This year I went on two puffin watching experiences, and it is about time I reflect on this with a listicle / ranking.

All on islands with decreasing populations of people and increasing populations of puffins.

Third place – Svalbard (one puffin)

A walrus watching trip in Svalbard (pop. 2900) was my first puffin sighting, in 2018. Puffins were just a possibility, but sold well by the guide noting they were very lazy and would wait until the last minute before the boat approached them and then chubbily fly away.

Agentic coding models such as codex and claude code are really useful for software engineering tasks. We sadly (and unsurprisingly) seem to be exiting the era of highly subsidised costs to get us hooked. Currently on my work account I have a measly 300 credit per month maximum.

I immediately burned through 50 credits with a complex prompt to GPT-5.6 Sol with the chatbot, whoops. Now that being more careful with credits feels increasingly important, I wanted to try and benchmark credit use for some of the current models for the tasks I’ve been playing around with.

Previous posts on menB:

• First thoughts and summary
• Working hypothesis for outbreak

UKHSA have sequenced one of the isolates from the outbreak, which is on PubMLST (190637). This is excellent and UKHSA have done a great job sequencing this strain so quickly, and releasing the genome and provisional analysis so quickly.

UKHSA have said that one the outbreak isolates is sequence type 485 and clonal complex ST-41/44. These MLST designations are low resolution molecular fingerprints that don’t tell us that much on their own. UKHSA have shown previously that this strain has probably been circulating since 2010, but increasing in frequency since then. Comparison among more genomes from the outbreak, as they become available, will be more powerful.

Posted some thoughts on the menB outbreak yesterday. Now nine more cases, total at 27.

A few more thoughts today, also after discussing with some others.

A local factor seems necessary. I think pathogen genetics

Even if there was 100% carriage due to massive transmission the rate of meningitis is so low that wouldn’t be enough to explain all of these cases. I would think transmission has been high in similar settings elsewhere, and am struggling to think of a reason why this is happening in Kent without a more invasive strain, or another factor that directly increases invasion risk.

A cluster of meningitis cases is currently dominating the UK news. At least five of the cases have been confirmed as serotype B (menB), from what I can tell the others have not yet been analysed.

My PhD was on bacterial meningitis, specifically whether human or pathogen genetics makes meningitis more likely. We mostly focused on pneumococcal meningitis as it is more common, but we did also have data from meningococcal meningitis patients.

In a first for this blog – as a lame attempt to counter the increasing amount of dross when you google simple household tasks, and for my own reference – here’s a post with some DIY instructions. How I fixed our leaking towel radiator which conveniently decided to break and stop the heating working on 23rd December.

Tools and consumables

Purchase list:

• Replacement valves
• Pipe wrench
• Radiator spanner
• Plumb tub

Optional: