Yes very much this. Science really isn't in danger of valuing the "big names" too much. Yes researchers who make them should get admiration for extraordinary discoveries, but too often that tips over to harmful hero worship.

N'oubliez pas: l'hexadécimal B6 se prononce «dizante-seize» sauf chez les Belges où c'est «onzante-six».

This seems likely true from some research we have ongoing as well. One persistent problem the NHS has is it's held to a punishing standard of "efficiency" where it's always running at close to capacity, but any operations researcher will tell you run at 80% or so. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

please don't @ me like "actually cerium is unique among the lanthanides for its +4 oxidation state" ⚗️🧪 #chemsky

It's unacceptable the way that Archaea have been written out of the history of science in this way.

Operator algebra is beautiful, as argued here. Somehow I feel about the statement [d/dx, x] = 1 the way many feel about Euler's identify. bristoliver.substack.com/p/ai-symmetr...

Obviously this graph is tongue-in-cheek, but the situation where there's a significant avoidable blip downwards due to some of the dubious funding and investment arrangements around AI having their bubble burst seems at least to be worth visualising too.

The rapid growth in Mendelian randomization studies. Gibran Hemani, Stefan Stender, Frank J. Wolters, Albert Hofman & George Davey Smith. European Journal of Epidemiology. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

If you go on there, it's full of MPs and journos saying perfectly normal things, then underneath there's a stream of clearly illegal and vile hate speech worse than the 70s. Yet the reaction is sort of... puzzlement? And I'm like, you can see this right? Right? (2/2) news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

Earliest camera image of Salford: photograph of the former Salford Town Hall at Bexley Square taken in 1856 showing the Crimean War 'Peace Celebrations' (photographer unknown).

💯. Got induction because of air quality inside our home and climate benefits, but now I like it so much better for cooking. Like, I don’t ever want a gas stove again. Ever.

📣 University of Liverpool Fellowship opportunities ❓ Have AI-focused research ideas in health protection data science, mathematical epidemiology and/or infectious disease modelling? #IDsky #OneHealth 💬 Please contact for further discussion! ⏰ Outline application deadline: 23:59, 01 Dec 2025.

It's not going to be easy for New York and Mamdani to stand up to Trump but there's a few billion of us around the world cheering you on.

Question: If a previously public access research dataset is no longer online because of Trump cuts, could there be ethical issues with doing research on previously downloaded versions of the data? I would think there's actually an ethical imperative to do such work, but ethics isn't always easy.

People can and should have nice things. If someone writes a report saying "we build transport that is too nice and that's why projects are expensive and that's why we don't build more of them" then not only should their analysis be discarded as junk but they should be pilloried.

This - but also, every actual nerd (which Musk is fundamentally not) knows Tolkein meant the Shire to be the pre-industrial West Midlands, like Worcestershire and Warwickshire, and Mordor represented the impact of environmentally destructive industrialisation in that region.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Doesn't everyone do this? Although that's the point of the event documented in the very funny thread ofc.

If here brings in a "dislike" button I'd also like a "chin up and keep posting even if some pricks are being mean to you" button to hammer please.

Whatever else comes out once the attack on the ECML train last night, this alone is a credit to the train crew, driver, and signalling team. Huntingdon was the first possible stop. In a highly stressful situation and improvising a plan the train lost just 3 minutes vs line speed to get there.

My general theory is that most "official" social media outlets are quietly dropping explicit promotion of X in favour of here and Threads, but at the same time know that video-dominated media like Instagram and TikTok is currently most important anyway.

My "Andrew Formerly Known as Prince Minor Indignity" story is we went to a concert at the Manchester Monastery, which displays photos of all the great and the good who helped in its recent restoration, including all the Royals in a line except him. Mick Hucknall off of Simply Red is there instead.

The first (1955) Danish edition of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. Later editions did not convert the title, so this is the only SI-compatible edition! 🎢

Fun new mural at 吃吧 in Piccadilly, which for some reason they translate as the unidiomatic but charming "Do Eat" rather than "Let's Eat" or "Eat Up".

I want to, and do, pay for journalism directly. The issue is none of us can afford all the great articles written if we pay per-brand rather than per-article; I want to top up X per month via my browser and pay Y per article, then by all means track me and upsell to per-brand if I read enough.

Absolutely this. As my paternal grandmother was dying, the most important message she wanted to convey to me in moments of clarity was, "Make sure there is never another war". The World Wars created a deep traumatic scar through the generations that experienced them, jingoism came much later.

The British media: When child sex offences are committed by an asylum seeker: "we should deport all asylum seekers just in case" When child sex offences are committed by a member of the royal family: "we'll stop calling him 'Prince'"

Women's rights activists Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst (Manchester Libraries).

Public transport investment usually has a return on investment of 4:1 (for every £1 invested, the economy grows by £4), but done well it can do even better than that Great example here

The British Royal family are one of the strongest examples of why Chesterton's Fence is wrong: Their history is so long literally no-one can know it all, but they're an obvious anachronism and as Andrew shows, a far from harmless one.

No no No no no no No no no no No no No thing beside remains! Techno techno techno techno!

Leeds United, street football team, Burley, 1962, photo by Paul Berriff.

"The Perfect Neighbor" documentary movie shows this point about the disaster of "Stand your ground" laws very vividly.

1/ @juniper-network.bsky.social runs a seminar series Wednesday 14:00-15:00 (UK time) during academic term-time 🎤 Talks on interdisciplinary topics related to interface between modelling, infectious disease control & public policy 🔗 maths.org/juniper/semi... 🧵 summary of talks from Sep/Oct 2025

JOB: Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 using a very large dataset of more than 120,000 viral genomes generated as part of the ONS Covid Survey in Prof Katrina Lythgoe's Ecology and Evolution of Viruses Research Group. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

A special collection of 6 papers on cohort studies in China is just out in @bmj.com www.bmj.com/collections/... with an editorial on the collection and the current publication climate www.bmj.com/collections/...

I just don't think it's acceptable behaviour for a WebApp to require you to clear cookies to function - being logged out of everything is a massive pain, and unless there's some technical thing I'm missing it's unclear why it's necessary.

Multi-"limbed" movement underwater never quite looks intuitive to me - it must have been honed by millennia of evolution but the way this, cephalopods etc. move is always surprising (and indeed why would a bipedal primate have any sensible intuitions for this in the first place).

Interesting - Bluesky definitely a signifixant player in #IDSky community Comparable share of #IDWeek2025 activity between Bluesky & X reflects recent debate in @cmicomms.bsky.social by @germhuntermd.bsky.social & @drneilstone.bsky.social on merits of 2 platforms www.cmi-comms.org/article/S295...

The Love Tank urges continued mpox vaccination uptake as new European cases identified. www.thelovetank.info/news/mpox

Made by Holborn Trades Council, the leaflet survived as part of the Trades Union Congress archives Author Peter Abrahams, future organiser of the 5th Pan-African Congress in Manchester, spoke at the protest meeting advertised on the leaflet's other side cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/coll...

I can confirm that the English are still drunkards and have tails. sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/vitry...

I built an MCMC painter! I'm excited to share this project I've been working on for a long time, which sits at the intersection of computational statistics and generative art; mcmcPainter! Link here: mcmcpainter.davidhodgson.me

Adverts are the purest form of capitalism, advertisers don't give a shit about political correctness or representing society they just want to sell as much crap as humanly possible. We have multicultural ads because most normal people like you and me quite like that and will buy stuff on that basis

It can be useful to use author order to signal things - the main convention is earlier means more hands-on, later means more supervisory - but putting numerical weights on different positions is meaningless, the work doesn't appear without the whole team.

"Park or Pirk" I mumble to myself while squinting, "then Wii or Wai, what might that mean?", which is a lot of effort when the Urdu writing is just a direct transliteration of the adjacent English for the shop, "Park Way".

the reason slowed down pop music works so well in horror films is because we all remember the horror of hearing the full version of babylon zoo's 'spaceman' for the first time.

My only Lucy Powell insight now she's deputy leader is if you email her you get a response from the address "[email protected]"

Petition for more counterexamples to plausible mathematical conjectures to contain the word "Nope". This is very cool in other ways too ofc. www.quantamagazine.org/first-shape-...