Embroidering a weird little eye for no reason that I can readily explain, except that arts and crafts are good for the soul and I need something to occupy my mind when I’m taking writing breaks.

We need humanities more than ever in the age of AI ft.trib.al/SDdQK9q | opinion

This is an extremely perceptive, thought-provoking piece that will resonate for anyone that has worked in, or had responsibility for managing, university research.

'Dundee’s is the only philosophy programme in Scotland specialising in European “continental” philosophy....The overall programme draws women at a ratio of roughly two to one over men, already far above the discipline’s national average and rising to three to one for the art and philosophy BA.' 1/3

deeply annoying that creative breakthroughs don’t come on schedule from direct work but from things like “open-ended conversations with interesting people” and “doing nothing”

LLMs support authoritarianism, who’d have thought it?

Editor in Chief of Science: AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive.

Even the teleprompter guy is corrupt. The #Trump season 2 writers are now just phoning it in… #Trumpland #USCorruption

Wow. This is good news. A new journal, the Canadian Journal of Political Philosophy journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/CJPP

I've been watching these projections with mounting dread for a while. There is potentially a serious reduction in the pool of students universities can recruit from coming in only a few years. Combined with continued restrictions on international students, it's yet more bad news for universities.

I wish more was done by unis to educate their fee paying customers on what is going on. Which is: the gov't used to subsidize/fund your Sweet Darling's university place. They don't anymore. So now you need to pay it yourselves & it's not actually even enough money to properly educate your S.D.

Congratulations to the government on saving 2700 jobs by nationalising British Steel. Now, about the 18,000 university jobs lost in the last 18 months, with more coming…

Palantir, not only a deeply unethical company led by democracy denying psychopaths, but it’s products are also unusable #PalantirKills www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

'Research from the British Academy shows that graduates in the arts, humanities and social sciences are just as likely to be employed as their STEM counterparts. They are equally resilient during economic downturns and more likely to move between sectors without wage penalties.' 1/3

This is interesting. It seems to have become much worse since 2016.

Hopefully this means they retire Wonderwall.

The US is a hostile foreign power. In case any of our political leaders hadn’t realised. Accepting this cash should not be legal.

My feed suggests that the racist team is winning. Sad times.

‘The most beautiful thing we can experience…is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’ - perfect.

He has never forgiven windmills for being visible from his Scottish golf clubs & for the fact that he lost a legal case over it. Eleven years later he’s still vengeful. Infinite loser energy.

Another excellent example of just how incurious and limited the UK press has been about this crisis. Not one mention of the cuts to humanities that Bristol’s own VC is trying to push through at the moment in this article about her position on the cuts 🤔🙄. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

So now Marco's campaign against the ICC becomes clear. He knows what we're going to do and he knows that the ICC will bring charges.

I suppose we can be thankful that Falklands related hatred means that the Argentina team probably hasn’t cooked up a racist song to sing about the England team. I don’t care about this World Cup, but I hope that bunch of racists get spanked.

Of course FIFA & Infantino have decided to hold a 30 minute half-time show during the World Cup final. How else could they get extra advertising revenue? Utter cocks. It would super if world football were governed by people who loved football more than they loved infinite suitcases full of cash.

This opinion is of the most correct variety.

I had to check this was real. It is (for over 30s). Hegseth continues to parade the most fragile masculinity of any man in the history of the human race.

Yeah, but apart from that....

Miliband out of Energy to water down Net Zero, Mahmood as Chancellor, ffs. Burnham doing a great job already of showing his government will be a radical improvement. Doubling down on the things their opponents like & their supporters hate, very clever 🙄.

I'm in a dialogue with a postgrad from overseas & it's becoming increasingly clear that their emails are written by an AI. I'll write 'you don't need to worry about X...', & they'll reply: 'I understand that I don't need to worry about X...' I'm finding it incredibly off-putting.

@visakurki.bsky.social gives this year's Tom Regan Memorial Lecture. To my mind it addresses one of the most important questions for animal law scholars: how to produce research that is practically useful whilst also challenging the status quo. Worth a watch! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6j3...

Woo hoo! I have managed to find an affordable first edition copy of The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. I set alerts up for this book several years ago & it’s only now that a copy has appeared. Such a great book.

This is the future the tech-billionaires want for us. It’s grim. Their vision for AI is as a means to them more power over us, including total surveillance. Ideally, they’d like to be gods, with us as their slaves. The world would be better without Meta. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Interesting listening to Labour‘s Andy MacNae on Sky discussing Net Zero. Didn’t seem that interested environmental arguments. Main interest in renewables was not having to go to other countries for energy. Nationalism getting more traction than a liveable planet amongst some in modern Labour 🤷‍♂️.

Truly eye opening @britishacademy.bsky.social report finding 42% (46,890) of the UK’s academic staff in social sciences, humanities and arts disciplines were on teaching-only contracts in 2024-25 up from 34% in 2012-13. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/loss-of...

That just leaves the misogynistic, homophobic, racist of the two foxes standing. A pity.

Coventry University uses TUPE to move staff into subsidiaries, strip them out of UCU national agreements, and refuse to recognise UCU for collective bargaining. TUPE exists to protect workers, not sidestep unions. If it's happening here, it can happen anywhere.

Even after all this, I am still kind of amazed that the great socio-political innovation of our time is just “being an asshole.”

As an academic, I have decided to pre-empt AI taking my job, so I am going to take ITS job! I am going to start hallucinating, lying to my students, and drinking 700,000 litres of water

Can Farage still pull out of his own by-election?

A thing that you do when you a) want to falsely claim to be a victim, & b) avoid police officers constantly watching because you’re a race-baiting crook, is refuse police protection.

A thing that you definitely do when you think the government isn't giving you enough security is decline all security offered. And, when you're given £5m, supposedly for security, & you fear for your life, you definitely spend the cash on several houses & no security. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I want to be writing for research & public engagement. Instead, I'm frantically working on a bid for a grant I won't win for reasons I'm not wholly sure about. When success rates are well below 10%, as well as skewed to certain subjects & topics, it all seems so pointless.

Every zoo is like: ‘We’re breeding these endangered animals to increase the worldwide population’. Except that they don’t (can’t, because they’ve domesticated them) release those animals. So, they’re just increasing a captive population, which they sell or trade with other zoos & private buyers.

The allies he refers to are dictators & war criminals. They don’t just want themselves to be immune, they want every tyrant to be immune. The common cause they seek is a lawless world where only power & violence matter. America: pro-war crime, pro-authoritarianism, pro-impunity, anti-rule of law.

Surprised Trump didn’t do this press conference wearing an eye patch, tricorn, & long coat, with a parrot on his shoulder, & the Jolly Roger raised behind him.

I guess the difference would be that war criminals don't get to avoid a trial by calling a by-election against a bin

Finally, I have a date for an initial appointment with an orthopaedic knee specialist. I’ll only have had to wait 280 days, every one of them in pain, for what will probably be a 10 minute consultation. Because the NHS is in a complete state. It has been tiring.

Making a broad bean orzotto. On the downside, two of the kids will sulk and refuse to eat it. On the upside, I'll have a broad bean orzotto.

Being asked to provide reasons why I’m wrong about LLMs was too much for this guy, he preferred to merely assert the contrary. I like the little winking face emoji after being a patronising twat though, really adds a certain something.