Hmmmm.

Well, that's us fucked, then.

The simplest definition of "enshittification" is this: Google has made it ridiculously difficult to google things and get a genuinely useful result.

I’m reminded of how, thirty odd years ago, I applied for AHRC funding for a project on science and culture in nineteenth century Ireland. The reviewers were unanimous that there was nothing there to study. Good to see that times have changed!

So the pusillanimity of institutions like the Royal Society or the National Academy of Sciences have no bearing on the erosion of trust? Or the bleating of self appointed leaders about keeping politics out of science?

Why can't they just analyse their data? Why is any computation or statistics called AI now?

There's no 'if' about it, surely. Bursting is what bubbles do.

posted by a friend who is Professor of Molecular Biophysics. PM me if you have any ideas and want to be put in touch.

We had a bit of a pumpkin crop this year.

Good to see someone involved in the field describing the techbro fantasies as “bullshit”. But note the link between this nonsense and eugenicist ideas from Altman. These people are rich, stupid and influential, which = dangerous.

Actually, folks, this is not phrenology (feeling the bumps on the skull) as people are saying in comments, it is physiognomy en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiog... a similarly exploded 'science'. (What it is to be C19th quackery nerd.)

New issue alert! ‘Nineteenth-Century Visual Technologies in Contemporary Practices’, guest edited by Gülru Çakmak and Patricia Smyth is now freely available online at 19.bbk.ac.uk. @openlibhums.org

Nos Galan.

This should make for an interesting year. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Machlud haul yn Aberystwyth/Aberystwyth sunset.

Y gwir yn erbyn y byd. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The beloved BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time has been awarded the 2025 British Academy President’s Medal! Professor Susan J Smith, President of the British Academy, praised the programme for bringing rigorous yet accessible discussion of complex ideas to millions of listeners: buff.ly/1bn63FD

SCIENCE RELIGION AND THE HUMAN FUTURE (Oxford UP) available Jan 16! So grateful to fabulous co-authors Charlotte Sleigh & David Wilkinson who stepped up after the dreadful loss of Tom McLeish (plus new jobs for other authors): book would not be here without them! @eclasproject.bsky.social

Still going cheap. You can't afford NOT to buy at this price!

I'm pleased to share the news that I have recently begun a term as co-editor of the British Journal for the History of Science (BJHS), working together with the now editor-in-chief, the brilliant Amanda Rees @amandarees.bsky.social.

Still going cheap. Hurry - it can’t last!

And if you happened to leave some nice reviews, I wouldn't mind at all!

Oh, and there's a bridge in Brooklyn we'd like to sell you, too.

UK readers: if you want to buy a hardback HTVTUTTM at a paperback price, Amazon currently have it at a whopping 68% off. Worth it for the amazing dust-jacket alone:

Entirely agree.

UK readers: if you want to buy a hardback HTVTUTTM at a paperback price, Amazon currently have it at a whopping 68% off. Worth it for the amazing dust-jacket alone:

Fascinating Aberystwyth connection to this story:

Rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expressions in the murderer's face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean. That's Matthew Clydesdale's corpse being electrified by Andrew Ure in 1818!

Which history departments in particular? The ones being closed at a terrifying and unstoppable rate, the ones losing their funding or…?

This is a massive fail. "We made errors here" does not begin to cover it. www.techdirt.com/2025/09/02/w...

Old but still relevant - possibly even more so now. I should update this.

“Why tradwives aren’t trad”. Delighted to feature in @prospectmagazine.co.uk today. Read online here: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society/hist... #Economica #womenwealthpower

Well I've voted calcite. I don't think David Brewster's ghost would forgive me if I didn't.

Ok who the fork thinks our job is to product “ideological…foot-soldiers”?

I spent some of the morning being interviewed about Harry Grindell Matthews, Death Ray inventor. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) topical as it turns out. So watch this space.

I was always awe-struck whenever I met him on the few occasions I was on a IOT panel. Difficult to imagine who could replace him.

Why Ai can't write my book. It's sycophantic, can't break with pattern recognition, flat, sad, it can't simulate emotional acuity, personality or experience on the ground. on.ft.com/47k2y5v

Now published! For anyone with an interest in solitary waves, steam carriages, canals, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the contest for the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 1838, or late-Georgian shenanigans generally: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Very very good letter in the FT magazine this morning pinpointing what humans definitely do when we “learn” and why machine LLM “learning” isn’t that. (And also why LLMs take up so much more energy than we do for thinking.)

@networkgender.bsky.social (FGEN)’s statement about Newnham College excluding trans women from its scholarships.

AI is not meaningfully intelligent. It certainly isn’t sentient. This isn’t a question, let alone an ‘unsettling’ one.

I suppose this is the point when I should say again that: the amount of money the videogames industry brings into the UK economy every year is *more than double* the value of the fishing and steel industries *combined* what this country is really good at is producing culture

I think we’ve stumbled onto the lost city of R’lyeh!

It seems Pepper’s Ghost is alive and kicking.

13th August 1831 📅 Richard Lewis (Dic Penderyn) was publicly executed at Cardiff Gaol for the part he played in the Merthyr Rising 🚩 His last words were: "O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd." - "Oh Lord, here is iniquity." biography.wales/article/s-LE... #Wales #History

At the Eisteddfod last week. Talking about how thinking about the future needs to start with history.

‘We’re the party of ambition’: Plaid Cymru sets out to topple Labour

Dydd Llun yn Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Wrecsam! Ymunwch â ni yn y pentref Gwyddoniaeth a Thechnoleg i ddathlu degawd o gyfrolau cyfres Gwyddonwyr Cymru, yng nghwmni @elinrhys.bsky.social, Gareth Ffowc Roberts, @irmorus.bsky.social a Deri Tomos. Manylion isod, croeso cynnes i bawb! #Steddfod2025

Dewch yn llu/Come along! Dathlu degawd o'r gyfres Gwydonwyr Cymru/Celebrating a decade of the Scientists of Wales series. Os fyddwch chi yn yr Eisteddfod ddydd Llun, dyma'r lle i fod/If you're at the Eisteddfod on Monday, here's where you should be: