"I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question" - Charles Babbage

Claude Code: [Paragraphs of carefully structured reasoning, giving a clear recommendation on the way forward, backed up with references, metrics and alternatives] Me: "Great do taht." --- Had this nagging feeling I knew the reply style from somewhere, and then twigged. Jeffrey Fucking Epstein.

This is of course true, but I would be interested to know how often this has happened over the last 50 years, with the word "AI" removed.

Old: suppress corridor care -> ambulances can't unload -> patients on kitchen floor, no care, out of sight of medics New: allow corridor care -> ambulances unload -> same patients in corridors, in sight of medics who can give only partial care. New approach looks worse to medics, but for patients?

I very much like that "Do monkeys have rhythm?" Is a full-blown scientific controversy now, with rival papers and letters in the leading journals of the day.

I suspect this account of hard, patient work is the approach that will get vaccination rates back up, and make measles a disease so rare that doctors can go a career without ever seeing a case. Far more so than top-down mandates and broadcast appeals, at any rate. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Can someone who speaks American explain what the FBI director is doing in the US hockey team’s dressing room?

I’m sure this sounded better in their head than it reads on the page. - I love my kids and want to protect them - I am not irresponsible in any way but do fear that people might accuse me of that - I don’t trust mainstream medicine, so I wanted explore all the options - Then I forgot

This is pretty terrible news. Vaccination rates are so low in local boroughs it could explode out to hundred or even thousands of cases, if it hasn’t already. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

These people are terrifyingly unhinged, and in the US they’re winning. The case doubling time is 6-7 weeks at present, so - unless warmer weather disrupts - we’d expect a couple of hundred new cases/week late March and another two months to 1000/wk. Measles CFR ~0.1%, so a dead kid per week by May.

Measles in the US. That huge South Carolina outbreak has peaked, but still reported 70 new cases this week. There are new ones across the US. Florida added 50 new cases, Utah 24. The long-term trend remains exponential, doubling about every 6-7 weeks. (NB: log scale)

This is the behaviour that worries me most about the current administration in the US. At all levels from ICE goons up to Bondi: they're all acting not only as if there's no accountability to the law now (a reasonable assumption), but as though there never will be; at least not in their lifetimes.

Nowhere near as big a drop-off as I was expecting tbh. Europe stepped up - at least a decent proportion of the way.

The actions of thugs who think that they can abuse, bully, lie and steal - that their political masters will make sure that they’ll never be held accountable. History suggests that’s a very dangerous assumption. Hoping the US courts will be able to teach that lesson once again.

The CMI have released their first mortality monitor of 2026. Based on death registrations, death rates in each of the first 5 weeks of 2026 were lower than last year. Mortality year to date in 2026 is equal to the best years on record. www.actuaries.org.uk/learn-and-de...

I think someone's shown Sir Jim Ratcliffe the population of England in 2020 compared to the population of the UK in 2025 and he hasn't spotted the trick yet.

QTWTAIC. (Questions to which the answer is China)

I’m not sure who is sitting in Republican HQ reading through their Carl Schmitt and occasionally writing lists of possibilities on a whiteboard, but I’m betting it’s someone we’ve heard of.

I'm sorry the guy changing the rules on the fly is named what

US measles cases, on a log scale, last few weeks adjusted for recent patterns of late reporting. Half of new cases still from the outbreak in South Carolina, but new pockets all over now. Utah, Arizona and Washington State stand out. Roughly, medium-term exponential growth, doubling time 6-7 weeks.

Yes, I had been wondering how essential works to make Parliament safe can possibly cost £40bn and take decades. It's because - as always, once you poke a bit - the "essential works to make it safe" turn out to include stuff like this.

No I'm not going on twitter. But I'm curious to know when the crypto guys start screaming for a bailout.

This is interesting. A clear prediction from Battacharya: that *more* children will be vaccinated against childhood diseases after his changes to the vaccine schedule. Interesting because like VaxView will show the changes starting in a matter of months; effects on prevalence can take years.

Pinching myself once again that Roberts, Kavanaugh and co have ruled explicitly that having violent stops of citizens to demand papers by masked government thugs is absolutely in keeping with the US Constitution. www.salemreporter.com/2026/01/31/u...

One by one, Europeans mentioned in the Epstein files who still hold political office are beginning to resign or are being forced out of office. Meanwhile, ruled by an administration almost entirely made up of Epstein associates, the US carries on as if nothing really happened.

How do things look one year later? For me the addition of the 2025 data point means that the evidence that mortality rates are falling is now compelling. Both 2024 and especially 2025 are significantly outside the 'no improvement' corridor. 5/6

Cowardly liar. Yes of course he’s seen it, it’s his job. He just doesn’t want to talk about it. Few people more deserving of contempt than Senator Bill Cassidy, who knew exactly what he was doing when he nominated RFK and convinced his colleagues to do so too. Now too cowardly to own it.

From a thermodynamic point of view, I know that an electric heater cannot be consuming any more or less energy than a computer network that does billions of calculations, runs a large language model, and as a by-product gives out that same amount of heat. But can I still find it extraordinary.

Office heating is broken, so starting to develop a civilisation-threatening artificial general intelligence just to generate a little warmth.

Is there an actual engineering argument for data centres in space? Radiating heat out into a vacuum, lifting enormous amounts of chips into orbit, power supply beyond solar, exposure to high-energy bit-flipping radiation ... all seem hard. Is there a compelling advantage that someone's worked out?

Epstein taking an easily-recognised position on international affairs here.

And we're done for the season.

Given we now have an outbreak of measles reported in ICE's prison for children in Texas, I think we can expect the line to revert to its former growth rate *at least*. With added horror. www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-dil...

Wondering which of the most horrifying effects of the far-right administration in the US to worry about? They're running a two-for-one deal today. www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-dil...

With his goddamn bunny hat. Well done.

I think the duty lawyer at Sky News has just arrived at work.

Pleasing to find that the cutting edge of computing is presented via a command-line interface with visual effects straight out of Ceefax circa 1995.

Ah, been looking for this.

I’ve written this lengthy FT analysis overnight about the multiple multi-thousand pound Epstein payments to Mandelson’s husband these particular paragraphs are worth reading slowly www.ft.com/content/608a...

AI doom scenarios tend to be presented as overwhelmingly likely from our current technology level. But these scenarios also seem clearly observable from interstellar distance (e.g., using all a star’s energy to support AIs smart enough to implement this). Hugely sharpens Fermi paradox.

US measles cases. As trailed, the fast-expanding South Carolina situation does seem to have peaked, so now to see whether the national growth also collapses, or whether it reverts to the long-term 6 week-ish doubling pattern. New cases in Utah + Arizona, Florida suggest the latter.

Been playing with US measles numbers - correcting the latest CDC figures for historical reporting delays and so on. Results appear disconcerting. Looks like there's been enough local outbreaks for national 6-week doubling since about August. South Carolina ramping that up to a 2-3 week doubling.

Honestly, I think we should probably tell them.

The 2025-6 mid-range flu wave is fully collapsing now. NHS broadly coping - which is excellent. Midlands Trusts seeing the worst of what pressure there is, but overall enormously better than recent years.

Here comes the sun: After two months of polar night, the orangish-glowing 🌞 returns over the horizon seen from the windows of the Barents Observer newsroom in #Kirkenes 🇳🇴. Temperature this morning is -24°C.

[quietly] this chart is encouraging … especially the 2026 line; you can see the gradient flattening out even on a linear scale and a cumulative plot … Measles has an r0 of 12+. If it were not being aggressively contained in SC we’d be way off the top of the chart by now.

The latest update - giving a further 89 new cases in South Carolina - is a considerable slowdown, thank goodness. A constant effective R would be pushing well north of 1,500 by now.

inventing a drink called The Susan Collins. to make it, you say "I'm very concerned about this" and then you serve gin and bleach to an 11th grader

Minneapolis protests doing a lot to restore faith in the American people specifically, and in humanity in general. So good to see how honest decency sears through even the most desperate propaganda.