This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Yes! If we want people to listen to science, then don’t put it all behind a bloody paywall.

I've shared this quote before but I'll share it again, as it's one I've been thinking about a lot as I've watched how our oligarchs have been behaving over the past few months.

Apparently The Rapture is scheduled for Tuesday...if you can confirm this do let me know...and I'll spend the next couple of days in bed instead of packing for the undergrad field course I'm supposed to be teaching from Wednesday. 😁

Interesting isn't it, MPs who have well paid jobs can claim for free vehicles, travel, rent, energy, heating and much, much more. But Disabled People who can't work and claim a fraction of that are scumbags ripping the system off. Perhaps these MPs don't own mirrors?

I'll bite. Furthest I've been: N: North Pole* S: Weddell Sea (63.5S), on land, Signy Island (60.7S) E: East China Sea (127.25E), on land, Taiwan** W: Utqiagvik, Alaska (156.78W)** *twice, 3rd time coming up in a couple of weeks. **But having circled the N. Pole, furthest E & W are both 180!😁

so. remember how in the past people got enough exercise just from doing their job & daily tasks? & now all jobs are screens & we have to *deliberately exercise* to stay healthy? from now we will have to *deliberately write* and *engage with art made for a wide audience* to keep our brains healthy.

Newspapers should have to declare what corner of the bullshit multiverse they’re writing from on the masthead. It’s very confusing getting these updates from totally bonkers eigenstates and trying to reconcile them with observable reality.

Today, I am reminded of my Barnsley friend Glenn, who, when unable to recall the name of the “me too” movement because of a few light shandies, called it “thee n’all.” ‘Appy Yerkshire day, tha daft bamcakes. #YorkshireDay

This is very good. This is a man writing about being a man in the way Caitlin Moran writes about being a woman, and I mean that as great compliment.

This didn't go where I expected. I thought the dude was going to say he could make LLMs generate output without prompts after about 50,000 prompts, a kind of LLM telepathy. But instead, he seems to have discovered how to think.

This is brilliant The largest language model anyone could ever need - with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/t...

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

American journalists have a lot to learn from Scotland.

Great excitement yesterday, discovering that in addition to the big fella, we have a wee hedgehoglet in the garden too!

Have you seen people pushing this figure, which purports to show that renewable energy raises energy costs? It's BS, as I explain in my latest on The Climate Brink #energysky 🔌💡 www.theclimatebrink.com/p/have-renew...

Found a friend... unusual to see out and about in middle of the day.

Important thread from scientists on the ground in Svalbard: “We came ready to dig snowpits & drill frozen soils. But we sampled thawed ground, bare-handed, with a spoon 💦 We came for snow sampling. But we got rain 🌧️ It felt like we’d prepared for the Arctic of the past.”

I think I might have overdosed on tea...it's been one of those* days. *filling in the sort of online admin forms that have me shouting obscenities at my laptop and wishing plagues of locusts on whoever designed** it. **I use the word 'designed' in its loosest possible sense

Good morning from Australia. #WritingCommunity #WritersCommunity #ReadingCommunity #indieauthors #booksky #Saturday

We have decided to ban the use of GenAI for research, writing & creative work at our organization. In fact, we make people sign an agreement saying that their research, analysis, writing, and creative work are *theirs* and not done by GenAI.

I talked to a NOAA colleague yesterday who told me that 75% of the federal employees of his division have left and he’s worried about their ability to get work done even if Congress funds NOAA at some level. The devastation to science will be felt for generations.

I've been taking early walks in the park to watch and listen to birds for my sanity, and the Merlin Bird ID app has been indispensable for identifying bird songs. Merlin was funded by a grant from the NSF, the science funding agency that Trump is trying to destroy. www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

Mike Harrison @mjohnharrison.bsky.social on his blog back in January. Increasingly applicable beyond just phones, I feel.

Every morning I wake up and check the news to see how many people have been killed overnight in Gaza, wondering when the world will decide to bring it to an end. It feels very hopeless, and writing a song to call it out seems like a very small thing. Anyway, that's what we did.

Exhibition news. 1) I have a number of etchings on show at the Zillah Bell Gallery in Thirsk, North Yorkshire as part of their Summer Exhibition, running until August 2. www.zillahbellgallery.co.uk/collections/...

OH MY GOD, NO… 🙄 The current systems of the Southern Ocean did NOT reverse. Not even close. This was all based on a b.s. press release — not a scientific paper — that is wildly, absurdly wrong. www.newsweek.com/fact-check-o...

Lol

Please be alien overlords.

yet another email from an academic asking me to fill out forms granting their publisher permission to use screenshots of my web-based work in an article which cites other academics who have incorporated unattributed phrases and entire sentences of my own writing about my own work. this happens a lot

A Texas boy needed protection from measles. The vaccine cost $1,400. Insurance did not cover the cost of vaccinations. Profits came before people. Yet this is the system that Farage/Reform, neoliberals want in the UK Defend the NHS, or risk bankruptcy and poor health. archive.ph/noB9w

Proposed NOAA budget zeros out ALL climate laboratories and cooperative institutions. GFDL, NSSL, GML, etc. This appears to also end the US greenhouse gas sampling network, including at Mauna Loa, the oldest continuous carbon dioxide monitoring site on Earth. www.commerce.gov/sites/defaul...

More funding cut because of the word trans appearing in "transgenic" or "transmission." This has been happening in the sciences for a while now, seemingly because the DOGE team is familiar with the UNIX grep command and little else.

What a tragedy this is even being proposed on paper... 💔 NOAA FY2026 Congressional Justification: www.noaa.gov/sites/defaul...

Feministly arguing that people assigned male at birth are innately better at strategy games than those assigned female at birth. Sensational women’s rights movement you’ve got there.

Feeding time for a fledgling blackbird that settled outside the studio window the other evening.

I may have contributed to the coming forecast apolcalypse... ...sorry about that

The view of someone who has never read a book for pleasure, been moved by a song, thrilled by a movie, stopped in their tracks by a painting, and wouldn't recognise a poem if it kicked them up the arse. What a fucking pitiful view of culture.

So... agony aunt style question...my wife @barbedbrooks.bsky.social just dropped a ginger biscuit in her mug of tea...and fished the sodden mass out with a tea spoon...and ate it! Should I be looking for a divorce lawyer?

I am trying to prepare a couple of new lectures, updating an undergrad module on climate change processes...and *every* time I check in here, there are posts on new papers that are relevant and I need to read. Could you all maybe just stop until I'm done...?

Do bubbles matter for ocean carbon uptake? 🌊🫧 Yes, especially for local CO2 fluxes, where wave breaking can enhance variability by up to 40%. That’s an important consideration for #mCDR, where fluxes could otherwise be miscalculated. More in our paper here: [https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GB008382]

🚨 Monday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the *lowest* on record (JAXA data) • about 350,000 km² below the 2010s mean • about 1,010,000 km² below the 2000s mean • about 1,590,000 km² below the 1990s mean • about 2,150,000 km² below the 1980s mean More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

In use at many UK universities right now

A warning to people with Academia.edu accounts (as most academics do): if you don't know it yet, they've turned into AI shills. As well as this "podcast", they've also tried to sell me AI-compiled bibliographies. You can go to settings and opt out easily, and I recommend you do.

Wow. That’s fascinating. (Also, obviously, bad.) www.edtechinnovationhub.com/news/mit-stu...

It is really really sinking in for me the degree to which LLMs are the ultimate expression of right wing anti-intellectualism. Its proponents are literally mocking the idea that anyone would ever want to learn anything, know anything, develop any actual skill, or have a thought of their own.

Alaska just hit a climate milestone — its first-ever heat advisory. Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the global average. grist.org/extreme-heat...

What are the current and future environmental impacts of data centres/AI? Who is responsible - companies or individuals? This week's Rare Earth (on BBC R4 at 12:04 and available online afterwards) got pretty lively as we dug into it all. One not to miss! www.bbc.co.uk/progra...

READING 10am Fri 13th Jun Whiteknights Campus

The last 15 years have seen a big, unexpected drop in the Emperor penguin population in Antarctica 🐧 BAS Wildlife from Space lead / cartographer / penguin expert @ptfretwell.bsky.social explains how this research was conducted, and what seems to be going on ⬇️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjgr...