The other problem with this is that research is a type of spread bet/lottery. You do lots of it and hope some of it pans out. If we had a perfect way of selecting which small bits of science and scholarship we "need", we'd have solved the funding problem. But we don't know this.

Despite the fact that it has been the case for at least 40 years, I'm sure most Brits have no idea that overseas students massively subsidise home students – and that far from taking up places that home students are being denied, they are creating *more* places for home students.

Miss Piggy has yet to marry because her fella has kermitment issues.

"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe

If you feel you must put this owl on the wall of your toilet, despair not, for I can draw one for you! www.worldofmoose.com/collections/...

Questions please (so delighted to have the captaincy today)

Love this poem of Seán’s. It’s so beautiful.

Have been thinking about “immigration has been tearing this country apart.” Surely I’m not the only person to think that it isn’t true, but inflamed rhetoric about immigration by politicians is what is tearing this country apart and so statements like that only makes it worse.

The grotesque spectacle of a Labour government — a Labour government! — promoting the idea of stealing from refugees to appease the far right

Have you got any Andrew Lloyd Webber?

We should stop the boats because it's dangerous, and we should stop the scapegoating of immigrants because it's wrong and cruel. Controlled migration is good for the country, helps build our economy and diversity strengthens our communities. (1/6) 🧵

Labour MP Simon Opher - "We should stop the boats because it's dangerous, and we should stop the scapegoating of immigrants because it's wrong and cruel. "Measures that create bureaucracy and insecurity do not offer clarity or strengthen control – they cost money, waste time and weaken the system."

Feels a bit like they deliberately floated something so draconian that when their policy is a bit less awful but still ghastly they expect to come across as compassionate and listening (they won’t)

The Prime Minister said in September that we are at a fork in the road. These asylum proposals suggest we have taken the wrong turning. The idea that recognised refugees need to be deported is wrong. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Hard to understand how the UK Labour party has even a single member left, seeing as it it has now become everything that you imagine someone once drawn to joining a Labour party is vehemently against. No one joins a Labour party hoping to punch down on the weakest and advance far right arguments

Every time a whistle blows in an Irish qualifier (this week) an indie documentary maker cries softly at their lack of faith and vision

COYBIG

Every time I hear a politician say that an issue is “dividing” this country they always then come down on the side of the right wing view of it. Just once I’d love to hear someone say “this issue is divisive, which is why I’m making the argument that kindness and compassion is important”

At some point, for the love of God, will someone ANYONE at long last take the council funding crisis seriously?!? Because THIS is what will break down a society, not some poor soul escaping incredible dangers, arriving on our shores.

Have to say I find the proposals to take away the route to permanent settlement of refugees both shocking and repulsive. It's code for 'whatever you do and contribute you can never become one of us so we won't allow you to try.' Racism, pure and simple.

Best £2.49 I’ve ever spent (and most satisfying use of VAR)

Every ad now

'people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing than are those who speak just one language.' Good thing that schools, universities and governments are so actively promoting modern languages then, isn't it? 1/2

A great man

President Michael D. Higgins and his wife Sabina are preparing to leave Áras an Uachtaráin for the final time this evening as his term comes to an end. Catherine Connolly will be inaugurated tomorrow as Ireland’s next president. #VMNews

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to have some news stories about migration issues but it is very odd indeed for BBC 6 Music, a station essentially targeted at hipster leftie middle-aged people, to be majoring on asylum seeker stories as much as it does.

Catisfactory

I interviewed the exceptional James Graham for Waitrose Weekend and I would just like to scream this bit from the rooftops. www.weekend-online.com/issue768/#10

Well deserved 250th goal Mo. I love you

Glad to see emery dressed as Dracula for rhe 19th year in a row

Happy Samhain 🔥

Good questions please

I’d love some of these for annual wear

The incredible May McGee died this week. A feminist icon whose name goes down in history alongside one of the most important Supreme Court judgements in the history of the state. Pre-deceased by her devoted husband Shay, who took on the state alongside his wife www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025...

Whatever strategy you’re about to suggest, we’ve thought about it. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

This feels like a Netflix Christmas special

Today is the 13th anniversary of Savita's death. She was denied potentially life saving care because of Ireland's unjust abortion law in 2012. Savita's death was preventable. We will not forget her. #NeverAgain Read more about Savita here. www.dib.ie/biography/ha...

who creates the lively art and music scenes if the rent is too high? who makes cultural life? who serves you food or washes your dishes? who creates the fancy little restaurants that draw you to urban living? affordable housing is at the heart of what makes city life worthwhile.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

The light over the Atlantic coast of Ireland is like nowhere else on Earth 🌎

“Our findings show that ChatGPT not only fails to recognise retracted articles but often evaluates them as high-quality research and claims that their discredited claims are true.”

I’m a bleeding heart pinko who thinks that migrants are people and believes that people deserve to live wherever they want. But I could be the most hardheaded British patriot and still support migration to this country because nobody has ever demonstrated that it’s a bad thing!!!

But British politics and cultural cohesion is supposed to have improved since the 1970s! We spin congratulatory narratives about wiping out the NF, defeating the BNP, the rise of multiculturalism, the decline of racism. For these ideas to be mainstream and explicit for the Tories now is shocking.

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

Let me fix this for you. "This government deplores these racist, divisive statements." It is that easy! Just say the bad thing is bad straightaway and move on.

“When we realised these jewels were only stolen to inflate the share price of a company whose entire value relies on the wholesale theft of other people’s art, we had no choice but grant immunity,” Genius from @waterfordwhispers.bsky.social waterfordwhispersnews.com/2025/10/20/l...

Managed to have an excellent fish at Sing Fong so the afternoon wasn’t a total write off