There is so much real estate contained inside mirrors and whoever works out how to monetise that will become richer than God (or drastically collapse the real estate market).

This is worth reading: interaktiv.br.de/ki-bewerbung...

This is so embarrassing. I'd laugh if this weren't used in the wild with real nefarious consequences. I'm disappointed they didn't even try to add animal pictures to their training dataset to give their classification accuracy a boost.

I had a fun time teaching this paper this year: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Would Mahmood Mamdani get to list Zohran in an academic impact case study? I suppose he's already tenured so it's less of an issue.

The epigraph for @travislacroix.bsky.social‘s new book is quite good. And I thought Dune was just about magic worms and stuff.

Might be of interest to philosophy of medicine people: www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/assista...

British Philosophy of Mind: “Appearing-as as an Efficient Cause of Seeing-that” American Philosophy of Mind: “New evidence for hierarchical structure in visual working memory”

It's that time of the cycle. If you've ever assigned something I've written, please say. Even if you're using it as an example of how not to do philosophy, it can all go in the impact file :)

Reading Quine's review of Ways of Worldmaking by Nelson Goodman.

I just realised that Star Trek fans might be a bit confused when they hear Irish people talking about Section 31 www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

Just flagging that Herbie Hancock's non-vocoder lectures are also really good: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPFX...

Monday morning, time to rise and grind!* *Cultivate wisdom and compassion.

I went back to look at the original and this is just awesome graphic design for 1850. Check out that font!

If you draw the cognitive science hexagram, Jerry Fodor appears and calls you a relativist.

I think we’re sharing our autumn pictures today.

It’s cool the way the world is indescribably beautiful but it’s also complex in a way that makes learning about it intellectually rewarding

At some point, things are going to get so bad we’ll have to choose someone to go to Enya’s castle to petition her to write a song so beautiful it can heal the world again.

A permanent post in my department. Closing date Dec 14th 2025, interviews in March. Please spread #histsci

Say what you like about Isildur, he supported a lot of work in the field of One Ring alignment.

So Halloween is finally over. You know what this means? It’s time to listen to Richard Lewontin’s 1990 Massey Lectures, Biology as Ideology: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni8k...

This is a staggeringly impressive arrangement and performance (the album came out today): www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxqN...

Just imagined a kind of person that loads of people would enjoy getting angry at but I'm keeping them to myself.

That's a turnip for the books

Happy Halloween! Don’t forget, the first translation of the Communist Manifesto into English began with “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe”.

This is a really great read that I’m going to be thinking about quite a bit!

There's a proof of the existence of God in Descartes' third meditation - but it is strewn with obstacles

This is a really great read that I’m going to be thinking about quite a bit!

Prompted by @fintanmallory.com's paper on LLMs as stochastic measuring devices, I propose adopting a metrologist's view of machine learning in general -- it's all measurement systems, always has been. realizable.substack.com/p/the-metrol...

Oetker is the name of the monster

I'm going to miss this man a lot. The best vote I ever cast.

If only the Springer Proof Editor was aligned with our values, then this wouldn’t be an issue. If it had values and they were our values as well. Then there wouldn’t be a problem here.

Springer Proof Editor really is a fascinating waking nightmare of software. It's like an art project about the psychic harms of bad design.

The words ‘orectic’, ‘erotetic’, and ‘erotic’ are just an accident waiting to happen. Like storing rat poison in the cupboard with your baking supplies. Or if not poison, viagra.

Three things regarding the Irish Famine I worked out for my book, which I don't think have been noticed before. 1. Over the Famine years the landlord share of agricultural production, seized in rent, went up by one-quarter, from 28.5% to 36.14%.

Wait, there's a Harvey Mudd College?!?!

Going to hunt down Dracula to ask him what it’s like to be a bat.

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Hold on, most of these TV tropes are just TV universals?!?!

The 24th of October was the 40th anniversay of the death of László Bíró who invented the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, the Biro.

Perfect film for a rainy sunday afternoon and available on Youtube (without ads): www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEui...

I'm enjoying the David Harvey at 90 series that Verso are running: www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/h...

So this is really 15 different questions compressed into one and thanks to everyone for helping to tease them apart! So many people are doing cool work :)

Do flavourings have representational content? For example, does ethyl methylphenylglycidate (commonly used for strawberry flavour) *represent* strawberries?

Playing with my nieces and happy to report that Screwball Scramble Level 2 lives up to the standard of the original.

Autumn in Durham

Can't deny that part of me doesn't want Connolly to get over 50% of the first preferences just because I love PR-STV so much and it would be a shame not to count transfers.

Wonder if anyone's written on the aesthetic category little-guy-does-thing-he-loves. Gould's 55 Goldberg recording has the energy of an enthusiastic kid showing you their collection of rocks. Chris Thile is the modern version of this. You're just drawn in: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFTD...

'New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.' 1/2

In the Exorcist, the doctors have a justified true belief that an exorcist can help Regan. It's justified because they think it will work as a placebo and address Regan’s mental health problems. But Regan actually is possessed by a demon and the exorcist does help.