Currently getting plenty of good evidence that the 'adults in the room' did have some kind of positive effect last time round, though admittedly suboptimal that we're only receiving that confirmation from their replacement by fully paid up fascists and cranks on this occasion.

www.ft.com/content/4f09... Genuinely hard to overstate how much of a strategic defeat it would be for the United States if the war ends with effective Iranian control of the Strait.

There is no surer political principle than Hubris will tend to be visited by Nemesis.

This is so true about so many things - I feel it professionally as a history teacher. Always knew Whig history was bullshit but goodness me.

A lot of these warmongers live either outside the U.K. or inside the UK in gated communities that you could barely find on Google Maps. Quite a few of them will have stocks in defence companies. So they’re just sitting at home safe and increasingly richer, smugly smiling as human beings burn alive.

This is exactly what I've been arguing - AI cannot possibly 'do' history in any meaningful sense because history is fundamentally a human endeavour. Without being able to understand and question the basis of interpretations the discipline collapses (or becomes something else entirely)

Reading comprehension is not a skill. It’s an outcome of what you know. Strategies plateau. Knowledge compounds. lnkd.in/e-P9uNE2

I for one would simply legislate that everything should be fine

Could really do with Trump just, like, falling over or something - sounds daft but it'd cut through in a way that his bizarre words just don't seem to any more

Universities embracing generative AI be like:

I have never seen a photo that looks more like a @coldwarsteve.bsky.social - is Cilla peeping out from behind the curtains?

Genuinely genuinely mad stuff

Getting rid of Nuno to institute a more exciting style of football and six weeks later ending up with Dyche is absolutely peak football ownership 👌

The BBC are accidentally running the subtitles to Mrs Marple over the Mercury Prize, and it’s rather wonderful. A few of lines could plausibly have been written by Jarvis.

I hate saying anything to do with politics these days because it seems that things can always be worse. Notwithstanding that, however, it feels to me that in time it might turn out the current US regime are very much overreaching.

A great many more people protested the plight of Sheffield Wednesday this month than have attended any protest against asylum hotels www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This Trump/Putin press conference is unlikely to age that well (which would be a good thing tbf)

People seem convinced AI can do everyone else’s job. Not theirs though. (Because anyone who knows the process / output of their work at a skilled level can see it’s not really doing it.) Which is scary, cos the people deciding that we can be replaced by AI aren’t us. It’s people who can’t tell.

This is my go-to argument to kids at school. Realise that people subcontracting out the ability to think, to know, to argue will lead to these qualities being ever more prized, not less.

Obligatory

Captain Tom's daughter Michelle Mone John Darwin Matt Goodwin ABBA Voyage Greensill Capital Whoever is running the Larry the Cat account EU Supergirl Salt Path lady LinkedIn Premium

Neil Young's Cortez The Killer appeared in a particularly memorable 'music in the history classroom' session during my PGCE

I'm not so bothered about regime change to install liberal democratic, pro-western governments in Russia or Iran but it sure would be nice to have liberal democratic, pro-western governments in the west

Still true: *Britain is a success story *Most of its cities are doing astonishingly well *Multiculturalism is popular *Mass immigration has not led to social disintegration *Nostalgia is increasingly weird *Britain is incredibly safe *Levels of social cohesion are high Don't let them gaslight you.

I'm all for a bit of Funky Captaincy but electing to bowl on a road on the hottest day of the year is possibly a bit too funky for my taste.

I wrote a new piece on how much progress has been made in treating childhood leukemia. The answer is: quite a lot! Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed survived 5 years after diagnosis. Now most are cured and around 85% survive that long. ourworldindata.org/childhood-le...

This reminded me of when I had several noise complaints made against me. Left my room and accidentally switched my Tiny PC with subwoofer to max volume and subjected 3 floors and 2 blocks of Ranmoor halls of residence to the 'Alan Partridge Happy Hardcore' screensaver for 4 hours.

NEW POST on AI, learning and why knowing stuff still matters. carlhendrick.substack.com/p/the-most-i...

We are going to regret this so much. The best AI strategy for schools will be to lean away from it as far as they can to preserve the philosophy they are about people knowing and doing things. schoolsweek.co.uk/school-ai-to...

Oh one final thing. Dr. Wong's syllabus, which really is awesome, leads off with this quote: “It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing." — Sofya Kovalevskaya

That single sentence contains more insight than the entire AI-generated summary I've had fun tearing apart here. And everyone who works in the education division of OpenAI would do well to sit and think about what it means, and what education is for, what math is for.

Bill Bryson's Notes on a Small Island perfectly capture's pre-GPS life in the UK

The discourse that's broken out on knowledge/skills tonight reminds me of that Jim Al-Khalili piece in the Graun where a literal professor of theoretical physics suggests 'knowledge' isn't really that important. Very easy to overlook when you take it as read/find it easy.

And, while I’m here, it always strikes me as odd that people complain of “Victorian schooling” training people for factories (i.e. workplaces) in one breath and then talk of schools needing to prepare kids for jobs (that don’t exist yet) in the next.

*Of course* school prepares children for their futures, but not by being a mini workplace. It’s by giving them a breadth of foundational knowledge and experience across the big, enduring disciplines and human pursuits. The kinds of things they won’t get chance to learn about or experience at work.

Creativity is domain specific - the more knowledge you have about a subject, the more creative you can be in that subject. You can't teach 'creativity' independently.

It isn't possible to design a school system where everyone leaves with the skills needed for the workplace because *they're all going to do different jobs*. Workplace training needs to be done by employers.

Why are they reporting it like it's a paramilitary coup?

Today my Year 9 class were doing a little bit of extension work researching a revolution of their choice, having studied 1789 and 1917 recently. I was watching them on the teacher console app that allows me to view screens & immediately noticed a few were clearly using generative AI... (1/?)

I went to a private Waldorf high school in the 2000s that was filled with the children of tech professionals - who explicitly wanted a lower-tech education for them. Many tech execs believe in careful exposure to tech for their kids, while also thinking AI teaching is fine for the great unwashed.

Why is the government and the news so indifferent to the meltdown happening in UK #HigherEd right now? Our universities are the envy of the world. Yet we are at risk of losing a generation of academics and damaging the sector beyond repair.

Madness. These exports help fund our own students and funnel £ into the university towns and cities outside London. We should be looking to expand capacity to take in foreign students who would previously have chosen the US.

Setting tariffs is not some presidential power set out in US constitution. Congress has delegated this power to Trump, and Congress can take it back. This ultimately is about Congressional weakness as about Presidential madness. This problem has a constitutional solution, if Congress wants it.

He never misses!

Deeply strange entering middle-age at a time in world history where things are getting measurably worse. Just a continual psychic struggle of “is this fogeyism or are things just not what they used to be?”

A preview of the days action in the Pitching In Northern Premier League