Nice, but slightly unexpected, to see serious folks I follow also play WoW. Back when I started, a lot of players online at the same time seemed to be coalition troops in Afghanistan.

What you’re witnessing is a populist assault on the BBC. This is not an institutional scandal in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an attack on public service broadcasting. iandunt.substack.com/p/extra-edit...

Yes, the #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge trailer is out today...

A great day for the golden rule of political analysis: when the right wins it is a resounding ideological victory that humiliates the left and when the left wins it is a precarious fluke that will surely end up humiliating the left. Conservatives are power’s landlords and the left merely tenants

I think this constant push for immigrants to feel & act ‘grateful’ is so insidious. Let’s change the narrative. Migration is a normal part of human behaviour, not a charity case. If you’re doing your best to do your best, you don’t need to do even more to be accepted. It’s your right to be accepted.

I think anybody running pandemic response exercises would really benefit from a slide on the difference between forecasts and projections. The weather forecast example is one I think I'll include next time we run one.

What if one model could realistically predict the economy of an entire country? The entire world? A month-long working group, co-organized by SFI External Professor @doynefarmer.bsky.social, made the case that agent-based models may bring this vision to life:

I built an MCMC painter! I'm excited to share this project I've been working on for a long time, which sits at the intersection of computational statistics and generative art; mcmcPainter! Link here: mcmcpainter.davidhodgson.me

I’m seeing some misinformation about pseudo-random number generator best practices going around the internets. Let’s talk about why the pseudo-random number generator seed you use shouldn’t actually have any impact on your results and, consequently, you can choose whatever seed you damn well please.

Apropos of nothing, I really do think UK journalists and politicians need some reminding that mass deportation of LEGAL immigrants, particularly those with permanent status, is far more extreme than even Trump's America and would basically place Britain completely on its own among democracies.

I'm v excited to be recruiting a PhD student to work on badger behaviour and ecology! Starting date is March 2026; see the ad here, or message me for more details: www.gregalbery.me/s/March-2026...

Wild bird species most at risk of contracting HPAI were those that are gregarious, tolerant of anthropic habitats, are non-migratory, and occupy the upper trophic level 👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....?

Counting on visiting neighbourhood cats to keep my bulbs safe from squirrels. Had to dissuade a jay from going after my garlic though.

Very cool stuff.

UPDATE: I saw it happen! At the Birds Canada research station at the tip of Long Point I watched an expert ever-so-gently and carefully put one of these tiny tags on a monarch. Let me walk you through the steps (1/4)

Want to build an interactive dashboard so others can explore epidemic scenarios? For COVID, @ngdavies.bsky.social spearheaded a great drag-and-drop approach, which made use of the JavaScript-based nature of RShiny... 1/

Some good advice in here but one critical piece I always give is this: Get a hobby. Preferably a mildly social one. One that has NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE. NOTHING. You need friends. Not colleagues. FRIENDS. Friends who will love you no matter your research prospects...

The next election is not lost, although I think right now it’s more likely than not that they will lose. But it’s a certainty that at some point they will lose and cede power to one or more of the right wing parties. Given their current platforms that is terrifying.

Seriously time to start thinking about an exit.

Just noticed the Conservatives’ British ICE proposal also involves using mass deployment of facial ID – still an unproven and unreliable technology that particularly struggles with non-white faces – to enable deportations. Which would inevitably mean false positives leading to detention of citizens

The government want more coercive powers for the state against protests, and the main opposition party wants more coercive powers for the state against migrants. Our political-media culture continues in a loop where the response to every perceived problem is yet more coercive powers for the state.

Are we doing simulations wrong? This paper convinced me we are. doi.org/10.1098/rstb... Usually we run 2 sets of "worlds" w and w-out intervention. Gives large uncertainties that include negative (harm) effects of interventions that are actually always positive (beneficial)!

Just a simple lack of respect really.

If they don’t pull someone in & fire them by the end of today over this then they might as well give up now. Mass deportation plans are how Reform describe them so this is clearly a sweaty failure panicking at his people finding out what his special friends are actually like

Fantastic piece from @schmidtdse.bsky.social post-doc @lucialayr.bsky.social on handling the emotional side of doing a PhD in climate or ecological modeling blogs.egu.eu/geolog/2025/...

wait they're going to roll out this digital ID by *the end of this Parliament*???? *laughs in eVisa*

Creating an ID system in the UK right now, amid anti-immigrant hysteria as part of a pledge specifically to target immigrants, is simply not the same as the complex legal and social history of ie German ID cards.

Really the issue isn't can they, but can they or future governments be trusted to not abuse it, and specifically to not abuse the fact that it is digital only. I already have an e-visa for settled status, which I absolutely expect this or the next (prolly Reform) govt to abuse somehow.

Oh, and the NHS surcharge -- about £1,000 per family member and year (!) -- is quite frankly infuriating, we are young, we hardly use the NHS. Just be honest and call it a visa fee.

"You don’t fight the politics of violence by quibbling with the details. You stamp it into a million pieces! You draw a f*cking line!" If Keir Starmer won’t even make a moral case against deporting our friends and neighbours, then what is the point of him?

“Immigration control is good for race relations” is the oldest argument in British immigration policy, it’s been made ever since the 1950s by both Labour and Conservative governments to justify whatever controls they introduce.

I am super hyped to finally share the first release of plumber2 with all of you. This has been the center of my attention for a big part of 2025 and I hope you'll find it a worthy update to the venerable plumber package. The blog post will tell you more #rstats

"How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner" by Annie Mueller 😅 😂 😭 anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-...

It is possible to cherish the BBC as an institution while also saying that BBC News is failing very badly, day after day, in its duty to inform and that it always fails in a right-wing direction. It desperately needs to recover its integrity

Probably won't be an easy to measure liability. Attributing a transmission chain to a visa free US visitor vs any other visitor/resident/citizen would be quite challenging imo. Countries will probably recommend travel vaccines for the US though.

What Reform are promising is abhorrent, as is the fact that we’re at a point that a mainstream political party in the UK could even consider it as a policy position, as is the fact that Labour are seemingly only arguing against the fact that the sums don’t add up

Also why the battle against the new right isn't and shouldn't be about policy detail. For them it is an existential battle. We are the enemy. Whether you can legally do something or not really isn't relevant to survival.

This is straight up 1930s era fascism.

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

Reform are filth. They represent hatred, extremism, ignorance and irresponsibility. They'd make us a wretched vicious hateful little island. If people don't stand up to this, they won't stand up to anything.

Oh that's just lovely. Every day something new.

Nehru without the nation building.

Just launched an interactive Bayesian epidemic modelling platform that runs entirely in your browser! No downloads, no installations, no expensive software licenses. Just open the link and start modelling disease dynamics with real-time parameter estimation. >> widget-bayesian-sir.davidhodgson.me

DifferentialEquations.jl is many things, and lots of people only use a small portion of it. Check out the JuliaCon 2025 workshop: introduces many aspects of the packages that the developers feel are underutilized and under-understood! #julialang #sciml www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSGF...

Proper vassal state behaviour.

Shame on Downing Street for going along with this. So much for being committed to a free press

Right-wing attacks on free speech are nothing new. I wrote this five years ago. Yes, the left sometimes over-reached, but it's wrong to claim that the right's attacks are solely in response to that. www.ft.com/content/c966...

think if you're broadly a centrist and were suuuuuper concerned about attacks on free speech from the left and so you decided to give the right a hearing then you need to realise you were taken for QUITE the ride (and don't really have anyone to blame but yourself)

Great piece on a galvanising force in British politics I have always found rather menacing.