TOTTENHAM MOTHERFUCKING HOTSPUR

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Broadband communism

Your annual reminder that William Shakespeare was born in what is now Turkey, never visited England and almost certainly could not read or write in English.

Ian Waterman was 19 when he caught a virus that robbed him of his proprioception. Over years he willed himself to learn how to deliberately move his body by focusing all his visual attention on it. This 1998 BBC documentary tells Ian's story: www.dailymotion.com/video/x12647t #neuroskyence

I worry that academia has a bit too much joy, camaraderie, and ability to take simple pleasures in the successes of others. That's why I am very much in favour of the proposal that everyone should report their privileges before saying something nice happened for them.

A time, not that long ago, where if and when the media rolled out their designated far right political character (ie Nick Griffin) it was purely so absolutely everyone across the public and media could throw eggs at him and boo him, not gladhand him on Question Time once a month for 15 years.

How incredible: “The full delivery took about 30 minutes. For hours afterward, pairs of whales held the baby above the water until it was able to swim… What struck the researchers was how many mother, sister and daughter whales united to support the new calf, even ones that weren’t related.”

Yes, I’m sure that had Morgan explained he was the prime minister’s chief of staff and his work phone containing his chats with senior government figures and their phone numbers had just been nicked, then the cops would’ve yawned

My god how is this real, like what the fuck is going on. Absolutely insane shit.

I don't want to ask the assistant a fucking question – why would I want to ask the fucking assistant a fucking question, I'm very obviously WhatsApping my fucking wife for fucks sake, when will this shit fucking END, get out of my fucking sight, sorry for swearing

Starmer fully living on another planet now. I guess he might as well spend his last few months as PM in a comfortable delusion.

Government-Funded infomercial from Norway striking back at US corporations and the tech Bros for filling the Internet with slop. youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?...

Wow, Labour absolutely bodied here.

That's why the modern dystopia is not a fully private state but a fully contracted out one. Things are still funded from taxation but the government provides no services directly. It buys everything from the private sector.

Terrifying in its rapidity - it's taken just 27 years, 2 months and 3 days since scandal first broke.

“You're thinking of the $175 billion in tariff money all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in the White House ballroom, the renaming of the Department of Defense, the $10 billion transfer to the Board of Peace, and a hundred other unauthorized actions.”

We are recruiting! Postdoctoral research fellow at www.sdn-lab.org, studying the computational & neural basis of social decision-making. Birmingham is a fantastic & affordable place to live, with one of the youngest populations in Europe & over 600 parks. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQO275/p...

the only place this should happen is academic conferences

Last call for this PhD studentship! Deadline Sun 22nd Feb

There is a Kinda Guy that is absolutely gaga for Gruff-Aesthetic White Guy Who Says Kinda Lefty Things. Their love for this is *not* strategic or instrumental to some end, such a person is an object of intrinsic attraction to them, and a strong one at that. They will rationalise anything for this.

🎉 New paper in Nature Communications 🎉 rdcu.be/e24jT Does our environment influence how likely we are to help others?

Olivia > Academics, check if your book is on the list of the Anthropic AI $1.5 billion settlement. Each author will get at least $3,000 per book. Claims must be made by March 30th. Repost to help authors whose works were illegally appropriated. secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup?cultu...

Hoping Matt Goodwin loses Gorton and Denton for many reasons, not least because we can deploy the headline, and resulting nickname, Matt Badloss

I think I might take one of these "under 20 minutes" AI skills courses the UK Govt. seems very keen on everyone doing and live-post it here... Maybe we can all learn something together! The press release sends me to aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ - let's go and see!

After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.

I think I’ve solved the mystery of why some people who get booted out of boozers are a national emergency, and others are not at all

unfortunately it appears that things are really complicated and getting the details matters a lot, sometimes more than anything, and also evil is extremely real. sorta the worst of both worlds there.

How do we think the press got details of Angela Rayner’s financial arrangements? Same way they got video footage of the Health Secretary necking a woman who wasn’t his wife *in his private office*, would be my guess. When the lads decide you need to get got, they will get you by hook or by crook.

One of my few sources of optimism is that while the uk press and elite is if anything more receptive to the performative cruelty of IVE than their US equivalents I do t see any Uk gov being willing to put in the resources needed to build up an equivalent force. /1

But I don't want middle class students to be my base, I want people who work for British Leyland to be my base

Look, does our university fee system create an active market in higher education? No. But does it function to incentivise investment in your education and encourage aspiration? Well, also no. But at least it does fund the universities? Ha, you're not going to believe this.

Graham Linehan made a willing place in his heart for evil, and once you open that door wide all the horrors come in.

Labour couldn’t bring themselves to leave X when its owner publicly called for their government to be violently overthrown. If you’re going to to stick round after someone makes it clear they welcome your execution then it’s less surprising that child abuse isn’t a dealbreaker either.

I mean, at this point a "counter narrative" on X is an image of a fully clothed child

For those following this ugly little Grok story , I recommend reading Laura Bates’s latest book

31 December 1995. Still the perfect goodbye.

I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p... #cogsci #neuroskyence

Not easy to get to sleep tonight - have burnt the bridge of whatever career I had left and really don’t feel that my opinions are so extreme that that should have been necessary

Very sad that I felt I had no choice but to resign from The Infinite Monkey Cage - a victory for the transphobes and other bigots - I did it because so much of the media has chosen to believe the kind and empathetic people are a fiction - they are real and so often unrepresented.

Yesterday, I visited my constituent, Amu Gib, who has been detained in HMP Bronzefield without trial since July. Amu is now on Day 39 of their hunger strike, yet there is complete silence across our mainstream media. This is an emergency. They must be granted bail, now.

Join us for a PhD in affective neuroscience at the Donders Institute (Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging) www.radboudumc.nl/en/vacancies...

In America it’s a deliberately dumb cartoon satirising the spiteful idiocy of a certain kind of middle aged reactionary; in Britain, it’s a newspaper column in the top selling paper, written by a former Prime Minister.

A bleak exercise: trying to explain *I* am a big old lib, that we believe in e.g. international law and protecting civil liberties, human rights and the rights of minority groups; that we oppose racism and inflaming hate against outgroups, and that the Labour right is antagonistic to all this stuff.

We are hiring at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings www.politics-of-feelings.com for a part-time RA (ideal for people with BSc/MSc before they start their PhD) to help the Centre's research on emotions and politics. Please spread the word www.jobs.london.ac.uk/internal/Job... | Deadline 16/12

If conservatives were for real, if they actually believed in the stuff their intelligentsia quote from Burke and Oakshotte, I actually think they'd specifically hate this. But alas far too often it's just a thin veneer of intellectualism over instinctive hates and bigotries, so here we are.

It's just bonkers, we should be able to say "No, that is simply false" and have that be the end of it. But since unfortunately they have the backing of our press and a plucky billionaire now all of society has to undo the arrangements we had settled into!

** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)