#Gatwick is my local airport. I am not screaming for more flights. It would be disastrous for the environment, and anyway, there will never be 'enough' flights. Enough is... what? Two or more a day, to every obscure destination? Labour is locked in the Sim City trope that growth requires airports.

This is interesting. I've always felt the great split in the central nervous system seems almost like a deliberate mutilation. "And as God drove Adam and Eve from the garden, he clove their brains in twain, saying unto them, let's see if you are so smart now, suckers."

Search for Vegemite on sainsburys.co.uk , and 11 Marmite products come up first. Have the Marmite people paid to push Vegemite down the listings? I like both products but I would also like the manufacturers to play fair.

Jimmy Kimmel was ousted not for disrespecting the dead but for disrespecting the Donald.

In cold war days UK was America's Airstrip One. Our new role is to host shitloads of Nvidia GPUs and churn out nuclear waste and CO2, ensuring that the Instagram algorithm maintains its annoying, intrusive edge

The way the long English winter - the 9 months when the weather doesn't even attempt to be pleasant - has started, I don't think we need named storms. Perhaps they should give names to the occasional spells of fine weather.

I was taught at school to say 'compare with' because com means with in Latin. That is such illogical bullshit. 'Compare' is now an English word. It should take whatever preposition conveys your meaning best in English. That might be 'to'. Prepositions are subtle. They don't translate exactly.

Again! Brighton getting heavy downpours while most of GB is dry. A band of heavy rain is crawling along the south coast. The SE, remember, is supposed to have a drier clinate than places north and west.

It's nice that the NYT has illustrated this piece with the colours I see, but it would have been more interesting to have a peep at the colours other people see.

So Virgin Media offers us a new TV box, says it will be better but doesn't say in what way, mentions we'll lose any recordings on the old box, doesn't say what happens if we refuse the 'upgrade', and expects us to be happy. Progress. Dontcha just love it.

Watch the skies! Here it comes! Once in a lifetime spectacle! A Blue Harvest Slaughter Super Moon. Or something. We now have more names for types of full moon than for sub-genres of death metal. Is it just me getting tired of this?

To the pest control company which has animated spiders and insects crawling over its web pages: Very clever! Now just stop it! Even to someone like me, with no particular creepy-crawlie phobias, it's very off-putting.

Botched insulation on 30,000 homes. This, not Angela Rayner's stamp duty, is today's biggest housing scandal. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Second time this has happened recently. I look at the rain map and Brighton seems to have been singled out for a downpour. It's probably an illusion: frequently there is just one heavy rainstorm in the country. And unsurprisingly, we tend to look at the map when it's raining locally.

Whenever I see a URL ending "login=false" I wonder what would happen if I changed that to "true"

Neuroscientists have been making some fairly awesome claims lately. Either their bubble of self-supporting delusions is now complete, or they really are starting to figure out how the brain works.

Why do people (Sainsbury's, for example) insist on calling Chinese cabbage "lettuce"?

This Zulu choir singing Bohemian Rhapsody on #BBCtoday is 🔥🔥

This year I have almost forgotten what heavy rain is like. But now it's bucketing down. Patchy showers are forecast today. Right now there is one heavy downpour on the GB map. It's moving E along the Sussex coast. I can confirm that the radar isn't wrong.

Amazing new idea. A single heatpump for winter heating and summer cooling. From Scientific American April 1978.

Matthew Syed's #bbcradio4 doc on time expansion experiences is a slow motion car crash between science and pseudoscience, and I hope science is gonna come out alive www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

I have approximately 1% of Chick Corea's technique, passion and improvisational genius, so I'm going to see if I can, in some limited sense, play like him.

My electric toothbrush pauses every 30 seconds, allegedly to remind me to change position. But I know that those pauses are really ad breaks, and one day they will be filled by actual advertisements.

Many websites try to explain the lyrics of Can's One More Night but miss the obvious symbolism of the 7/4 vamp: the endless cycle of weeks, each ending disappointingly in "one more Saturday night". music.youtube.com/watch?v=t-AH...

We are beginning to get a grip on possibly the biggest problem in growth and development, which is, how things come out the right shape and size. Through evolution, the genome has acquired tacit knowledge of physics and chemistry.

We are beginning to get a grip on possibly the biggest problem in growth and development, which is, how things come out the right shape and size. Through evolution, the genome has acquired tacit knowledge of physics and chemistry.

Finally got my euros from the Post Office. They were sitting in the branch for days but staff could not release them. Computer said no. Somebody (me?) must have done something that tripped a security mechanism. After multiple calls between me, branch and two offices, the handover was authorised.

I try to guard my data, but I still get targeted advertisements, and this time the product is absolutely ME. I want it. It's like COVID. You can avoid it for a while but it gets you in the end.

The thorn section: this is our cactus Dizzy, opened today for a short season.

Trump wields the tariff weapon like a medieval jester with a pig's bladder, as a way of infuriating other countries without doing them serious violence.

Surprising that Royal Mail thinks it can save £400M by delivering 2nd class mail alternate weekdays, considering that posties will still have to do their rounds daily with 1st class. Perhaps RM's real agenda is to devalue 2nd class to a junk mail service and make 1st class the norm.

Does anybody in the UK record cloudless days or keep statistics on them? With satellites, it should be easy. You might argue that the difference between a cloudless day and a merely sunny day is insignificant for the economy or public health. All I know is we don't get many of them.

Can't remember who posted about this, but thanks, even for non snooker followers it's a brilliant essay on the nature of skill #motorcontrol www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

As a row breaks out over the meat content of free school meals: just a reminder that meat-eating is a cultural norm, not a nutritional necessity.

There are IKEA pillowcases on eBay for more than you would pay at IKEA. It may be because IKEA are so crap at maintaining stock for delivery.

Migrating my two Xitter identities to Bluesky turns out to be harder than moving my life to a new city. I don't see X becoming a cesspool of hate because I don't follow those people. What I see is a resilient community of interesting, humane people who somehow ignore Elon and carry on.

This day in 2005 London bus and Tube services were disrupted by suicide bombings. My train terminated in the suburbs leaving me a long ride on my folding bike to work at ActionAid.

Trying out the 'laser pointer' tool in Microsoft OneNote. Draw a shape. A second or so later, it vanishes. You can scribble all over the page, non-destructively. It's actually better than a laser pointer because of the slight persistence. Great if you are doing a presentation or video with OneNote.

Another call centre, more Vivaldi on hold. We would value The Four Seasons better, if the only way to hear it was to travel to Venice and attend a live performance in a baroque church.

What can the behaviour of supermarket shoppers tell us about how we form habits and learn skills? www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Usual caveats about the very concept of representation, but this paper is a really nice take on it, with testable implications. Everything we'd call 'thinking' is abstracted away. What matters here is that if the thinking is done right, information passes from sensory to motor without distortion.

I've said it before. Apples in philosophical and psychological writing are always red. Though that's probably not the main reason why we see this apple as red. This is an example of colour constancy - another aspect of brain-as-scientist. A plain red sphere would have created the same visual effect.

Once again BBC news shows Brighton beach, which might make you think it's sweltering here. It's actually 26C right now. Brighton is where Londoners come to cool off when it's 33C in the capital.

Prompted by the news that Wimbledon no longer has line judges. Perception involves both prediction and retrodiction. In judging where a ball bounced, humans use its path both before and after the bounce. Theories of #perception based purely on prediction are missing half the story. #psychology

GLASTON is an anagram of NOSTALG

Assuming pacifism isn't the only acceptable position, how bad does the IDF have to get before it's OK to wish death on it? #glastonbury

Do we even need a formal definition of a heatwave? The UK Met Office thinks we do. It's complicated. The threshold temperature, which must be reached on three consecutive days, varies across the country. Even the highest threshold, 28C, may seem low to people in warmer countries. Heat is relative.