Most of the time my Garmin thinks I get deep sleep is when I am in fact wide awake and failing to sleep at all…

This sounds similar to Adam Moss's AI Cosmologist: arxiv.org/abs/2504.03424 .

Not for JCAP (where I'm an Editor). If the requested changes are relatively minor, I'll look at them myself.

Indeed. I don't think it's malicious (i.e. trying to slow down the publication). My guess is that it's a knee-jerk "busyness" reaction.

And another new refereeing phenomenon (has happened multiple times in the last few months, but never in the previous 20 years): referees declining to review a revised version of a manuscript, having made major, significant comments on the initial version.

IMHO, Ely on a bad day is worse. (Thanks to delayed trains) I've spent a lot of time at Bristol Parkway while on the way to and from Swindon, and it does at least have a decent-sized indoor waiting area.

I appreciate that postdocs are under a lot of pressure, but frankly, that's reality for many (most?) academics these days.

ii) the current status (AFAIK) of the LMC microlensing events observed by the MACHO collaboration.

At least some of the students appeared to be entertained by the Penzias & Wilson pigeon poo story, but I should probably drop the Zwicky spherical bastards story from my repertoire...

My campsite is less precarious than the one on the ridge, but it does appear to have a snake in the (long drop) toilets.