Saturday, October 3, 2026 — Edition No. 94

← Past Editions · Edition No. 94 · Saturday, October 3, 2026

Today’s outlook: Sunny with a chance of puppies

What's On Glasgow

Free Dick Institute show brings 'Two Roberts' home to Ayrshire

Over 100 works by Glasgow School of Art-trained partners Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, many never before seen, go on display in Kilmarnock until January

By Helen Cooper

Two young men from Ayrshire met at Glasgow School of Art in 1933 and went on to become, for a short while, among the most celebrated artists in Britain. Now Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, the "Two Roberts", are coming home.

A free exhibition at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock, which opened on 25 September, brings together more than 100 works by the pair, many of them never before seen by the public. It runs until 10 January 2027.

MacBryde and Colquhoun were partners in life and in art. According to the exhibition listing, the duo played a vital role in mid-20th century British art, influencing contemporaries including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.

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AI News

Simpler may be enough: study finds a basic AI coding agent keeps pace with elaborate rivals

A new preprint from researchers at EPFL and Apple suggests that, on machine learning engineering tests, the AI model itself matters more than the machinery built around it

By Damien Day

Imagine you need a kitchen fitted. You could hire one capable builder with a van full of basic tools, or a firm with a project manager, a scheduler and a team of specialists. A new study suggests that, in one corner of artificial intelligence, the lone builder does just as well.

The paper, titled "How Much of a Harness Does a Strong Agent Need for Autonomous ML Engineering?", was posted to the arXiv preprint server on 30 September by Kirill Brilliantov, Alejandro Hernández-Cano and Emmanuel Abbé, whose affiliations are listed as EPFL, the Swiss university, and Apple.

It is a preprint, which means it has not yet been peer-reviewed. Its findings should be read as the authors' own claims, not as settled science.

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What's On Glasgow

Glasgow's giant 'bird book' gets a fresh look in free Black History Month workshop

A roundtable at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow invites the public to explore the world behind Audubon's The Birds of America, with a second session on Saturday 24 October.

What's On Glasgow

Free junior parkrun at Govan's Elder Park: a family guide

Children aged 4 to 14 can run, jog or walk 2km for nothing on Sunday mornings. This week's run is off, so here's how to be ready for 11 October.

By Helen Cooper

Free, weekly and made for children aged four to 14, Elder Park junior parkrun is a cheerful way to get the family moving on a Sunday morning in Govan.

A heads-up first: the run this Sunday, 4 October, has been cancelled because of a shortage of volunteers, according to the event's official parkrun page. The next scheduled run is Sunday 11 October, and it's worth checking the page before you set off.

The junior parkrun is a 2km timed event that starts at 9.30am every Sunday at Elder Park, Langlands Road, G51 3TZ. It costs nothing. parkrun stresses that the aim is to have fun, whatever your pace.

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What's On Glasgow

Beatles Complete bring Cavern Club Beatlemania to The Garage tonight

The young Liverpool band with more than 300 Cavern Club shows behind them play Sauchiehall Street this evening. It is listed from 7pm, tickets are £22.27 and it is over-18s only.

By Damien Day

If you fancy spending your Saturday night singing along to the Fab Four, there is a ready-made plan waiting on Sauchiehall Street. Beatles Complete, a Liverpool tribute band with more than 300 Cavern Club shows behind them, play The Garage tonight, Saturday 3 October.

The band come with a serious Merseyside pedigree. According to the What's On Glasgow listing, the Liverpool-based "beat combo" are the youngest ever Beatles band to gain a residency at the Cavern Club, where they still perform on Thursdays.

The members are all in their early 20s. The listing says that makes them "the closest thing you will get to the unbridled joy of seeing the young Beatles when they first lit up the world".

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Audio Equipment

Four Tracks In, 38 Out: Toronto Engineer Uses AI to Unpick the Beatles' A Day In The Life

John "Wheels" Hurlbut tells Production Expert how AI separation tools let him pull apart one of the most famous recordings ever made, and why he sees the technology as a way of honouring old records rather than rewriting them.

By Henry Davenport

Few recordings are as well known as "A Day In The Life", the closing track of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was made on four-track tape. Now a Toronto engineer says he has pulled it apart into 38 separate tracks.

John "Wheels" Hurlbut describes the experiment in a first-person article for the audio trade site Production Expert. The site says he started with Steinberg's SpectraLayers and then discovered MVSEP.com, "a little known product" whose name is short for Music & Voice Separation, and which he "found to be very impressive in his tests".

Hurlbut, who is 61, has been working in studios since at least the early 1990s. "There is one thing, though, that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime," he writes, "and that is the ability to remove different instruments and sounds from a mono or stereo file."

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