When excellent MPs stand up for what’s right and then get suspended by their party we should be very worried. Chris Hinchliff has been a staunch defender of nature and is far closer to the public view than the prime minster. Such arrogance 😡. Great quote here from Craig Bennett, agree 💯 .

This is “healthcare” in the United States. A pharmacy benefit manager randomly decided they just weren’t going to cover this man’s inhaler anymore, so he couldn’t afford it. He died of an asthma attack. Devastating. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

#NoMowMay has begun! 🌼 The rare chance to help nature by doing nothing.

‘Okay which one of you accidentally added Robert Cecil to the chat?’

"When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order." Iya Prigogine, Noble prize-winning chemist

One of the top two talks at #rewired25, @jessrmorley.bsky.social looking philosophically (& necessarily) deeper than the usual AI healthcare hype. TLDR summary: AI is systemic ie. Like electricity, and can be more effective at population level, but individual is where the current focus is

New online! Understanding the therapeutic toolkit for inflammatory bowel disease

A reminder that cycle infrastructure allows more women to cycle

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

Here are some nice prickly pear also

Away on hols, so please enjoy this beautiful sunset from last night instead of my usual musings. From Las Hayas on the Canary Island of La Gomera. Normal service will sadly be resumed soon

Good to see this ... www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=...

My latest @bmj.com piece . Having spent much of Tuesday in a severely overcrowded ED with corridor/waiting room care galore & much of Monday on a ward unable to discharge patients waiting for community services that they absolutely *do* need - policy meets real life. www.bmj.com/content/388/...

Efficient transport infrastructure often looks empty. Inefficient infrastructure looks "busy".

So the secret is out. The ITV team that made Mr Bates vs the Post Office has been making a drama about the phone-hacking scandal. Featuring David Tennant as Nick Davies. And Mr Bates himself (aka Toby Jones) as me. An altogether less heroic role for Toby, but he’s brilliant as always

Fun fact: if you're buying from a creator on etsy, you can reduce their etsy selling fees from 6.5% to 2.5% by ordering via 'shopname.etsy.com' instead of 'etsy.com/shopname' or searching from the main site. It costs you the same but the creator makes more

Amidst the DeepSeek debate, here is a highly readable and researched piece on whether it's the model (open code, remember) or run environment (local or cloud) that censors. It's the run environment, notably (state) controlled clouds. Which puts things in a very different perspective. Recc'd reading

This morning I read that DeepSeek used training data generated from other language models which has companies like OpenAI fuming, and I can't stop thinking about how there's a lesson in there

A new UK group is suggesting a five-point manifesto to address the rise of SUVs www.suv-alliance.org.uk

EU medicines agency quits X & moves to Bluesky "EMA will no longer post updates and content on X. We believe the X platform no longer suits our communication needs” the agency said in a statement www.reuters.com/world/europe...

We know the main reason that people don’t cycle is because they think it’s unsafe … but it appears the opposite is true, cycling makes you live longer in better health.

Lifetime risk of dementia after age 55 years - 42%.

"This is unconstitutional," I scream as the facial recognition equipped robot dogs drag me to my cell. "This goes against everything America stands for!" I shout, as the algorithmic sentencing machine condemns me to death. "This is not who we are!" I remind the firing squad of child soldiers

Mediterranean diet changes gut bacteria, boosting memory and cognition: A new @tulaneu.bsky.social study suggests the Mediterranean diet's brain-boosting benefits may work by changing the balance of bacteria in the gut. [MedSky]

You just gotta love London knitting. Merry Christmas all

I don’t know who made this but great job

this truly helped me writing my dissertation

Ynterviewere: Kan you explayne this gap in your resume? Gandalf: Then Darknesse took me, and I strayede out of thoughte and tyme, and I wanderid far on roades that I will not telle.

A wonderfully uplifting story about groundbreaking surgery at Papworth, where surgeons transplanted a pair of lungs revived outside the body in a hi-tech box. Medical science doing its magnificent, awe-inspiring, life-enhancing thing 💙🫁🫀 www.theguardian.com/society/2024...

I swear I’m not trying to be a total shill for the government but this is a very weird framing in the main BBC story about zero growth. They only won the election in July! It takes time for them to do stuff!

I knew it!!!! The socks!!!

Every sunrise and sunset I've captured in 2024.

For the day that's in it... except this isn't the winter solstice, this was the summer solstice sunrise over Newgrange this year which was the earliest since 1796.

It also makes it harder for them to ban books.

My latest @bmj.com on why an experienced workforce is necessary for safety and productivity www.bmj.com/content/387/...

The devastation on its way is unimaginable - like nothing humanity has ever witnessed before - and everyone will wish they had been climate activists and ‘hysterics’ when they had the chance. We are in a moment of unprecedented stupidity

This article depicts a battle ‘within the National Trust’ but RT2021Ltd or Restore Trust is a private company with 4 directors, The National Trust is a 129-year-old charity which has 5.5m members, all of whom have democratic voting rights. www.thetimes.com/article/26a1...

A mom just came in SO EXCITED to find a map store bc her son would LOVE it. She tries to be coy. "My son is... Really into maps. Real special kid." I'm like, ma'am, this is a map store. Half my customers are on the spectrum. I have a trains and transit section. You're among friends.

Top punning

Disney princesses face serious health risks, warn experts. Disney must consider ways to improve princesses’ wellbeing, including mindfulness, training on cohabitation with animals, and personal protection measures against toxic particles #ChristmasBMJ www.bmj.com/content/387/...

hello hello hello SO this might sound VERY BORING but if you're on Bluesky I'm guessing you're not a fan of Massive Platforms Owned by Billionaires. It's about to get much harder to run any sort of online community in the UK, unless you do it on a platform like Facebook, WhatsApp, Discord, etc

This morning the UK Gov published a new batch of entries of algorithms in use in the public sector (on their Algorithmic Transparency Reporting Standard). www.gov.uk/algorithmic-... Long form response tomorrow coming, but a quick 🧵 @adalovelaceinst.bsky.social

🚨 I'm recruiting 2x postdocs and 1-2 DPhil (PhD) students at Oxford to work on AI, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, and public interest technology research. Interested in human-centred and critical approaches to study the impact of data and algorithms on society? Join us next year!

When you work in NHS Scotland and read out a CHI number as 3-3-4 instead of 2-2-2-4

#IBD in 2024, the top 3 papers selected by the authors were PROFILE study in LancetGastroHep www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... SEQUENCE Trial @nejm.org www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/... Bacteriophage paper in Cell Host & Microbe www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We’ve all been there.

In WW2, the British government mobilized to create a global, distributed logistics chain aimed solely at keeping Britain supplied with one resource. Flagged as a critical war effort, at times it carried a shipping priority higher than munitions. That resource was Tea. 🧵 /1 (Image: IWM D 10405)

…The idea that Andy Jassy of all people has been heeding the kinds of things i've had to say on the role of "AI" in the workplace does weird things to my head. Gotta figure out a way to wield this for… the right reasons. www.cnbc.com/2024/12/15/a...

Today, the UK government announced a proposal to change copyright law - for the benefit of AI companies - that would cause huge, irreversible harm to creators. More info below, but most importantly here's what you can do (wherever you live): 1. Email your MP. Template letter in 🧵 👇 1/10