A Nuclear Future I'm reading "Going Nuclear" by Tim Gregory on the recommendation of my brother having seen him give a talk on it. To be clear it's written for not just a general science audience, but a completely general lay audience - even explaining units of measure and metric prefixes of…

A Nuclear Future I'm reading "Going Nuclear" by Tim Gregory on the recommendation of my brother having seen him give a talk on it. To be clear it's written for not just a general science audience, but a completely general lay audience - even explaining units of measure and metric prefixes of…

The Man Knows His Brains Funnily enough it was hearing Mark Solms talk some years ago that led me to acquire his "Hidden Spring" on the strength of it, with no prior knowledge, even though it was some time before I actually had the bandwidth to read him. Like Iain McGilchrist, his work is now an…

Scary Hiatus Moving into the second week of being without a functioning laptop capable of my research and writing needs. Amazing how dependent you get on switching between sources, channels, tools and apps, that just can't be done with a one-screen phone and two thumbs. Nothing lost content-wise…

Ministers have chosen the Welsh island of Anglesey as the location for the UK’s first “mini” nuclear power stations. Story: www.thetimes.com/uk/environme...

A Setback in the Gender Wars www.psybertron.org/archives/20454

A Setback in the Gender Wars I suspect when the dust settles on the current BBC crisis things will be worse for the Gender Critical (GC) vs Trans Rights Activism (TRA) agenda. It's apparent from my social media timelines that after all the opportunistic leftright political agendas, the Trump &…

Announcing the 2026 MoQ Symposium www.robertpirsig.org/announcing-t...

If you believe either that Franklin discovered the double helix, and / or Watson and Crick stole her data, ask yourself how you know this. Then take a read of this article.

Yep. And regrettably, those headlines make it into the public consciousness, even though the science behind them does not support such strong claims. 😕

Hmm... not buying it. Those kinds of epidemiological studies are horribly confounded by all sorts of factors that can't be controlled for.

There We Have It All roads here lead to better democracy - better "self-governance", (the original point of Cybernetics itself, not to mention the ancient Greeks) - even though I'm keeping my personal focus at its higher levels of abstraction, to the point of being metaphysical. And "self"…

Every current "deal" with an American needs to include a clause that they agree to oust the orange tramp at the next opportunity.

Oh, look everyone, it's Global UK's best friend and ally, with whom they have such a very, very special relation. Yes, a friend like this is worth leaving your block of many other friends who also happen to live next door for.

George Henry Lewes Strange triangle of conversations last night with humans and Chat-GPT. Emily Thomas, who I know only from her Bergson interview of Emily Herring at Durham Uni, shared a scanned extract from "an old philosophy book" on X/Twitter. My interest was piqued by the fact that a lot of…

Enlightened Islam and Judaism? This is just a stub / holding post for future elaboration. I have an agenda item to address Antisemitism and Islamophobia in mostly-secular Western "Christian culture" (like ours) or ex-colonies elsewhere - where in fact they are pretty much examples of the same…

Trust Yet Again Heard Jimmy Wales giving a plug to his new book "The Seven Rules of Trust -Why It Is Today's Most Essential Superpower" on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning. Trust has been the explicit subject of many posts here up to about 2012, since then it has been subsumed into my "Rules of…

This is a mess but something doesn't smell right here. Jess Phillips is hardly some empty shell, cynical government appointment. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Think we’ve crossed a pretty major threshold – and a very bad one – if a journalist working in the lobby for a major newspaper group can tweet like this without professional consequences.

Voyage of Four Books www.psybertron.org/archives/20364

Voyage of Four Books Homeward-bound having been offline for a whole week on a trip to Bilbao via the Brittany Ferries service from Portsmouth. Overall a slower pace of life travelling this way and visiting the sights and tabernas of the Basque capital on foot, except for one longer trip by metro…

Here’s One I Made Earlier The company name "Autonomy" mean anything to you? As I consolidate my formal writing I'm always referring back to my Pysbertron blog post archives from earlier, and forever surprising myself with things I'd written and forgotten. Given that's 25 years or evolution not…

Update on Iain McGilchrist My take on McGilchrist in 2025 is still essentially everything I picked-up from his 2021 "The Matter With Things" with its Sacred Turn and the added interest of his much earlier 1982 "Against Criticism". His thinking is an important, embedded part of my own story at…

The Matter with Things iainmcgilchrist.substack.com?r=clgv4&utm_...

Henry’s thesis is on: “Developing a Naturalistic Metaphysics for Biological Agency”. His goal (our goal in working together) was to show that there’s nothing unscientific or supernatural about ideas of agency, mental causation, and free will. ⬇️ (1/n)

The Edge of Scandal Really just a housekeeping post, based on re-reading some earlier "Annual Edge Question" responses and recognising that the so-called "Last Edge Question" in 2018 has proven to really be the last, and brought the 20 year annual run of John Brockman's "Edge" and his writer…

Predictably Unpredictable www.psybertron.org/archives/20293

Americans I am begging you to sort this out. Your mad racist uncle has shat himself in public again.

The Trump UN address is the most dystopian thing I think I've ever seen. It's like some scene out of a 80's Robocop film. It would be comically stupid if it were not our painful reality. And the body language of all of the other diplomats in the room is reading as between angry and uncomfortable.

Predictably Unpredictable My agenda is like anyone else's these days, to find better ways of understanding and making better decisions in a world where recent experience suggests we are failing to get to grips with the existential polycrises facing us and some metacrisis that might underly these.…

Don’t take medical advice from the President. And vote out every single Senator who is responsible for RFK Jr. leading our Department of Health.

Home of humanism, #ConwayHall, opened its doors on this day, 1929. One of two surviving buildings in the UK built for the non-religious to gather and find community. 🧵https://heritage.humanists.uk/conway-hall/

Pirsig the Sailor - RPA Online Chautauqua www.robertpirsig.org/pirsig-the-s...

That's equally a good argument that proper free speech isn't absolutely free speech?

RFK and Trump both millionaires-at-birth both got the Covid-19 vaccine both using govt to make it harder for poor ppl to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

Hey, if you are actively coughing and sniffing at a conference, WEAR A DAMNED MASK. We need to start having policies at meetings to hand out masks and enforce their wearing to limit infectious disease spread.

Gov. Spencer Cox has been preaching calm in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. But in Utah, the fight over gerrymandering shows how hard bridging divides really is.

Systems vs Complexity Mentioned several times that, within the Systems Thinking community in it's widest sense, there are factions that don't just have preferred views, they positively reject others. Even within those that see Systems and the main focus, there are competing theories, sciences and…

Reminder of why our work for inclusive education that prepares young people to think freely and understand others is so important. RE should be broad & balanced, introducing pupils to a wide range of religions & non-religious worldviews, including humanism. humanists.uk/2025/09/17/r...

I wrote about my first ever package holiday and the beauty of experiencing weirdness with a dear friend app.thenewworld.co.uk/story/141629...

On my way to beautiful York for a talk with York Humanists this evening. Assisted dying, the religious right in the US, and politics in the UK: just some of the areas I expect to cover. I know many members have already submitted questions online which I look forward to answering!

Anyway, if I had to guess I would say the main reason it’s being erased is because he sprayed it on a Grade II listed building.

Cynefin 2025 I make multiple references to Dave Snowden and his "Cynefin" sensemaking - organisational strategic action consulting business. My interests remain more abstract philosophically - metaphysical - but even with differences of shared understanding at this level, and indeed his personal…

Grains of Destiny – Brandon Mayfield I've mentioned Brandon Mayfield just the once before. As well as being a published author, he's a fellow Robert Pirsig scholar and member of the RPA (Robert Pirsig Association), who was curious enough to research and write up a comparison between the works and…

Elon Musk will be championing the Tommy Robinson 13/9 rally, on grounds that Nigel Farage is "weak sauce" on mass deportation and too soft on Islam Govt not even reviewing its use of X since 2022 shows different rules apply to Elon Musk than we expect of every school-child on British values

I just finished reading this excellent paper, highly recommended.

Grassroots music venues are more than stages. They’re community spaces where culture is created, friendships are forged, and future legends are born. Back the campaign to protect them and #OwnTheStage. party.coop/campaign/com...

Vibe Coding? Guess I can see why it got that name. Time to bring my LLM-AI / ChatGPT experiment to a close. Having previously only used ChatGPT as an occasional alternative to Google, especially with Google itself having slapped its own AI between us and its search results, I took it seriously as…