Photographed on our patio this morning. The hose is half-inch diameter (about 12mm).

 He seemed to be lost, or just terrified. I went in, got the camera, and came back out, and he was still trying to hide beside the hose.

Is this a pigmy shrew, or a greater white-toothed shrew?  Or something else?

Amusing Book: Tipperary Tango

Less Serious Books, a new division of Logic Press, is publishing the story Tipperary Tango, by the rather enigmatic Fergal Anton, who vanished in mysterious circumstances about twenty years ago.
See:
Less Serious

Analysis Zero

This is my new book on the foundations of analysis. The hardcover version can be got for half-price at the printer's site: http://www.lulu.com/shop/anthony-g-ofarrell/analysis-zero/hardcover/product-22350069.html

It is a bit expensive.  There will in due course be a paperback that you will be able  get from Lulu.com for about Euro 12.50.

Added 3-10-2015: In fact, the paperback costs just Euro 10.00 from Lulu.  (Recommended Retail Price 19.99).

Little book of lecture notes on Geometric Measure Theory

Logic Press has just published Maria Roginskaya's lecture notes.  The book is called Advanced Basics of Geometric Measure Theory, and is available at
http://www.lulu.com/shop/maria-roginskaya/advanced-basics-of-geometric-measure-theory/paperback/product-22307272.html

Topics covered include the Banach-Tarski paradox, cardinals and ordinals, equivalents of the Axiom of Choice, measure and integral, Hausdorff measures, and a remarkable recent result of Korner's on the Hausdorff dimension of sets of sums.

It will take until November or so before the ISBN registration propagates to the whole system, so if you were thinking of ordering it for your institution, or through a bookseller, you should wait until then. It is available right now direct from the printer, Lulu.com, at half price.

Cyclo-lecteur's blog:

We met Jean-Pierre Brèthes when we sat down on the same bench to watch the Chaban-Delmas bridge open for a cruise ship leaving Bordeaux. He blogs at
http://cyclo-lecteur.blogspot.fr/
and is worth reading.

Monkey-puzzle Nut

This is a Monkey-puzzle nut, from our garden. It was plucked before it was fully ripe. It is resting on a plate of diameter 16cm.  It was sticky, oozing a white fluid. We kept it for a month or so, and it dried, and then I hit it quite hard with a wooden mallet and it broke in two:

 Each spike on the fruit is the tip of a separate nut:

 I cut and peeled the shell off one and ate it. Tasted unripe, woody, in the way an unripe hazelnut does.   There are lots of other fruits on the tree. We'll wait for them to fall of their own accord.