Lovely visualisation. It seems to put me in the right neighborhood.

"We address three kinds of critiques of anti-aging: philosophical appeals to “naturalness”, societal concerns about resources, justice and stagnation, and individual worries about meaning and boredom, showing that none provide decisive objections" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We need a moratorium on the following depictions of AI: gleaming white robots, floating blue holographic brains, glowing amber lines connecting a dark globe, Lawnmower Man style 1990s computer graphics, semitransparent screens floating in the air showing vector art faces, robot & human handshakes

I think Brin's The Transparent Society is fantastically underrated as a book. Not for the discussion about surveillance (which is important), but for the clear defence of the open society.

Forskning bidrar till samhällsutveckling först när den faktiskt används i beslutsfattande. Vi har tagit fram en praktisk handbok i forskningskommunikation, baserad på arbete vid Institutet för framtidsstudier. Länk i kommentarerna.

A recent cartoon for @newscientist.com. p.s. my new book of science cartoons, ‘Physics for Cats’ is out now. Links at www.tomgauld.com

Len Fisher, Cathy Foley and Robyn Williams on the importance of remote links in science. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

I think Syd Mead is on to something important. Not just that hope is important and energizes you to implement a better world, but that we rehearse futures all the time with imagery and imagined reactions that shape our behavior patterns.

When you start designing really big and dense data centers, gravitational time dilation will reduce their efficiency. For constant density, there is an optimum radius about 75% before the Buchdahl limit for total compute (as seen by observers at infinity).

I was told there had to be a love subplot in my book, so now I am thinking of shipping Stafford Beer and Friedreich Hayek.

A recording of the humanity plus discussions about AI (including a long segment with me, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Max More, and Natasha Vita-More.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOX5...

A cool first (small, but lengthening) step: arxiv.org/abs/2601.13370

On one hand, I feel we might have to revoke the nobility of xenon. On the other hand, I am starting to think there is a lot of cool noble gas organocryochemistry for really alien biospheres... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis(pen...

ALLFED are seeking a Chief Executive Officer at a pivotal moment. From strengthening governance and strategy to building financial sustainability, this role is critical to our organisation’s future and mission. Apply here: bit.ly/45WlCVL

As the raindrop hits the roof and expires, the ghost raindrop continues the fall. Sometimes you feel them indoors when it rains hard enough.

CfPs for the 16th Beyond Humanism Conference: AI, Education, and Multispecies Sustainability: A Dialogue Across Humanism, Transhumanism, and Critical Posthumanism. July 1-4 2026. Timișoara, Romania: shorturl.at/6Jlsv

Doing a serious long-haul flight during a very eventful weekend: looking at the news when occasionally reconnected feels like doing relativistic travel into the future.

The last few months have seen AI assisted math move forward significantly, especially thanks to new tools and ways of collaborating. I think Tao is right in that this suggests new ways of writing papers - the result can get tailored expositions with little effort. mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1158558...

Weird crossover #1 instigated by my husband: Carl Michael Bellman Dubstep. Claude had fun mixing Swedish and English lyrics. suno.com/s/z20bfIxCqY...

New paper with the Mimir gang! Roussos, J., Adler, J., Campbell, T., Engström, E., Jebari, K., & Sandberg, A. (2025). Survey Article: When and What Is the "Hinge of History"? Political Philosophy, 2(2). politicalphilosophyjournal.org/article/id/2...

I really liked this poem by Gwern: gwern.net/fiction/lab-...

"dynamiskt spektakel designat för att ge dopamin-kickar" är verkligen sant både om några av de vackraste och några av de fulaste saker som människor är kapabla att skapa

A lady with vivid green suitcase squeezing past me at airport bus station, apologising for very short time. Over the next quarter hour our paths cross again and again as I leisurely stroll to my flight. Poor thing was waiting for elevators as I took escalators, missing shortcuts.

Going from snowy Sweden -7°C to the balmy 3°C of Oxford has left me shivering. It always feels far colder in the UK thanks to the moist cool air.

One of the great awakeneings in my life was when I realized that one could embed Turing machines in Markov chains. That something is a probabilistic process is no guarantee that it is stupid or doesn't encode a lot of information.

One of my favorite seasonal greeting phrases is the Swedish "Glad fortsättning!" ("Happy continuation") used especially a few weeks after the New Year. Optimistic and forward looking.

In September, The Lancet released a report: since 2010, humanity’s total burden of illness and early death has dropped by 12.6 percent, driven by declining deaths from the world's deadliest infectious diseases: all down by between 25 and 49 percent. buff.ly/2Jeoldi #ShareGoodNewsToo

Oral exams are great for checking student understanding, expensive in time for teachers, and hard to cheat on. Here is a demonstration of how AI could scale this: www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2025/12/figh...

This is a lovely visualisation/sonification. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ7O...

I really like the boardgame Terraforming Mars. One aspect is that it depicts a civilization trying to achieve a long-term goal. I made this little song to entice my friends to play earlier today... suno.com/s/VfzAqd8ld1...

Playing a murder mystery game: the coolest part was to actually see extended cognition in action. Different friends solving different pieces using different skills (OCD is useful), my husband the prosecutor coordinating ("This is just like my day job"), a shared distributed model taking form.

(From ToF to 4IR) Wearing my ugly xmas sweater, chatting with friends in knitwear onesies at our cozy winter retreat, we hatch the concept: the Tom of Finland onesie. Leaving the leather additions from NanoBanana aside, where can one get a black cable-knit onesie? Seems to be a market lacuna here!

Interesting dive into how an important complex technological system works when stuff fails. Centralization (which may be needed for quality) is always in tension with robustness. youtu.be/ZRB7pjRVVkI?...

I wonder if the plethora of LLM-induced crackpottery and sloppy paper writing in science over the next year will act as an inhibitor for the rising AI-supported science by making it socially embarrassing.

Happy solstice!

Interesting feeling waking up because of fire-truck sirens and a smoke smell, and finding that there is was an actual fire in the building... below me. Amazingly effective for waking up quickly. (No, no danger to me, and situation is now under control).

The Foresight Institute Existential Hope Meme Prize has been unveiled. www.existentialhope.com/existential-...

Love this. This is a great idea!

This is an excellent think piece on the threat of AI-enabled techno-authoritarianism. 80000hours.org/problem-prof...

Cool new paper out in Nature on AI-designed proteins that survive 150 °C and nanonewton forces! www.nature.com/articles/s41... It's very interesting work - but I see people saying it is also directly worrying. I disagree - to explain, here's a short 🧵

How have I not noticed the National Gallery mosaics before? Science! Rutherford! Sea monsters! Amazing stuff

The space data centre feasibility issue is getting a lot of people - on both sides - to very confidently say falsifiable things that will be disproven relatively soon. Great! (The falsifiable part, not the overconfident part.)

How can research cut through today’s noise? I wrapped up the @futures-studies.bsky.social project "New Ways to Communicate Research Results" with a full-room talk on formats that strengthen researchers’ voices. What communication and public engagement tools work best for you? #SciComm 🧪

If you can join us in Paris next June, I'll be speaking at this. Don't forget to register before midnight: www.csb.eu.com/conference/r...

"The picture of AI offered by the AI ethics community is one-sided and negatively biased. We should be skeptical about the negative narrative promoted by AI ethics and explore ways of reforming the system." link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy Smallpox Eradication Day! laneless.substack.com/p/500-millio...

Cool, EM connectomics was named "method of the year" in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am increasingly annoyed by people using "eugenics" to label every disliked or stupid policy. It makes it harder to discuss the actual moral issues if I want to crispr-enhance my kids. Or maybe it is better to let the term die of over-broadening into mere "badness", and invent specific new terms?

Nice write up of my talk for the U of Colorado's Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute on the ethics of wearable health devices. "The potential harm from these devices remains minimal compared to their benefits." news.cuanschutz.edu/cctsi/when-t...

Läs min nya bloggpost "Those who welcome the end of the human race"! Oblygt törs jag påstå att detta är bland det bästa jag skrivit på sistone. Och budskapet är viktigt. I vanlig ordning har jag sparat några pärlor till fotnotsapparaten, så missa inte den!