Bollocks. One, hardcovers are selling great, especially the ones that these days come with sprayed edges and illustrated end pages. Two, ditching hardcovers would absolutely gut author and bookseller incomes. You want to fuck up publishing? Kill the hardcover. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Well clearly a poster version of this will be going up in every lab across the civilised world... xkcd.com/3242/ #chemsky

Make Hate Weird Again.

Dear Bluesky Experts who read this: I am considering downloading and using (off line, data privacy etc) AI model (e.g. using something via Ollama) on my PC. Maybe even using/making an AI agent for simple admin tasks. I am not 100% convinced this is useful though. Any hints/tips/thoughts/advice?

This is insane. This is the government’s “independent” advisor on antisemitism. He sees four antisemitic cartoons targeting Zack Polanski. His response? To demand an end to the antisemitic targeting of Polanski? No. It’s to attack the Green Party.

PHWOAAAAAR

I'm sure Starmer will be along shortly to condemn these. Alt text: various political cartoons from major British newspapers leaning hard into stereotypically antisemitic caricatures to depict Zack Polanski

Oestrogen made me live Stimulants made me sane Without either, antidepressants allow me to sit in the corner, a hollow shell, and numb the pain, waiting to die. None of the above? Then it would have to be all alcohol, all the time. At least I’d die faster.

This use of language is called a dogwhistle. The disinterested or unaware person doesn’t see why specific words are being used. The hate groups, & those being oppressed, can hear it clearly.

It used to be that the right wing politicians described being gay as a ‘lifestyle’, so they could claim their hate was about politics & based on a ‘choice’. The new far right call being trans - ‘trans-identified’. Ppl are born Queer, get over it.

I could live to be a thousand and still not understand the decision-making which got them here

On the Elon Musk thing by the way: You do more work than Elon Musk. Your value to society is also far greater. Even if you actually do nothing. Because he breathes death. He's killed millions of people with DOGE alone. That's just a fact. But it was also true before he did that.

genAI is reducing workloads and costs for people with power, while increasing them for people with very little. is that a good idea, especially right now? you tell me

Never met Tony Peters, don’t know who he is, but a million years ago on Facebook he posted this and I don’t think anyone’s ever put it better.

PSA, folks:

"Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views." flux.community/matthew-shef...

I see the UK media are at it again. It's pretty simple: Do I *KNOW* that Israel is engaged in genocidal* activities? Being honest, no. I am a non-expert. I know that there are experts who do think this and have put forward evidence for this. That evidence and reasoning appears sound to me. 1/n

NIGEL FARAGE'S SUPPORTERS ARE SHOWING UP AT GREEN RALLIES DOING NAZI SALUTES. 382472343 OF NIGEL FARAGE'S EX-SCHOOLMATES SAID HE MADE GAS CHAMBER NOISES AT JEWISH KIDS. ALL WE FUCKING HEAR ABOUT IS THE ONE JEWISH PARTY LEADER BEING A DANGER TO EVERY JEWISH BRITON. I FEEL LIKE I'M GOING INSANE.

Here lies a two-fold tragedy: 1) Dawkins has done some interesting and useful things, they still exist despite everything else. 2) I have a deep and abiding love of the British pastime of mocking the mock-worthy, and some of the values of the Greek pantheon (punishing hubris and loving irony).

I would appreciate it if everyone on the internet would stop talking about Richard Dawkins so that I don't have to see what an embarrassing gormless twit he has become. Thank you. freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2...

School should be about education. Not obedience. Not sparing wealthy heads & politicians inconvenience. Not acceptance as a valuable member of society. I love education. I love learning. I come from generations of teachers, & I teach. All children deserve to thrive. It uplifts everyone.

It is the *height* of discomfort, to find yourself at the centre of yet another bogus culture war, talked about by people who don't know you & don't care about you. To be excluded from your friends. Yet you still go, you know what? I'm neurodivergent. I'm expressing my needs. I will not go to school

If you think I don't want to challenge autistic & ADHD children, or that listening to them & making changes somehow weakens them, I challenge *you* to get uncomfortable. Be genuinely curious. Speak to some SEND parents. Speak to some autistic children. As a basic condition of intellectual riguour.

I've taught in over 100 schools, across the world, so I'm not talking entirely without some first-hand experience from the other side of the desk. We take our system as this unimpeachable, inevitable rite & insist that anyone who says 'this isn't working for me' is spoilt or delusional

Do you know what the current UK persistent school absence rate is? Nearly 20%. Nearly 1 in 5 school children are regularly missing school. Yet every week newspapers are commissioning op eds to witter on, without evidence, that it's a problem of labels, an issue of over-indulgence.

I got the best grades in my year. I was accepted to Oxford. School got what they wanted out of me. Also I often couldn't sleep with anxiety. Also I started binge drinking at 14. No one ever said 'alarms every 50 minutes, constant ambient noise, sitting still & no protection from bullies is not ok'

I see children resisting demands to obey, to shut up, to not express their needs or ask for better, & I see extraordinary courage that I never possessed. It never occurred to me to not go to school, & it never occurred to any adult to tell me I deserved better. I was very convenient.

It's not. For years we called dyslexic kids 'thick' or 'slow'. We tolerated teachers picking out pupils & mocking them. Physical punishments. Parts of the media still fetishise obedience over independence of thought, courage, wellbeing. Unity over meeting the needs of a diverse cohort.

But increasingly it gets conflated - slyly, deliberately - with the unnecessary, harmful discomfort of, for example, having extreme sensory sensitivities & being forced to sit in noisy, bright classrooms in the same chair with no accommodations or compassion. That this is somehow virtuous.

It is good - desirable, even - to support children through intellectual challenges, new information, exciting puzzles. That kind of challenge builds confidence & is part of education, of course. No one, I think, has ever argued that the discomfort of attempting a tricky maths problem is bad.

The rising 'children need to get used to being uncomfortable' anti-neurodiversity discourse is at once evidence of improved visibility & understanding (which always provokes dissent), & also lazy, pathologically incurious, harmful propaganda, mostly not from frontline teachers, pushed by the media.

#PostDoc opportunity in medicinal chemistry at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (Liverpool UK) ref: APR20260383 | duration: 3 years | closing: 31-May-2026 #MedChem #SynChem #ChemPostDoc #PostDocJobs #chemsky 🧪 app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car...

John Taylor posts regularly on UK #DrugDiscovery jobs at LinkedIn and here's the post for 02-May-2026 #ChemJobs #UKChemJobs #chemsky 🧪 www.linkedin.com/pulse/ukdrug...

Clamping down on legitimate protest is not helping to protect Jews, if anything, the opposite. Attacking British Jews is not helping Palestinians, if anything, the opposite.

I'm convinced a major reason why the right hate universities is that they mix students from different backgrounds. Hard to "other" a culture or region when many people have met and become at least acquaintances of members of it.

overwhelming. The root of this value is the independence of the university, something we are sadly chipping away at everyday it seems. It's our ability to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, rather than power and profit, that makes universities so valuable...

Though not without their flaws, Universities they have *already* done more to drive economic development and innovation than pretty much any other human institution, and that's in addition to creating informed citizens and otherwise enriching the human experience. The evidence for this is...

#DNA tests are misleading because they equate genetic #ancestry with human-made categories, like "Irish." @hnorton.bsky.social, @dunsworth.bsky.social #ethnicity #race #genetics #science #DogBreeds

Tierney Thys, marine biologist and interpreter of the sunfish news.mongabay.com/2026/05/tier... “Tierney M. Thys, who died in March at 59, spent much of her life asking those questions, and then finding ways to share them” 🦑🌎🧪

Deeply disturbing to see number of politicians who see protest against the murder of children, medics and journalists as inciting violence while marches by far right extremists who frequently actually incite racist violence is quite acceptable - politics & media in this country is rotten & racist

In 2013, I started following helium because of Felix Salmon's column on it (which, amusingly) was based on another Reuters column by an energy analyst, John Kemp. #chemchat web.archive.org/web/20130331...

When all you've know is privilege, equality feels like oppression.

Always love to be reminded of this. A lot of it was hand-stitched too. Really amazing, precise work. Women’s work is so often minimised and forgotten.

Fellow ADHDers: Do you experienced shame-based paralysis or paralysis-based shame (or both!). How the FUCK do you break the cycle/shame spiral/doom hole? (By paralysis I mean cannot write an email, or cannot start a task, or cannot do anything even things that bring you pleasure)

I'm reading this article: www.texasmonthly.com/news-politic... One of the things we liberals/centrists/lefties/progresssives/non-bloody-fascists ALWAYS forget, and are frighteningly too complacent about, is that the conservatives (of whatever kind) are highly motivated and mean.

Paperback of Normally Weird was out on Thursday - thank you to those who’ve been reading it and commenting this bank holiday weekend Will be talking about it in Berkhamsted, Swindon, Dulwich and Glasgow this week www.robinince.com

Today is the anniversary of a great day in global history: the day Bluesky’s Sensual Alf meme began, a curse that still haunts the website. It’s my fault and I wrote about it here: little-flying-robots.ghost.io/how-i-accide...

This Opin clearly comes from someone in the UK who loves Eurovision but voted for Brexit and doesn't want to keep facing the consequences.