I know I wasn’t supposed to laugh but I did

My first #TenMinMerlin this season (well, 16 minutes to be completely honest but who's counting 🤠) All credible. Noisiest and easiest for me to identify are robin, common wood pigeon, and magpie.

Original by www.instagram.com/davidlbatche... here www.instagram.com/p/CR92P99L072

So loads of people are sharing an obvious ai "glow up" of an actual photo. I never share ai stuff even to dunk, but in this case I'm sharing a comparison to show the problem. We have to stand against this slop at every level or it becomes normalised. They want us to stop caring. See alt text.

Baby daffs on St David's Day 🤠 (excuse the work-in-progress border mess - I peeled back the weed-control fabric a couple of weeks ago to give the daffs space and light).

Has felt like it here in Hastings - stats show it's not subjective, we have indeed had a lot less sunshine.

Meteorological spring has begun; what was winter like? –UK as a whole only 9% wetter –England was 35% wetter than average –Several counties in the southwest recorded top 5 wettest winters Climate change has made such winters much more likely. When it does rain, downpours can be heavier 1/

Good morning! 🪶

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

I want to do my part in raising awareness. Texas's Big Bend is set to receive new border security infrastructure, including >100 mi of border wall cutting through Big Bend National Park. Kristi Noem just waived 28 environmental protection laws and regulations to expedite this construction. 🧵 1/4

Starmer appears not to have learned that nasty sniping (like the Galloway nonsense) is not effective with the voters who turned away from Labour. He needs to provide a positive and constructive alternative to Reform, and to stop pursuing hate (including trans hostility and demonising immigrants).

Took me much too long to get this 🤦 Brain blocked on wondering what organisation the BBCG is 🤣 #bbcGhosts

Interesting - they are different things of course, because the usage pattern of each is quite different. For example one electric full charge today is around 150-250 miles, and a petrol fill-up is more typically twice that. There's also "grazing" - relatively slow car park destination chargers.

Hannah Spencer walking into Westminster, sucking her teeth, tutting, and muttering "tell you what, you've had some cowboys in here."

Note Green+Lab at 66% - under no split between Green and Labour would Reform Party Ltd have come anywhere close to winning; a resounding win by the left. Also of course a clear message to Starmer to return to the Left.

This is just straight-up oppression from the state. Not really thought about it before, but I see no reason why a license to drive should depend on gender anyway.

NEW: This is a terrific deep dive into Epstein & Russia by @professorshaw.bsky.social for @thenerve.news which starts with ‘Yachtgate’, Mandelson’s 2008 scandal involving Nat Rothschild, George Osborne & Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/peter-mand...

Occam's Razor

The grab-bag policies of the modern fascists - that includes the Reform Party - a mix of state intervention, removal of workers right, burning the planet, and investment in local companies - to go alongside the deportations and pro-aggressor foreign policy. www.ft.com/content/4541...

when people talk about AI used in moderation of social media posts, you must remember there is always the human-in-the-loop, often a woman, often in the Global South, always dehumanised and forgotten 1/n www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Had a quick nose - 1-bed flats in zone 3 look to be £500k to purchase (where there is supply...). A maxed-out 30-year mortgage with 50k (10%) deposit would be around £2200/month and the bank would expect a salary of £75k miminum, per the rightmove calculator. Truly insane.

A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them

London’s “worst mass eviction in recent history” is underway; hundreds of households across London told to get out of their homes this week by the same landlord, ahead of the renters rights act. The landlord? Billionaire Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital. www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-...

So dumb, and yet VCs continue to be suckered into giving this charlaton ever increasing billions for his slop-machines. Well, more likely those VCs are expecting payback as governments, large enterprises, small investors etc are suckered into buying the dumb.

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

On scientific progress, occasionally overturning established orthodoxy with better evidence.

Alien Myths about Trans People from the outer rim of Tufton Street. Or Fiona McAnena and the Clangers. I have been in demand from the media a bit in the past few days and have twice recently been matched with Fiona McAnena from anti-trans group ‘Sex Matters’.

Does it need to be said? Do *not* buy his vile book that the interview is effectively promoting - buyers become complicit in his behaviour.

For the #printerSolstice2526 prompt volume: my #linocut of autodidact #mathematician Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940) with diagrams of cross-sections of 4D polytopes from her publications. 🧪🐡🧮👩🏼‍🔬 #histsci Alicia came to math honestly. Her father Prof George Boole developed Boolean logic, but died 🧵

I don't think we need to give the guy who championed austerity in the UK any economic credence. Countries that ignore AI will be fine. What matters is people, not slop-machines.

On so-called "effective altruists" - those who excuse their appalling behaviour sacrificing humanity now, by claiming to aim for some imagined and delusional future utopia.

Wow, I hope 1.4% of productivity translates directly into a 1.4% increase in profit because as soon as OpenAI stops subsidizing the cost of their APIs, they're going to need every penny

One of the great myths of our society is that really rich people are rich because they are smart. They are not rich because they are smart. They are rich because are broken. Because nothing matters more to them than hording wealth. Because they lack morality, empathy, and social responsibility.

Again and again, guardrails are a scam

"DOW WITH GREENTS" "REFORS REFORS" "BRITAIN NEEDS REMARM" Dumb party (Ltd). So feeble-minded, he has to slop up a picture saying someone loves him.

📚 Now reading 📚 Henle, Mary (1976). Why study the history of psychology? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 270: 14-20. Will be compiling some quotes and thoughts over time. Pin📍or bookmark this thread if you want to follow along. 1/🧵 nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

"Gulliver [] encountered a professor whose ambition it was to create a complete body of knowledge by the random combination of all the words of his language. [] which Swift makes so patently ridiculous" AI bros should read* some decent books, engaging their minds. * NOT dumb AI summaries of them!

Excellent thread. Hits my own peeves squarely on the head, but more eloquently than I can :)

Appears the Reddit post was rage bait. bsky.app/profile/neil...

Metal disco covers don't miss youtu.be/JvuCvGUpFpA (via my friend Laura on another social media entity entirely)

Aside; thought I'd take a nose at the company website to see what this was about. Such a memory-hungry website! I've no idea what they've done to construct it, but it drives Firefox on my phone to gobble up all the memory; site runs like a slug. viture .com (space to avoid spreading the problem!)

Absolutely brilliant take-down by @fionaharvey.bsky.social of ludicrous myths & misinformation spouting from Tony Blair’s think tank. Why on earth does he think it’s sensible to make our energy more costly & less secure?

I've become increasingly wary of the Tony Blair Institute's influence and lobbying. * Avocating for a weak approach to tackling climate change, which effectively enables a slowdown or worse * Maximal FOMO approach to the worst of AI which itself hurts progress towards decarbonisation.

As a historian of biology, until a decade ago or so, I had been under the impression that we have to be sophisticated to spot the remnants of eugenics and 19th century scientific racism (e.g. Troy Duster’s idea of “backdoor eugenics”). But this kind of stuff takes us straight back to the 1920s-30s.

a stat i always cite is the number of anti-trans articles in the press went from 60 in a year, to 7,500

pure elite capture - the uk just folded to a hardline anti-trans campaign pushed by a tiny number of people www.thepinknews.com/2026/02/11/n...

Well that and they did not want their babies taken away forever in the delivery room. heatherburns.tech/2026/02/02/t...

Mate, it was 1066. Move on.

“I’ve reviewed over 50 sticky toffee puddings” is an incredibly powerful way to begin a video