the robot also doubling over as if it kicked itself in the balls too makes this ten times funnier

Scientists now believe that the human brain--a magic goo for worrying--can also be used to do other things

The “Labour” Party finds itself arguing ordinary workers, carers and others are “takers”.

🚨 Fully funded PhD scholarship to work with me, Ali Mazaheri, Dhruv Parekh, and Katrien Segaert at the University of Birmingham on new brain-based tools to improve diagnoses of consciousness after severe brain injury. 🚨 Deadline: 9th January 2026 Full details and application form: lnkd.in/ejZkfFbW

Asking informally: does anyone know someone who might be interested in a postdoc focused on understanding changes in memory representations driven by attention using EEG? ⚡️Thanks!

"Exiting the market" is such a soulless way of describing threats to people's livelihoods and the loss of training and opportunity for so many search.app/KvG3k

Baby, Sporty, Ginger, Scary, and "what did I come in here for?" x

Oh look, my university's about to lose £21 million because Labour want to appease some mythical racists who won't vote for them anyway.

"With dismay we witness our university leadership making soulless choices that hollow out our institutions from within and erode the critical and self-reflective fabric of academia". [from Guest et al., 'Against the Uncritical Adoption of "AI" Technologies in Academia']

Do you recommend any particular platform / approach for tracking usage of open access materials? Not just download counts but also asking some simple information of the user before they can download (like EEGLAB, Fieldtrip, SPM, etc all do). Any pointers much appreciated!

Do you recommend any particular platform / approach for tracking usage of open access materials? Not just download counts but also asking some simple information of the user before they can download (like EEGLAB, Fieldtrip, SPM, etc all do). Any pointers much appreciated!

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

New! Cassetteboy vs Keir Starmer. This took absolutely ages, so if you'd like to buy us a coffee at ko-fi.com/cassetteboy we'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

When the AI hallucination is deemed more true than empirical reality www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

The Labour Party has a tradition of antiracism campaigning. It’s supposed to be in the party’s DNA. That they cannot say it’s just straightforwardly wrong to alarm families who choose Britain to live, work and raise children in is a total moral failure.

Can we just replace the entire fellowship of the Royal Society with LLMs that make acquiescent noises in the presence of power and nominate each other for awards?

🗣️🗣️🗣️

Me at 11 watching the X-Men movies: Xavier is doing his best in a difficult world! Me now: Magneto should be allowed to hunt every senator that supported the mutant registration act for sport

Wikipedia editors trying to fend off the onslaught of AI crap have crowdsourced some telltale signs of LLM-generated writing; it might be handy for editors and proofreaders generally. Thanks to @ellenrykers.com for pointing me to it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

There's a road near me where they've put up loads of Union flags and England flags on lampposts and obviously one of them felt they should also represent the other nations, so there's also a Scottish flag, a Welsh flag, and a, get this, Irish flag. Like actual Ireland.

This is why I struggle with "legitimate concerns," people have no actual idea what's going on

This is 100% a project of the far right (probably Reform) to stir up a culture war over flags. I drove through Birmingham last week and it felt positively third reich in its excessiveness. Yet again Starmer drops to his knees and appeases. We're so fucked. www.bbc.com/news/article...

I wrote about 28 Years Later

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.

I regret to inform you that Starmer’s been tweeting dehumanising videos of migrants again. These videos have been shown to increase support for Reform, by increasing salience of migration. He has to go.

Photographing research participants – does anyone know any good papers / guidance on ethics of publishing photographs of research participants (with consent obviously)? Specifically, I worry that face blurring might be seen as de-humanising especially as my sample will be from a marginalised group.

⏳Final week to sign up to the Green Party. 🗳️ Vote for Bold Leadership on August 1st.

Very proud of my student who walked a Palestinian flag down the aisle in her graduation today

Last week, someone put up some Palestinian flags on lampposts on the main road into town. This week, someone has pulled them down and replaced them with England flags. Some people's thought processes just make me so sad.

I understand it must be hard for people who grew up in the 60s and 70s to accept music being political.

If you agree with our 5 requests to our universities, please sign 🖊️ the open letter and don’t forget to confirm your email! ☺️🙏 openletter.earth/open-letter-...

If you are not concerned by the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation because you think it doesn’t impact you, you are wrong. This is an authoritarian abuse of power by the government & it curtails all of our civil liberties #r4today

Meanwhile, this morning, the Guardian runs a puff-piece on the Top Boffins designing the UK’s next generation of nuclear warheads. “These are the kind of skilled jobs Labour is eager to talk up.” I shit you not, for the love of god…

<3 Soupy

I'm so grateful to write my first magazine article with Psyche Magazine! psyche.co/ideas/how-mu... It features our preprint on 🫁 'Body-Wandering' 🫀 with invaluable guidance from @micahgallen.com and @themindwanders.bsky.social : biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

😲😂

Study on London 20 mph limits shows: - collisions ⬇️ 35% - casualties ⬇️ 36% - fatal/serious injuries ⬇️ 34% - child casualties ⬇️ 46% - child deaths ⬇️ 75% - walkers, cyclists, motorcyclists killed/seriously injured ⬇️ 28% etsc.eu/20mph-limits...

Simple argument here: if this was happening you'd be able to point to a company that was actually doing it. You'd be able to point to the jobs and the ways in which they'd replaced them with AI and the ceo would talk about it openly. Is that really too much to ask? Yes. The answer is yes

While Britons were giving their 12 points to Israel

Ooooo it's 15 years today since Gordon Brown called that bigoted woman "that bigoted woman" and Brown was made a pariah for calling a bigot a bigot.

Have seen the name ARIA coming up in research funding discussions recently, but had no idea it was this

LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data, with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions. Unless your use case requires a model of a distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful.

5. If you listen only to corporations, you’re a dupe. Of course, they'll justify the harmful things they want. Of course, they'll tell you that rules are too onerous, taxes too high and subsidies too low. It takes spectacular political naivety to take them at their word. ... Oh, hello Mr Starmer.

"Over just one generation, children have largely lost the freedom they had to play out and get around independently near home." Today's essential reading.

they use Theft-AI to write essays, we use it to mark them. Either that’s the end of human learning or we collectively speak up, demonstrate skills, actually give a shit about teaching as a form of expertise & uni as more than just a career boost tick box exercise. I know what I expect to happen

Does anyone have any examples of illustrations (not diagrams / models / charts) in scientific papers? Research related to child development or psychology would be especially helpful, but any examples would be welcome. Thank you

#UKCarCulture is a continuation of colonialism.

Just watched this slowly moving across the sky. Creepy and amazing. Apparently a rocket stage venting fuel 😲

Chatbots are destructive of information literacy and of our information ecosystem. Just saying it might not be accurate is not enough -- by posting this, you are promoting this very misguided use case. For more detail: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

Is interoceptive sensing unified across internal organs? 🫀🫁 Our high-powered psychophysical study (N=241) suggests not. Bayesian evidence indicates interoceptive processes are largely modality-specific—challenging the idea of a unitary interoceptive sense. 🔗 Read here: osf.io/preprints/ps...