me to far-from-equilibrium systems where contrasts are too great for the stately laws of thermodynamics to tell us much — where messy flows give rise to structures, where the possibility of life emerges from between the cracks. He tells me of robots programmed to travel uphill, how they only ever get there if they make enough mistakes. You cannot hope to reach the summit, he teaches me, by only ever going up.
Southward view from West Edinburgh. Big fluffy clouds with signs of rain, and a bit of rainbow poking out of the top and bottom.
Dog on her back, with Sonny's hand on her chest, with her left paw wrapped around their wrist.
A closeup of two white clover flower heads in a city park.
A viewing hole, through which a faint red glow can be discerned.
A lamp brightening and darkening, showing the spectrum of light it produces by means of a diffraction filter.
A spectrogram of my voice, rising in pitch. This time, frequency (in kilohertz) is on the y-axis and time is on the x-axis. You can clearly make out the harmonics as repeats of the curve.
Many tiny rainbows on a pile of bedding. At the top we see a near-spherical prism, like the ones off Crystal Maze.
The windows of my house through a diffraction grating. You can see that even the blue of the sky has plenty of red and yellow in it.
Magwink-branded device with a pair of circles attached by a hinge. I'm one of the circles is a diffraction grating filter, showing the sky outside of the window split into spectral colours.
A neon(?) sign, with a boat and the word 'persevere' in a shield, with its spectra broken down by a diffraction grating. The reddish parts of the sign are divided into several lines of different hues; the cyan seems to be just a green and a deep violet-blue.
A small dog with pretty big ears, lying flat on her back, paws folded above. She looks very peaceful.
A windblown dog on sandy grass, looking majestic.
Just so much lightning (and a bit of thunder)
Kifl, a grey terrier, wriggles on her back in the clovers in bright sunshine.
A big pink poppy flower in bright sunlight, with a bumblebee that has just taken off, about a centimetre above its green centre.
Small dog standing in the sunshine, on grass, by a stone wall.
Photo of p.4 of the programme: "Consciousness Now Discoveries in neuroscience and psychology are transforming thinking about memory, recovery, attention, and consciousness. Meanwhile, AI’s rise forces us to ask: if machines can imitate thought, what remains uniquely human? World-leading thinkers Michael Pollan and Anil Seth tackle this complex puzzle. Gwen Adshead and Orlando Swayne reveal the human brain’s adaptive ability in trauma and transformation, Nick Barber and Helen Pilcher examine the sometimes uneasy power balance between mind and medicine, and Fergus Murray, Julie Farrell, and Lucy Rose joyfully expand our definition of neurodiversity."
I’ve never seen it. Indeed, Starmer gives every indication of having no core values whatsoever. The inescapable conclusion is that to many people ‘decency’ is a sort of middle-class affect. A Republican politician might brag about having personally thrown a trans person out of the “wrong” toilet. A Labour minister urged us to “alert a member of staff” when “a person of the opposite biological sex enters a single-sex facility”, a near perfect encapsulation of how they talk and think.
But then he can’t really say if he’s strictly an optimist or a pessimist and, no, doesn’t know if he’s an extrovert or an introvert, either. “I’ve never really thought about it. I don’t know what that tells you.” He doesn’t know what he dreamed last night – or ever: “I don’t dream.” Just hits the pillow at 11 and – “bang” – is out till around 5. He doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem, wasn’t scared of anything as a child. “Nothing. No phobias.” Hmmm, this is harder than I thought. What about his lovely heather-coloured tie, where is it from and who chose it? He takes it between finger and thumb. “Would you say heather? I had it down as slightly darker.” Quick-fire is perhaps not his format.
The same LED torch as in the first post, but this time viewed head-on. This gives a richer image, but it's a little harder to make out the gaps in the spectra.
Hazy reflections of a window with diffractions of the same window showing smooth spectra from violet through to red; and a white circle, surrounded by its spectra, each of which consists of exactly three circles, which overlap until you get to the secondary maxima, where they're all the way separated.
A window through a 2D diffraction grating; many duplicate window images surround out, each one having its colours more separated than the last.
Kifl receives belly rubs while gazing at me, just behind the camera.
Dog picks up a carrot toy and puts it down again, then grabs her pear and dances it over to me before placing it back down again in reach.
Kifl, a mostly-dark-great terrier, sits with remarkable intensity next to a rubber pear toy that she has carefully placed on the floor in front of her.
An extremely abstract, ethereal form, resembling caustics, with a roughly circular firm. It's smooth, yet sharp.