Breaking: New FDA panel appointed by RFK Jr finds predominant cause of crime is ice cream consumption. “The signal each summer is very strong: ice cream sales go up, violence follows.”

Just watched the Tylenol press conference because I had to. It's hard to convey how utterly deranged, even by Trump standards, it was.

Our project is to create a database of what we call "structured motivated proofs". For more details about this, and for information about how you can get involved (if you have suitable skills), see a blog post I have just written. gowers.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/c...

I didn't ask for AI in my search. This is really not convincing me!

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs

In 2011 I wrote a review of Alan Turing's 1948 paper Intelligent Machinery where he considered the case for embodied intelligence. My review was intended for a 2012 centenary celebration of Turing's birth, but no proceedings were published. So here it is. rodneybrooks.com/alan-turing-...

The real existential threat isn't AI — it's billionaires. My latest, for @theatlantic.com: www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

Royal Society president Sir Adrian Smith: “I am sure that many of you will share my concern at the events of the last week and the growing tendency to resort to the language of violence…including, unfortunately, an address to the recent London rally from a Fellow of the Royal Society.”

I got off academia dot edu 5 or so years ago, when I discovered it was sending automatically-generated emails in my name without even telling me - I found out when a very senior member of the profession replied to one. It's only gone further and further done this path since, as far as I can tell.

Conscious of the limitations, lecturer A proceeds to put in at least the same amount of work they would have had to invest to master this task without AI, just to make sure that AI is being used

“What was unsettling, however, was hearing Emma tell Grem she loved it – and Grem replying: “I love you too!” Emma tells all her cuddly toys she loves them, but they don’t reply; nor do they shower her with over-the-top praise the way Grem does.”

I thought it was excellent. Classic Hartley in all respects. Full disclosure, I was a kickstarter backer of the film who has watched it via my reward package Blu-ray copy. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to turn up on a cinema screen here in darkest Canberra any time soon, sadly.

There’s a new Hal Hartley movie, “Where to Land”. thefilmstage.com/where-to-lan...

Rollout of #Ebola vaccine has begun in DRC in response to the country’s most recent zairevirus outbreak. It is still thrilling to know a vaccine for this scourge has been licensed and can be rapidly deployed. Vaccines save lives. www.afro.who.int/countries/de...

If you want to feel good about humanity for 2½ hours, “Thirteen Lives” is a tense, moving, inspiring tale of the 2018 Thai cave rescue, when ingenuity, bravery, cooperation, desperation and luck paid off. The bitter aftertaste is how many children we’ve collectively failed since.

Doctor: I need to test you for proBNP. Me: What? I promise you, I don't support British fascists.

“The Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers is the world's first and only institution dedicated to the alignment alignment problem.” “Subscribe unless you want all humans dead forever.” alignmentalignment.ai/caaac/blog/e... (H/T @ mhoye @ mastodon dot social)

Life on Mars? The latest results and what to do about them:

Can we just replace the entire fellowship of the Royal Society with LLMs that make acquiescent noises in the presence of power and nominate each other for awards?

Suppose we have a unit square, and we want to find the volumes of two 4-dimensional sets — call them “Opp” and “Adj” — consisting of pairs of points inside the square, such that the line containing both points intersects either two opposite sides of the square (Opp), or two adjacent sides (Adj).

Cognitive scientists and AI researchers make a forceful call to reject “uncritical adoption" of AI in academia #AI #GenAI #HigherEducation #ResearchIntegrity #WCRI2026 #WCRI www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/cognitive-...

How did I miss last year’s most gonzo biotech story? Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 81, illegally imported body parts of Marco Polo argali sheep, the world's largest, from Kyrgyzstan, and sent the genetic material to a lab to create cloned embryos, court documents say. www.bbc.com/news/article...

As for the claim that AI "contemplates blackmail": See my discussion of the details and interpretation of these experiments at www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

In a dangerous escalation in nominative determinism, several nations have acted to rename the bureaucracies governing their militaries “the Department of Victory”, “the Department of Unassailable Triumphs”, and “the Department of World Conquest Preordained by Manifest Destiny”.

If you’re wondering how much of what RFK Jr said yesterday about vaccines was true—almost none of it was. @FullerLab_UW is one of the most accomplished vaccinologists out there and her article is required reading to separate truth from falsehoods. theconversation.com/how-rfk-jr-s...

1/5 A poem by Adrienne Rich, 1961, titled "Artificial Intelligence" dedicated to GPS (of Newell and Simon). Eerily prophetic and a great description of LLMs "when they make you write your poetry, later on". On page 136 of this book: www.amazon.com/dp/039328511...

45 signatures on the official government petition already! We need at least 50: let's make it happen! www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/... #Australia #PhD #HigherEducation

Exclusive: RFK Jr. and the White House buried a major study on alcohol and cancer. Here’s what it shows. www.vox.com/health/46008...

The Bertrand “paradox” is the famous observation that asking for the probability that a “random chord” on a circle spans more than 120° is meaningless until you specify exactly how you choose the chord. The Wikipedia article describes three methods that give P = 1/3, 1/2 and 1/4.

Breaking: Vladimir Putin announces that from 2026, all livestock raised in Russian farms will be genetically engineered to match his histocompatibility profile.

Sergei Drozdov has published his nice proof using hyperbolic simplexes of the necessary and sufficient condition on the radii of spheres that sit inside and outside a Euclidean simplex in any dimension. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Zuckerberg: I am *literally* building Roko’s Basilisk! Everyone who assists me will become a billionaire, and everyone who chooses not to will be tortured for eternity! Everyone: Nah, we’re good. Also, no sane adult takes that Yoko’s Broccoli thing seriously.

TIL that if you were a premature baby in New York in the 1900s, your best chance for first class neonatal care would come from being exhibited in a state of the art incubator as an attraction at Coney Island. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

If you pick two points at random inside a regular dodecahedron and draw the line that contains them, that line can intersect three different kinds of pairs of faces, separated by angles of: π, arcos(–1/√5), or arcos(1/√5)

The first nobelium-containing molecules ever made + directly identified could herald a shake-up at the bottom of the periodic table as scientists reassess the physical phenomena that give heavy and superheavy elements their chemical properties. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/making-mol...

It’s crazy that America just like. Destroyed science. Just looked at its golden goose and went “wow should we kill this? And not for the gold, but just because we fucking hate this thing” And if you tell random people about it they go “no, that doesn’t seem true” and just refuse to believe you

TIL from the Devo documentary on Netflix: … Two members were at Kent State in 1970. … They played in disguise as a televangelist band called “Dove” as their own “support act”. … Bowie offered to produce their first album, but then he was too busy so he palmed it off on Eno.

A great story from @quantamagazine.bsky.social about the 50-year effort to understand the physics and mathematics of the Hofstadter Butterfly. www.quantamagazine.org/ten-martini-...

One formula to rule them all! P(d, F) = 4d / ((d+1) F) In d-dimensional space, d≥2, given a regular polytope with F faces that come in opposite pairs, if you pick two points at random from the interior of the polytope and draw the line that contains them …

Pick two points uniformly at random inside a regular polyhedron with F faces. For even F, the probability that the line containing these points will pass through any pair of opposite faces of the polyhedron is: 3/F

Meanwhile, in the fact-based universe:

Pick two points uniformly at random inside a regular n-gon. For even n≥4, the probability that the line containing them will pass through two opposite sides of the n-gon is: 8/(3n) For odd or even n≥3, the probability that the line will pass through two adjacent sides is: 16 sin(π/n)^4 /(3n)

the world it’s a nuclear-powered spaceship. It’s good TV and he’s from Harvard so they let him. But I’m sick of his fear-mongering and relentless twisting of the truth. He is no longer a scientist, he’s a fraud. Anyway, I have zero doubts this thing is a comet.

Here’s some Gemini gaslighting: • giving a wrong answer to a puzzle • giving Python code that could test its claim • asserting it obtained results from the code supporting its claim • but when I ran the code myself, it showed the claim was false. g.co/gemini/share...

You wake up in a universe with a different number of spatial dimensions. Your senses are confused, and you’re too embarrassed to ask someone on the street “Hey, how many dimensions does space have?” But then you chance upon someone who likes mathematical puzzles, and ask them:

A letter from my local council announcing plans for a “Montorsoli school” made me wonder if it was a typo for “Montessori” … but on closer scrutiny, a religious order really is planning to name this facility after the 16th century Florentine sculptor & friar Giovanni Montorsoli.

Well I, an astronomer, can obviously think of no downsides to a company promising to launch a constellation of reflective mirrors into low-Earth orbit to increase daylight for folks on the ground.

Let R be a rectangle with side lengths 1 and 2, and let S be the subset of R consisting of all points x in R such that there exists a point y in R that is a distance of 3/2 from x. What is the area of S? This is a high school-level calculus problem, but it takes a bit of care …

Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

Senior lawyer apologises after filing AI-generated submissions in Victorian murder case “The lawyers explained they checked that the initial citations were accurate and wrongly assumed the others would also be correct.” Disbar these clowns who can’t grasp the nature of AI slop.