I'm thinking today about people I knew and won't see again. Change, transience, they're fundamental to our physical nature www.gla.ac.uk/schools/soci...

I'm thinking today about people I knew and won't see again. Change, transience, they're fundamental to our physical nature www.gla.ac.uk/schools/soci...

We live in THE most insane timeline.

End times

We are uncivilising ourselves

This is a great question! Emerson Lake and Palmer. Many ingredients in common with things I like. Leave me cold. Incredible String Band. I enjoy many camp followers. I even like some of the subsequent solo projects. Cooler people than me used to play them at student parties. I wish I liked them.

😮😮. One of my favourite drunk conversations is, "what was the best gig you were ever at?" I have several answers of my own but one of them is certainly RT solo, just him and acoustic guitar, a wee upstairs club on Sauchiehall St, Glasgow, about 1986. It's his own, authentic voice, like it or not

Erskine Bridge looks like a huge mountain ha ha in the middle of a bike run this morning #cycling #erskinebridge #glasgow

After decades of gradual disarmament, London is quietly reversing course by expanding its warhead stockpile, altering its nuclear doctrine, and acquiring stealth F-35As to carry US tactical nuclear bombs, write Sonja Amadae and Tom Stevenson.

IOP President Professor Paul Howarth has warned that the latest UKRI funding package risks causing long-term damage to UK science, with deep cuts to key facilities and projects threatening the foundations of physics. Read our full response: www.iop.org/about/news/r...

There's a motto for life: "The detour is the point"

This is why we call it the Extremely Large Telescope! This photo shows the massive, 39-metre-diameter structure that will hold the main mirror of our ELT.   798 mirror segments will sit here, working together as a single mirror, in what will be the biggest optical telescope on Earth. 🔭 🧪 1/3

The aurora in the same sky as the Magellanic clouds - what a beautiful image!

My goodness, childhood without powdered blancmange - bleak!

I REALLY hope this is true

In Essex, more witches: according to her later indictment, on this date, Margery Barnes of St Osyth, spinster, kept and maintained three imps or spirits, a mole called Pygine, a grey cat called Rusfott, and a dun dog called Dunfutt, with the intention of bewitching men or beasts. She is ... 4/

it really stinks that bandcamp, a profitable company that’s enabled something like a revolution in independent music distribution, is just going to get wound down and thrown away because its corporate owners don’t have a use for it

🚨 Beyond the limit 🚨  New ESO study finds that current proposals to launch 1.7+ million satellites into orbit would have devastating consequences for astronomy. The most extreme proposals come from SpaceX & Reflect Orbital  🔭 🧪 ☄️ #DarkSkies #SatelliteConstellations 1/4

The start of a new survey of the Universe? That deserves a new view of the cosmos 🌌 Meet the Ocean of Stars, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's newest wide-field image. 🔭🧪 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/gallery/imag...

Something I wrote about in Elemental is the fact that we are living through a massively important historical turning point: the beginning of the end end of the hydrocarbon era. America’s choice to ignore that is, frankly, self-defeating. www.hachette.co.uk/titles/arthu...

Anybody tempted by Reform's climate change denial should see these words from the US. Alternative energy isn't 'woke', it's GOOD BUSINESS

There shouldn't need to be sophistry and argument, and the fact that data centre discourse involves so much obfuscation and bickering and pointing should in itself be enough to flag that there is something deeply wrong with the justification. You can either make a clear case in favour, or you can't

Naomi Klein is always excellent.

I think we just passed oops.

A woodland walk, the shade welcome on a hot summer's day #Fife #BankheadMoss

A woodland walk, the shade welcome on a hot summer's day #Fife #BankheadMoss

Are you a teacher or do you work in a UK school keen on helping students view the August eclipse safely over the school holidays? Go Stargazing UK have more than 250,000 discounted eclipse glasses to give out. Want to find out more? Visit ukeclipse.com/get-solar-ec... #Augusteclipse ☀️🌑🕶️

It seems to have become commonplace to blame net zero for Britain’s high energy bills and/or weak job market… … and I guess I’ll have to explain again why there is very little evidence of this. Britain has plenty of economic problems; net zero is not high on that list (though climate change is) 🧵

At the Reflecting Pool, and guys, this doesn't look right.

They knew what they were doing. Fuck them.

we like short songs so this will take less than one minute of your time. The shortest #apocalypse you'll ever encounter cthulhubrothers.bandcamp.com/track/the-ye... #TheYellowing

Albert Einstein's self-portrait for his romantic partner in the early 1940s, Margarita Konenkov, who was later identified as a Soviet agent. The couple nicknamed themselves "Almar." Hence the portrait is captioned "Almars Nightmare" #Einstein #science #physics #ScienceSky

my own view of Westminster has never recovered from this story, Tony Blair advising Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron's horse-riding pal, on how to deal with the phone-hacking scandal. Ideological enemies? Nah, that's just pantomime for public consumption www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014...

It's very depressing to see such posts and realise that, once again, university adult education was in the vanguard

This is * insane *. STFC council minutes from December have been removed from their website, changed, and reposted. The new version rolls back on funding commitments made explicit in the initial version. I can't think of another adjective other than Trumpian behaviour.

Venus and the crescent Moon over a corner of the enormous car park of Guarulhos airport, São Paulo, Brazil.

Who at the time took Philip K Dick's hallucinations for prophetic?

Where would this leave mature students who have made their way into university through Access courses? In many cases they'll have overcome substantial personal and situational barriers to do so. Seems like pointless bureaucracy to be this prescriptive about how they demonstrated readiness for study

Festival of people each playing their own, unique, invented musical instruments. No digital technologies. They all get solo sets but must also be willing to improvise in randomly assembled duos, trios and quartets and in one immense, all- inclusive orchestra to finish up

"This report make shock you." - clearly a Russian bot

James Hutton that true son of fire who said to Burns “Aye, man, the rocks melt wi the sun”… —Edwin Morgan thought so, & was inspired – by Burns & Hutton – to write “Theory of the Earth”: one of his SONNETS FROM SCOTLAND, first published in New Writing Scotland 2, 1984 #geology #poem #poetry 3/3

Inverclyde Skywatchers, the amateur #Astronomy group I join on Mondays, have an annual Burns celebration. I've scoured his works and there's hardly a mention of the sky or the cosmos. But this is great! - thinking on a planetary timescale. Maybe we'll use this next year #robertburns

Those are arguments you cannot win

I saw this and thought, "didn't something like this actually happen?" and of course the true events are detailed in the rest of the thread. In real life plutonium is not so easy to get your hands on - I hope!

Sidney Coleman’s 1975-76 quantum field theory course at Harvard, recorded on an old black and white tube video camera.

Amazing: KPMG wrote a report describing the successful use of AI by businesses. But the case studies turned out to be AI hallucinations. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Some great news this morning! ESA has extended the Solar Orbiter mission‼️🌞🛰️ Solar Orbiter will continue to give us even better views of the Sun's poles as its orbital inclination increases. Plasma Observatory has been recommended as ESA's M7, with the formal decision expected in November. 🛰️

A wee house among very tall ones #saopaulo #consolacao

I had the same experience today. I dismissed the offer as quickly as I could and I may have found a "don't bother me again" button because it hasn't happened again. Or maybe it heard me saying, "fuck off"

Beautiful words. Sadly Venus and Jupiter are nowhere near one another, the appearance of an encounter specific to our vantage point on Earth. Maybe there's a metaphor to be had there too