How do I explain to my PDR reviewer that my career goal is to retire and be a lollipop lady

“Kids are on the phones all day and we think it’s bad for them!” okay well how about you make it possible for them to do literally anything else

That bit where Dumbledore has to keep drinking from the bowl, but for reading another exam script

Love it when a trainee has to experience a two month turnaround for a desk rejection on their first paper. Really helps to motivate them for a career in this broken enterprise.

A bunch of fascist bastards roaming around looking for violence within walking distance of my house. I despise everyone who let us get to this point.

There is an election this week. I've decided that - bins aside(!) - my priority is NOT to vote for anyone in a party whose current/would be councillors actively support killings on the road. (that means ppl who object to 20mph limits, LTNs, dedicated cycle lanes, etc) makes voting choice easy, sadly

What a time to be alive www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

bell hooks tells us that we should be less afraid of showing emotion to our students, so maybe it's ok for me to kick and scream in front of the class when a student makes me read genAI drivel with entirely fake citations

The AI thing remains blackly hilarious to me. It’s like if people insisted that we allow ourselves to be changed as we humbly submit to the awe and mystery of pogs

🎉 Excited to share our publication in PNAS! 🎉 What happens when our stream of consciousness turns towards the body? Our fMRI study of 536 individuals finds that 'body-wandering' is associated with patterns of brain connectivity, physiology, affect, and mental health: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

University admin frantically deskilling students to use software that implodes before the students even graduate

Another university getting rid of things you could only ever do at a university and replacing them with stuff a 13-year-old can do on a phone

For what it's worth this is my full quote. I would love to understand from @ukri.org why this call has been restricted to 4 weeks (with no advanced warning) going against it's own EDI commitments. The response so far doesn't explain why only 4 weeks nor why not 8 weeks.

The choice of graph with the nice line going up and the headline really are working very hard to make the evidence seem very different to what's written in the paper.

I had no idea YouGov polls aren't random sampling and are basically MTurk for politics. BBC News - Is there really a 'quiet revival' of religion among Gen Z? - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Spoiling a lot of takes but begging a large number of other questions... "Worsening graduate fortunes, it turns out, are a particularly British problem" www.ft.com/content/649d...

I drew a face on a paper plate. Who could even begin to understand how it perceives the world or what it dreams of?

So that's two Tucson Consciousness Conference regulars in the Epstein files so far

Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist. 16/ bsky.app/profile/psyc... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_...

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

New NHTSA crash data, combined with Tesla’s new disclosure of robotaxi mileage, reveals Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher than human drivers, and that’s with a safety monitor in every car. Tesla has reported 9 crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin, TX. /1

*slowly places the UK into the sea*

*slowly places 90% complete MRC draft into the Recycle Bin*

Absolutely phenomenal thread

This government clearly don't really understand the complexity or the danger of the situation. They show no sign of beginning to understand, and every sign of asking the monorail salesman how public transport should work. It's going to be an uphill struggle, but don't leave this to politicians.

Poverty is deepening. 🔎 Our #UKPoverty2026 report was launched this morning. People in very deep poverty now make up the biggest group of people in poverty, at 6.8 million people. This is unacceptable for the fifth richest country in the world, and it has consequences.

I think the solution to this worry is to knock all this dumb shit off

For all those involved in drafting so-called AI guidelines, but being overwhelmed with nonsense, this is a lifesaver. Great work by Dagmar and Ariel! Resisting Enchantment and Determinism: How to critically engage with AI university guidelines. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

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.