How hard would it be to change the rules / law such that life peers could be kicked out of the legislature? Serious question.

Re the Royal Society, notice that Prince Andrew has disappeared from being a fellow - though Prince William, Princess Anne & a Kent remain 'Royal Fellows'*. So clearly it is able to kick fellows out. Its patron is the monarch: perhaps HE could insist on Musk being evicted.

Small thing: to a British eye, it's weird that a post-doc can be a professor. Sane words used in a different language = much confusion.

If *charities* did this, there'd be no end of "oh they're all so badly run"!! But charities don't do this because they are in general not badly run.

For when people ask what use ChatGPT is*, here's my university advocating using it to teach you. Which is VERY SENSIBLE because it does a very good job! *which somebody - @adamrutherford.bsky.social ? - did on here recently.

1st October. Happy new VAT quarter! Whenever somebody says that "I'd like to run my own business", I wonder if they really realise what business owners have to actually do. VAT returns, tax returns, payroll, getting a decent accountant, getting a decent CRM etc etc. Soooo glamorous!

And let's remember some countries' epic levels of sexual abuse of schoolgirls *by school staff* - sex-for-grades for one thing. Many of those pregnancies will be highly non-voluntary and will be some by school staff 🤦🏽‍♀️

30 September 1928 | Elie Wiesel was born in Romania. A Jewish writer, Auschwitz & Buchenwald survivor, Peace Nobel Prize laureate. "Indifference is the epitome of evil." / „We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

imagine being a consultant doctor here and having to go out litter picking to be given your citizenship lol www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

UK foundations: if you want to opt-in to the Fdn Practice Rating, do so by EOP today! Opting-in was created b/c fdns want it: they want the check on their practices & progress even if they aren't randomly selected. Opt-in fdns are assessed like the fdns in the main cohort, for a wee fee.

@zabong69.bsky.social @criminologist.bsky.social I had a dream last night that we three were hanging out together at some conference/ festival, which involved sitting around on some lawn drinking tea and it was all rather lovely! Maybe we should! 🤣

@willperrin.bsky.social Hi Will. I thought that you & Fran might like this article with actual indigo news! www.science.org/content/arti...

Random fact re this dugout canoe 👇🏼: The German for a 'dugout (canoe)' is "ein Einbaum" - literally 'a one-tree'. (I learnt this while in one with some Swiss Germans in Borneo🤣) German is so brilliantly like Lego: you just stick together whatever words you've got until you've made what you need 👍🏽

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

The Economist has an article this week about predicting Nobel Prize winners. With these random extra-judicial killings (ie, murders)👇🏼, there's one prediction about Nobel Prizes that we can all make pretty confidently! 🤦🏽‍♀️

Protests as Morocco to spend between US$2Bn and $5Bn billion on stadiums and infrastructure for the 2030 World Cup, including a new 115,000-seat stadium near Casablanca. By contrast, the government’s annual health budget for 2025 is about $3.2Bn.

🥳 ARED, a Senegalese NGO, is awarded the highest honour in education*!! It has two laureates annually: one this year is Mamadou Amadou Ly, ARED's founder & director. 🥳 ARED is the unicorn that everybody wants: an indigenous NGO whose intervention is shown by... yidanprize.org/laureates/ma...

Martin Neary has died: the Westminster Abbey organist who played at Princess Diana's funeral - and who, if I remember correctly, chose to have John Taverner's Song for Athene at the end: a brave but appropriate & inspired and, as it proved, wildly popular choice. slippedisc.com/2025/09/prin...

Hey! An open double spiral staircase made in wood (the world’s biggest of its kind) is now gracing #NotreDame’s South tower ! Opening day for visitors: 20 September !

Yeah, but genius idea to put your *draft* assignment into a decent LLM to get feedback on it 👍🏽

Neuschwannstein is a C19th faux medieval castle, built so recently that there are photos of it being built. Weirdly, there was already an actual medieval castle on that site which the king had removed to make space for his more ideal one(!) 🤔 That king, Ludwig, his father also built a vaguely...

Gotta love secular Gothic 👍🏽

Are you a science and technology aficionado? We are looking for someone to report on anything from astronomy to archaeology, particle physics to synthetic biology. Apply by September 28th:

Clever design is fabulously articulate:

this is an extraordinary canary in the coal mine

Médecins Sans Frontières is famous for staying in dangerous situations after other NGOs leave, so it is very telling / tragic that even they are now leaving Gaza City:

Happy 120th birthday, special relativity! Albert Einstein introduced special relativity in the paper "On The Electrodynamics Of Moving Bodies," published in Annalen der Physik #OTD in 1905. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭 Manuscript: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1... English: www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einst...

I just got invited to speak at an event in Saudi Arabia. Would you go there, *all* things considered? Genuine Q: I'm interested in how other people (would) think about that. Feel free to DM me if you don't want to answer in public here. Thanks.

HT the guy who got a degree last week who is... 96 years old! A friend was at the graduation ceremony & said that the guy got a huge standing ovation. Quite right 👏👏 [Open University degree in history of art.] We can all be inspired by that!

? Charities are struggling to recruit, despite loads of graduates (&post-grad) needing jobs 🤔 "Some 69% of respondents [charities] from high-income countries such as the UK reported facing a recruitment challenge". Better marketing of roles, and pay? www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/charity...

People who comment on what happens in university classes: when were they last *in* a university class?? 🤔 (Me: yesterday 🤣)

People sometimes ask why we don't use AI for the research in the Fdn Practice Rating. Here is Google A"I" mis-stating the Charity Commission's remit. It's not hard! - that org is literally called the "Charity Commission for England and Wales" 🤦

Establishing the precise effect of Sarah Ferguson's patronage of charities would: (a) be hard because she's only dropped seven now. That's few for analysis; (b) be possible only a few years hence, ie, after a few years of financial accounts after the termination have been filed. #charity #royal

Dropping Sarah Ferguson as patron is unlikely to harm these charities because royals generally do very little for their patronee charities (on ave. <1 engagement per year), so the patronage has no discernible effect on revenue. (Not that she's really royal.) www.giving-evidence.con/royal-findings

We treat high fevers in the ICU with Tylenol and we don't make patients "tough it out" because that can be dangerous. Hope this helps.

Various charities have fired Sarah Ferguson as patron over her emails to Jeffrey Epstein. Will that affect the charities? Unlikely. Giving Evidence's research appears to be the only research into the effect of royal patrons on charities. We've looked twice. Both times, finding no effect 👇

Global review of research from 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇦🇺🇬🇧🇪🇺 finds almost all studies show no difference between the rates at which immigrants and local people commit crime, with only a few studies from 🇩🇪/🇮🇹 finding higher immigrant offending.

Musicians: please get busy & write new descants for Christmas hymns! No need to only ever sing the David Willcocks ones from That Book! Innovation please!! There's still time to write them & choirs to learn them before Advent starts! 👍🏽 (Carols from Kings is ~alone in using other descants...

I’m in Vienna right now. A city which went from being the intellectual and cultural capital of the world to a “provincial backwater” (to quote Brian Barry) in a couple of decades due to nationalism, anti-semitism and fascism which drove away the leading scholars and artists it didn’t murder.

Quit Facebook.

Grade inflation on Strictly Come Dancing! Analysis in The Times:

Am doing more blacksmithing tomorrow: part of my on-going project to learn how to make a cathedral 🤣 carolinefiennes.com/2023/12/15/um/

Oxford people - tomorrow (Saturday) morning at 11.30 there is a gathering at the Holiday Inn Express near the Kassam Stadium to counter anti-refugee protesters.

The BBC broadcast today a natter about the cost-benefit of the UK royal family. Reminder: our two rigorous quant research projects about the effect of royal charity patronages: both found no discernible effect. (Tho the royals might create other benefits.) www.giving-evidence.com/prince-andrew

Wouldn't it be handy to have all the evidence on yr focus topic in 1 place & summarised so you need not read it all yrself! Giving Evidence did this, abt women on remand: systematically searched the literature, mapped it all & summarised it. Shout if you'd like a summary of the evidence in yr area!

Niche post, but would anyone with a nice venue within a few hours of London (*hello vicars*) be interested in hosting an afternoon concert by Imperial College Chamber Choir on Saturday November 8th? 45 minutes, a cappella sacred music, retiring collection, that sort of thing.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... free speech?

Hey, people who teach / defend regression: Look at today's Google Doodle 👇. Notice how: - the variables have normal letters, not Greek ones that your computer can't make - they haven't put whole equation is italics (WTF is that all about?!) - the intercept is stated last. Just saying...

ICYMI: transparency & perceived fairness in funding decisions appear to increase the racial mix of applicants and grantees👍 The British Academy uses randomness to allocate some grants (for applicants above a quality threshold). Obv randomness is fair. It found this: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

It's Hildegard of Bingen Day today! She who started the empirical sciences in German-speaking countries which obv has a mighty legacy but who The Economist this very week says is not "relevant": excitingholiness.org/first-editio...