This is an interesting angle. I particularly relate to respect and to providing a shared diagnosis. This raises the questions, why is there a perceived lack of respect? Why is there a lack of shared diagnosis of problems? My take on the second is that we're not using...

In honour and fond memory of Prof David MacKay. The UK uses ~30 GW of electricity at any one time. I was curious how much we'd need if everyone boiled their kettle at the same time.

I love bird song

Spent the 10th anniversary of Prof David MacKay's death reflecting on his work and how inspiring his book www.withouthotair.com was for what @wikisim.org is aiming to achieve. Thank you David.

Stock markets don't fund business investment. Why, then, do we worship them? youtu.be/g93iq5wTV-g?...

We need more of this! Intersections between different domains like electricity and flooding / water. Makes me think about this recent work by @aendra.com @data.ft.com: www.ft.com/content/1536... Looking forward to Wednesday's Geo London event.

@kaggle.com FYI I gave up trying to prove I was human after the 4th captcha... all I wanted to do was sign up to upvote a dataset. www.youtube.com/shorts/-BIuf... 🤖

Happy to have added the 100th star to this repo for discrete global grids! :D github.com/sahrk/DGGRID Even happier to have just found it implements an equal area hexagonal grid.

How do we expect our democracy to function without access to basic and up-to-date data sets? Prompting an LLM with "graphs of the crime rates in London over the last 15 years" returns a hodge podge of stuff with poor / zero provenance. The best I could do last night was: wikisim.org/wiki/1256

I wish I could allow companies to use my data to train AI but only if they set up and funded a not for profit to manage that same data and allow other companies, journalists, academics to access it. This would level the playing field, resulting in better services ...

Ian called in and essentially said the reason we focus on migrants and not the uber rich exploiting us is because… “You’ll never stop the rich” WRONG There is a way and our millionaire/billionaire class are TERRIFIED of it.

Despite a lack of conclusion, the majority of people in Denmark voted for parties that support a wealth tax. In the coming weeks, politicians shouldn't lose sight of that #TaxTheSuperRich https://bbc.pulse.ly/igvxptizxn

Alternatives have landed! It's now possible to have a central concept like "Energy demand of heating water in UK" and have an alternative according to a political party, academic group, report, etc. Here's an example: Original: wikisim.org/wiki/1244 Alternative: wikisim.org/wiki/1248

enough is enough. #facebook & #meta facilitate #child-abuse $375,000,000 fine should be just the start. $16,000,000,000 ... $16 billion is the revenue that __Meta__ estimates they made just from __scams__ wikisim.org/wiki/1078 that's 42 times the $375m fine. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I did it again. I spent a whole day last week "just" getting the price of gas to check the claim that "gas prices are soaring"... they're up 80% but this was the _lowest_ price they were over 2022/23! Graph from: tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uk... (private company) 🧵

In February 2026, annual gross median wage of a UK employee was £31,032, £25,863 after income tax and NIC. Hard to survive, raise families, buy home, save for pension. 1% have more wealth than 70% of the population combined. Can't grow economy without equitable distribution of income and wealth.

I'd highly recommend this. @aleesteele.bsky.social is an excellent guide through the history and structure of our modern digital infrastructure and how it's changing. Packed full of insights, a thoroughly illuminating and enjoyable tour. Best enjoyed with a cup of coffee in your hand!

Thanks for sharing this powerful poem @aleesteele.bsky.social hellopoetry.com/poems/5249/t...

Revealing who owns England just became government policy whoownsengland.org/2026/03/19/r...

If this bit on the right is huge, what do you call the other bit on the left?! #energy #adjectives

Love the fact you're writing about this @richard.northover.info !! 💚 🙌

"We have been in the worst foreign policy situation since the second world war. The only reason we are today in a better situation . . . is because we have co-operation."

Spent the whole of Tuesday cleaning data and reflecting on why making sense of the world is so darn hard ajamesphillips.com/blog/convers... #energy #democracy Including how even simple data is hard to get, and not present in news articles...

Just published my team's mock up of an interactive map of English River Basins and a proposed Water Availability Rating to wikisim.org/wiki/1219 Also added to Stream, the UK's water data portal. I suspect I should not have had those permissions though, heheh! 😉 Good they've found out now and...

A great, humorous marketing / sort-your-s@£$-out kinda article visakanv.substack.com/p/13-questio...

Politics of envy? "It's hard to throw that at Patriotic Millionaires. We're people who are saying we've been fortunate, most of us are realistic enough to know the fact we are wealthier than average, a lot of it is down to good fortune." - @stephenstroud.bsky.social

🤣🤣🙏

Canary Wharf, London looking cyberpunk!

Had a 🤦‍♂️ moment when I calculated the £ per person for the £500 million increase in GP funding as... drum roll... £7 per person and thought @wikisim.org was broken... nope WikiSim was fine, just my intuition was broken! 😂 wikisim.org/wiki/1198v2 ajamesphillips.com/blog/convers...

Came across some more "Totally non-Interoperable, Very Important Data". Would love to know how they arrived at that solution as it genuinely looks harder to do than almost any other web solution I can think of but perhaps there's a good reason? #open-data ajamesphillips.com/blog/totally...

Happy Open Data "Day" Week! opendataday.org I will submit an event (probably too late to be accepted but good practice!) for adding open data about UK energy system from David MacKay's excellent and open book WithoutHotAir.com #open-data-day

A narrative supported by interactive simulations is powerful mixed medium for exploring a complicated scenario. ciechanow.ski/airfoil/

Such a tragic event but what a skilful approach from being "consumed by grief, anger, and hate" to "feeling that anger [gave] some control." to realising its harm and then the wisdom and strong determination to "[refuse] to let it consume her life." Inspirational. ajamesphillips.com/blog/inspira...

Any action that does not promote peaceful understanding between people directly harms everyone. Apart from being illegal, someone suggesting violence¹ is harming themselves.

My fellow Derbyshire MP, Natalie Fleet puts it brilliantly. Online abuse has become an unfortunate symptom of being an MP. It is threats like this that dissuade brilliant individuals from standing in politics. It is shameful that Reform UK are refusing to take action against this behaviour.

This is a new series where I'll compare AI performance for answering different questions related to public policy. TLDR: it's not looking great _yet_, but based on Claude AI's response I'm confident it will get better for these simple questions / calculations 🤞🤞

I've (finally!) produced an attempt at explaining what WikiSim is and what problem it's trying to solve. This is version 1 (or 3 depending on how you count it!). Thoughts, criticism, confusion, crickets, encouragement, excitement all very much appreciated 🙏

Insightful interview. So good! www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_kt...

> a hangout/social gathering event and a community for the people who are into art/experimental/alternative game development, playful media, and general d0peshit founded in 2019 by @thenomi.bsky.social There's a wait list 🤞 there'll be a space for me to attend :)

💖 I'm sponsoring arp242 because GoatCounter.com is exactly the non-creepy tool to track website usage I was looking for. It's just a friendly person at the front door with a little counter clicker and a tiny note pad, rather than whole surveillance enterprise... github.com/sponsors/arp...

Attended a great and uplifting pro-democracy event in TheConduit tonight which I will post about shortly. This is a re-share of my request for anyone interested in supporting our democracy and improving our collective and individual abilities to make sense of our complex world to get in touch.

Suella Braverman says Reform would scrap the Equality Act 2010. Law prevents discrimination on the basis of age, disability, gender, marital status, race, religion and sexual orientation. Reform taking us back to Victorian era, removing hope. Our predecessors fought hard for social rights.

Hey, if you know anyone working on pro-democratic innovation please share this with them, or if you don't, please share anyway! Thank you 🙂 I'd love to connect with others to support our politicians in keeping their promises and help ourselves and each other...🧵 ajamesphillips.com/blog/motivat...

I can't get enough of this writing, so good. Thank you @pollymackenzie.bsky.social howtorunacountry.substack.com/p/this-is-mid

Every little helps for one last push for Dr Day to defend all NHS doctors as whistleblowers www.crowdjustice.com/case/what-wi...

There are so many amazing UK institutions and organisations to help us. I learnt about www.locksmiths.co.uk/find-a-locks... today and I knew we had the ONS but on Tuesday I learnt we also have osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/what-we-do/ and uksa.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/about-the-au... ...

This sounds like a wholesome event to attend: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/havering-c... cc @haveringstreets.bsky.social #peace through listening, understanding, discernment and wisdom.

Great finding from @ipsa.org by NewCitizenProject.com like: > Citizens want more participation. Every single participant said they would take part again. As one member put it: “this is what democracy should look like”. theipsa.org.uk/whats-democr... www.newcitizenproject.com/projects/ips...

ICYMI, we joined @oxfamgb.bsky.social and @mills4humanity.bsky.social in signing a letter urging leaders at Davos to tax millionaires more. Read this week’s Closer Look to see how taxing the super rich can help win back our democracies. patrioticmillionaires.org/perspectives...

We've got the internet, but it still seems safer, easier and more reliable to copy data rather than rely on flaky URLs to connect to it. Some data design philosophy for @wikisim.org. Thanks Stefan Magdalinski and Icebreaker One for prompting this post.