This was great fun to record and challenging and fascinating, but honestly I still don’t know what conscious is - beyond an emergent property of a network - and I’m not even sure @anilseth.bsky.social agrees with that :-)

Join the live studio audience at the recording of our new podcast, A Question of Science 🎙️ On 21 March, we’re talking all things ageing with @statto.bsky.social, Paul Nurse, Linda Partridge and Lynne Cox. Book your free ticket to put your questions to the panel ⤵️ lostintv.com/aqos.htm

In person tickets are full, but online viewers still very welcome for tomorrow's Gresham lecture.

🚨🚨 "Brexit makes no sense in a world dominated by Trump. Britain’s place is back in the EU". Great column by @jonathanfreedland.bsky.social on #brexit and the election of Donald Trump which I think has been widely misconstrued in some quarters. /1 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I would add that Labour’s relaunch reads as a list of policies they would like to enact if the plan works. But I don’t see a plan. In 2025 (in my view) they will have to either set the country on trajectory to rejoin SM and CU or align more closely with US. Rudderless mid-Atlantic is unsustainable.

"Chris Rea is from Middlesbrough. This means that Driving Home For Christmas is essentially a song about being stuck in a traffic jam on the A1(M)." Anyway, it's December, and you know what that means.

Spent the day at Boulby Underground Lab near Whitby - 1.1km underground. Dark matter searches, neutrino physics, very low cosmic ray and background radiation suitable for (amongst many other things) quantum computing. It’s a pretty unique facility and the mine is remarkable - over 100km of tunnels!

I finally started watching The Last of Us (I know I’m very late) and now I’m paranoid about getting athletes foot.

This is really good bsky-follow-finder.theo.io

The best thing about this image: the night side of Saturn. It’s not totally dark. Why not? Because it’s vaguely lit by light that has reflected from the rings. If you could somehow stand on the top of Saturn’s clouds, when it’s night, your world would be brightly lit by the huge yellow arc of rings.

Good morning! If you've found my 'UK news and politics' starter pack useful to get you up and running on @bsky.app, please spread the word to new users by giving this a repost. Cheers! go.bsky.app/VNsC9bL

And one last picture of my cat, just to round off this initial short series of physics and cat posts, this time with my radiator also in shot.

Here’s a picture of my cat asleep with its feet on its head. I can’t do this.

I’ve been lecturing today at Manchester - special relativity - and for no good reason other than I want to post stuff here, here’s my lecture notes introducing the concept of invariant mass :-)

I am going to start following people by the way - just getting started :-)

I saw Bob Dylan last night at The Royal Albert Hall - it was wonderful. They made everyone put their phones in little bags so they couldn’t be used. I was ambivalent initially but the result was wonderful. Everybody just listened and the audience was dark. I think it’s a good thing. Thoughts?

Right. Hello. Is this place any good?