"the broad-muzzled canids" @secondmentions.bsky.social www.latimes.com/environment/...

Seems about right

New CMYK just dropped

This photo is funnier than it has any business being people.com/hairdresser-...

Shame John Virgo has died because I really wanted him to be my co-host on my forthcoming Goalhanger Podcast, The Rest Is That Thing They Lean On When It's A Tricky Shot In Snooker.

Signs and portents

I read this, and I am freshly reminded that one of the most important insights in humanism is that this our one and only life.

The director of McDonald's Netherlands is called... Zoe Hamburger www.mcdonalds.com/nl/nl-nl/con...

How? How do you double-check the accuracy, if you're not already an expert? Ask a different GenAI? Or do you, you know... Have to go and do the research you would have done anyway, pre-AI? Because I'm buggered if I can think of how you do that in a way where the GenAI saved you time.

😭

I have prepared a video summarizing the study. Please come back here after reading the thread : ) youtu.be/bAk4PFEuWKQ English also youtu.be/CETjjZBMT5c Spanish youtu.be/tkpjlCxDJZA German (Thanks to Esau Dharma for providing the Spanish voice for Witgar Wiegele!)

Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools

Imagine your house falls down one day and it's because a load of parakeets have been systematically eating your mortar

Always nice to be recognised for my work in @thetimes.com, but I haven't done any fluid dynamics research for a while. I had my one year anniversary at @tandfresearch.bsky.social last week! www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

Holy hell, what an obituary

Wonderful thread.

Politicians: don't use AI to make your maps.

Incredible things available on my local freecycle

🧪 Here's a science mystery to start the year. Why are species names for fish and plants appearing in the scientific literature in papers about firefighter injuries, hearing loss and heart attack? Is it AI? Translation tools? Something else? nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/is-this-fi...

Best TikTok thing going is the two dudes trying food from every country without leaving NYC. If you haven’t seen them yet, it’s incredible. My favorite so far is last week’s. Legit got me emotional.

You're not ready for the name of the energy transition specialist at Heat Pump Association UK

Why is Youtube putting the livestream of a funeral from East Belfast on my homepage?

The industrial academic fraud economy in action. The current prices paid to Iranians for writing computer science papers for Chinese clients.

If you want to communicate likelihood, use numbers.

This is quite an important point; if you are a UK citizen with Twitter on your phone, opening it up is like playing Russian roulette that the algorithm might commit a strict liability offence on your behalf.

A minute's inciting racial hatred

No, that's too Guardian

There should be literally no circumstances, ever, where citizenship is can be revoked. If you literally sign up to fight for an opposing army in a war, then we should prosecute you for treason not revoke citizenship

It’s really awful that the Byzantines would ritually mutilate former rulers to keep them from taking the throne again but on the other hand this did mean no one had to suffer through episodes of the Nikephoros Bryennios Podcast Hour.

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Must not eat the chocolate nuclear submarine

i post this story every christmas, and will keep doing so until it stops making me cry merry christmas xx

I think the plural is Chocolates Orange, it’s a possessive noun, like Attorneys General.

I'm going to crack an egg in my bath tonight as a tribute.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

I'm curious to know if the 42 papers all cite the same thing, or have they been assumed to be citing the same thing by Google Scholar.

Just been shared this cursed quiz program. In tribute to Diana, 100 multiple choice questions on her life. youtu.be/7_Zsw6e-TGc?...

So much of what I know of history comes from strategy games. Also geography,not much better for familiarising yourself with a region than trying to conquer it.

Big news I've not seen reported elsewhere: Mr Blobby joined Spotify on the 1st of Dec, so you can now listen to the UK Christmas no. 1 for 1993 open.spotify.com/artist/6990P...

Guessing no Irish people were involved in naming this EU sexual health project? share.google/ivvblu2oua7B...

Good Lord

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

ONS is so bad. (This is about specifically British nationals.) www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Reverse Image Forensics Challenge: Try to find a unique area in Figure 9 of this recent Scientific Reports paper: 10.1038/s41598-025-17456-6 [Aug 2025] - Annotated by ImageTwin.ai

A writer tried dating alt-right men as an experiment to learn about them. There is so much going on here I don't even know where to start www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/...