I’m excited to announce a new release of vcr: v2. vcr helps you record and replay HTTP interactions in your tests (and more now, see below). This release brings improvements in usability and security, it streamlines the API, and adds many new features.

In the past decade or two, I’ve seen a LOT of popular science books of this form: where the noun in question might be salt or wood or math or clouds or daydreaming or whatever. It’s not enough to write an engaging book on Topic X without somehow, by tortuously overreaching, making it the underpinning of life itself. If we ever do an SV-POW!

Zum „Tag der Seenotretter“ (sic!) rückt der Beitrag das grundlegende Recht auf Rettung in den Fokus. Er zeigt, wie dieses Recht an den europäischen Außengrenzen selektiv umgesetzt wird.

Parallel computation puts many CPUs to work on solving a problem much more quickly than one CPU alone. But this only works if the tasks are carefully scheduled and the additional CPUs are not waiting around for something to do. How do we choose the right number of processors for a given problem ?

One of the most interesting things about teaching is that the best questions come after I’ve finished my talk. Yesterday, during Day 2 of my three-hour crash course on AI search at FSCI 2025, a participant looked at our side-by-side demo of Scopus (not Scopus AI), SciSpace (in standard, non-deep search mode), and AI2 PaperFinder and asked (paraphrased): Thanks for reading Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship!

The Greeks loved oracles. The average temple of Apollo, who among others was in charge of soothsaying and predictery, was adorned to the gills with gifts from grateful worshippers whose inscrutable questions got equally inscrutable answers from Apollo’s oracles. None of these were more famous than the Pythia, the young ladies high as a kite on volcanic fumes at Apollo’s temple in Delphi.

On Monday, July 14th 2025, I hosted a mini-workshop on homomorphic encryption at Google’s Portland, Oregon office. Though Portland is a small city, it’s becoming a hub for homomorphic encryption. Intel and Google both have a presence here, as well as the hardware startup Niobium, and a few individuals from other companies who happen to be based here.

Clear Skies created the first index of research integrity: Oversight. We offer metrics describing research standards covering the entire research ecosystem. If you want to know more about metrics for your portfolio, get in touch. I sometimes get asked why I picked the name ‘Clear Skies’. I used to fly gliders. Gliders don’t have engines, so technically, they don’t actually “fly”, they just kind of fall out of the sky.

When I set out to write On the Wings of a Pig , I didn’t expect to end up writing it with anyone else. The core idea was mine, born from years spent straddling the line between bioengineering and policy, steeped in existential frustration at how little attention we give to the collapse of the living world around us, and how much a lot of my conversations felt like science fiction. I had the science. I had the stakes. I had the vision.

Vom 24. bis 27. Juni 2025 fand die 113. BiblioCon im Bremer Messe und Congress Centrum statt. Unter den rund 4.000 Teilnehmenden waren auch wir vertreten: Das Open Research Office Berlin war bei mehreren Vorträgen und Workshops aktiv beteiligt. Wir blicken zurück auf die Konferenz und stellen unsere Materialien und einige Impressionen im Open Access zur Verfügung.

Following on from the last note, staying in and with Japan, as the recent elections can be a ‘teachable moment’, as we like to say in the classroom. What it speaks to is deepening structural stresses that are exceeding existing modes of governance.