Major props for Chuck. Huge.

Somewhere in that publishing house there was a production designer who worked very hard to make sure the pages played out that way. And perhaps died very happy.

Autumn is segueing into winter hereabouts - the first snows are dusting the mountains and we're due our first 'proper' fall come Tuesday. But at least IT. HAS. STOPPED. RAINING. All images taken with Olympus OM-1/150-400mm f4.5 IS. #scotland #highlands #landscape #photography

This has been bugging me for years, so I finally sat down and worked it out: in The Winter Soldier, Zola claims that his brain was transferred to 200,000 feet of magnetic tape circa 1972. Well, at the best 6250dpi density of the time, that's 1.788GB. Peabrain. #marvel #captainamerica

Bugger

Another day with in-house review: “You do realise that your model fails to take into account edge effects at watershed boundaries?”. #climatedata #catsanyday

The Ganga River, which sustains the lives of at least 600 million people, is facing its worst dry spell and lowest streamflow in 1,300 years, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay India’s Simrin Sirur.

It pains me to say it, but do not buy an iPhone 17 until Apple has fixed the issues with its N1 comms chip: networking - WiFi, Bluetooth, mobile data and phone calls are unreliable and have not been addressed by either software update so far. Hubris and failure to test a critical system component?

I mean, adaptive, auto-negotiating, frequency hopping FISH.

Breaking News! Code UFB!!! The 3-year mean rate of atmospheric CO2 growth just hit a new record high reaching a growth rate of 7.88 ppm per 3 years for October, 2025. This breaks the previous record high of 7.83 ppm per 3 years, from February, 2019. Net-Zero by 2050? The Climate 8-ball is bored.

Corrupt Britannia. UK Govts bury bank scandals. Frauds, moneylaundering not investigated. FCA, SFO rarely prosecute. HBOS frauds report promised by 2018, nothing published, ministers don't answer questions. City of London Police funded by Lloyds Bank, UK Finance, financial institutions.

This. Is. Fucking. Brilliant! 🤣

“Climate Change is a hoax”. I would like to put deniers in the path of this. And spare the people of Jamaica from the unfolding disaster. tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/ad... CI# /Pressure/ Vmax 8.5 / 871.4mb/185.0kt Which makes it the strongest hurricane recorded

All political parties annoy me at times. And I’ve avoided joining, to show impartiality when advising politicians across the spectrum. But, with humanity so determinedly sleepwalking into a spiral of crises, I’ve now joined the Green Party. It really does make sense. #greenparty #scottishgreens

It's the Scottish Government this time in ostrich-denial mode: they've restricted Covid vaccination boosters to the over-75s. This ignores all clinical evidence and is a recipe for a spike this winter that will further stress the NHS. "For what of a nail, the horseshoe was lost…"

After months of Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy, Ukraine hit power grids deep across the country Zelenskyy had warned Ukraine would retaliate proportionally. Belgorod now faces blackouts while authorities ration fuel for generators euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/24/f...

Altman & co claim that ChatGPT is solving hitherto unsolvable maths problems? So how about we start with the basics: exhibit A - the AI summary of my Apple TV invoice: £11.65. Exhibit B - the actual content: £9.99. Apple “Intelligence” has failed to distinguish ‘VAT inclusive’ and has added it on.

ChatGPT did something useful today: I used it to query the Torx screwdriver size for my Asrock motherboard. "Probably T8", it came back with. "Bugger", thought I - "I don't have a T8 driver". ChatGPT then added, "Remember that Asrock motherboards ship with a T8 screwdriver? No I hadn't. And it had.

I’ll have “Do not disturb” on for the next couple of days… #philippullman #bookofdust #therosefield

Another report on how our high visa costs deter top R&D talent www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

An impressive level of seismic activity today for Scotland: a 3.6 magnitude at 0825BST today, & even bigger shake at 1807BST - our house is built on quartz bedrock and the whole place leapt around. Which is going it some for a 200-year-old stone house with metre-thick walls! The cats are unamused.

With the current AWS outage, I’m noticing that organisations like Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland are affected. Which means that they’re hosting in US-East-1 (Virginia). So what happened to holding customer data in GDPR-compliant regions? I have questions… #AWS

This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.

Proud papa moment: my son J published a letter in the @nytimes.com today (in print tomorrow) on the need to think our definitions of autism.

Breakfast time at Weasel Towers… #Caturday

Bloody brilliant 👇

So, this is what the outlook from our house cameras was late last night - on video it looked like a blizzard. Went outside, clear, still night, and nothing visible to the humanoid eye. 8.2ºC, Scottish Highlands. Stumped. Any ideas?

It's that time of year again: mists, mellow fruitfulness, and the Red Deer bellowing on the hillsides. That isn't too bad - it's when they move to the lawn outside the bedroom window at 3am that it gets irksome. Noise cancelling Airpods are a wonderful invention… #wildlife #nature #photography

Photo shows aftermath of recent wildfire on Dinnet Muir National Nature Reserve in Aberdeenshire, caused by out-of-control muirburn by gamekeepers on nearby grouse moor. Photo by @kredp.bsky.social raptorpersecutionuk.org/2025/10/11/s...

A tale of two purchases: 1. Royal Mail First Class from Putney to Balquhidder: 5 days door-to-door (10 days from placing the order for an in-stock item) and zero tracking. 2. China to Balquhidder: 5 days from placing the order, door-to-door, tracked every step of the way. ‘Nuff said…

This is not, “an unforeseen weather event”. This is the result of decades of underinvestment in the resilience of the grid to predictable (and predicted) changes in weather patterns. Even without that, the grid is far less reliable than it was even ten years ago. The UK is no longer fit for purpose

Power’s off, again. Every time the wind gets up, our part of Scotland loses power. SSEN has had 30+ years warning to improve resilience of their infrastructure due to the changing climate, yet they’ve done fuck all save extract the maximum amount of dividends and bonuses for their directors.

Having worked in Machine Learning and Big(gish) Data for decades, this sort of tripe annoys me: a fundamental and deliberate mischaracterising of what AI is, what it can do and where it’s at. This just gets in the way of discussion of its very real impacts www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Too many of the good ones are passing…

This, completely.

The UK news space is dominated by by blatant enablers of authoritarian delusionists (including the BBC), while the government does its best to toady to the same, to whom no rational appeal can be made. The Starmer government may well go down as the final nail in the coffin of UK democracy and reason

Little man, the country that the rest of the world sees “going to hell” is the USA, and that entirely as the result of the mind-buggering stupidity, greed, corruption and bigotry of you, your fellow apparatchiks of authoritarian idiocracy and of the delusional fools who voted for you.

Climate change is a con job, Trump announces to world leaders. Then criticises Obama for flying in a 747 to play golf. Not enough use is made of the stage hook by the UN, in my opinion.

Has anyone seen the speech DJ Trump to the UN? He is suffering from senility for sure, likely has dementia!! 🇺🇸Is in deep💩⤵️🕳️‼️ @maddow.msnbc.com ,👍🏽,it's up to the🇺🇸👥to save ourselves&perhaps🇺🇸(I hope)‼️In front of the🌍,🗣️'…climate change is a hoax…ruining the🇪🇺economy…;I have a saying"drill baby drill"'😟😓

Brexit Britain pays the bill so Donald Trump can lord it over us. 🇬🇧 UK exporters: $1.36bn in tariffs in just 4 months under Trump deal. 🇪🇺 France & Spain: less under the EU. 💷 🇬🇧 farmers/manufacturers foot the bill while elites roll out red carpet. Had we rejoined Europe, we’d be so much better off.

This is amazing.

True then, true now

I need a considerably bigger desk…

Same here. Voted labour my whole life, so has my family. Now I’m almost certainly voting green at the next election and so is my entire family. We know neighbours and friends doing the same. People look at labour and they see liars in suits, it breeds apathy, fascism excels under apathy.

I gave my heart and soul to that place. Built entire sections for journalists pushed out of their home countries. When the writer I hired, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, they paraded me around as a symbol for press freedom. I put MY LIFE on the line to defend journalism and WaPo.

This from the Tories wouldn’t have surprised me: after all, a meth-crazed scorpion will pretty much behave as you’d expect. I’d didn’t have particularly high hopes of the Labour government, but I’d expected better than this authoritarian, sycophantic appeasement of corrupt fascism. Starmer has to go

‘Onanocracy’ - brilliant @georgemonbiot.bsky.social - I wish I’d thought of that one! 🤣