a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes' 1/

A short blogpost detailing my experience of censorship at the AI for Good Summit with links to both original and censored versions of slides and links to my talk aial.ie/blog/2025-ai...

RIP Helen De Cruz (1978-2025) 💔 Helen De Cruz @helendecruz.net), professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University, has died. dailynous.com/2025/06/20/h...

5 years ago every LinkedIn Dude was posting pictures of Greta Thunberg with hollow 'inspiring' messages of action on climate change and fawning about her bravery As soon as she took up the cause of Palestinians being killed they stopped

You don't have to obey anyone's framing. Calling them British Petroleum. Call it a chatbot instead of "artificial intelligence". Use real emissions, not adjusted for offsets or certificates. It's all allowed!!!

Right now there are a lot of new eyes on Signal, and not all of them are familiar with secure messaging and its nuances. Which means there’s misinfo flying around that might drive people away from Signal and private communications. 1/

I regret to information the Bluesky philosophy community that Michael Friedman, noted philosopher of science and ground-breaking historian of Kant, neo-Kantianism, and logical positivism has died. May his memory be a blessing. #philsci

The United Nations has proclaimed this year the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology because it is, allegedly, the 100th anniversary of the development of modern quantum mechanics. But what actually happened in 1925? /1 pubs.aip.org/physicstoday... #histsci #quantum2025 #histSTM

This week on the blog, I court controversy by suggesting that our understanding of history has in fact improved over the decades #history #academia salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/n...

The fetishisation of Magna Carta is bad. But the notion that the rule of law on its own is going to save you is worse. Roman Empire and medieval polities had elaborate legal systems allowing them to exploit large swathes of the population. Modern arrogance about the historical context is stunning.

Is everyone huffing paint? Crypto guy claims to have built an LLM-based tool to detect errors in research papers; funded using its own cryptocurrency; will let coin holders choose what papers to go after; it's unvetted and a total black box—and Nature reports it as if it's a new protein structure.

Theory-freedom is an incoherent ideal for scientific objectivity and one which harms the integrity of science.

Let's debunk this whole "space is hard" mantra. Looking at all NASA-led missions launched since 2000, only 4 out of ~60 missions experienced total failures. Two of these were due to issues with the commercial launch vehicle, & two were spacecraft issues. That is a *93% success rate.* (1/n)

Some AI enthusiasts fantasize about chatbots' potential future suffering. But David McNeill and Emily Tucker say there are many good reasons to reject the claim that contemporary AI research is on its way toward creating genuinely intelligent, much less conscious, machines.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat passed away today at the age of 101. She was one of the pioneers of mathematical general relativity.🧪

There isn’t enough ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel to make a dent in our emissions – and there won’t be for years theconversation.com/there-isnt-e...

in August, i went to two meetings in Iowa—one headed by the Sierra Club, one emceed by disgraced congressman Steve King—both in opposition to the same project: a proposed carbon-capture pipeline. for Drilled, my longread on the pipeline & what it says about the future of climate politics:

January 2025 was quite unexpectedly the warmest January on record at 1.75C above preindustrial, beating the prior record set in 2024. This is despite the presence of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific, with the El Niño event of 2023/2024 long faded. www.theclimatebrink....

Very happy to share the newest entry in the Elements in Philosophy of Physics series: Causation in Physics, by Christopher Weaver. This one is permanently open access, courtesy of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

still can’t believe that if i want my story to exist, i have to be the one that writes it absolutely unbelievable, if you ask me

Philosopher of physics Larry Sklar, who famously challenged "canonical" example of thermodynamics reducing to stastical mechanics has passed away. ⚛️ #philsci

There's a classic #philsci paper by Deborah Mayo (1994) on need for metascientific approach to recognizing cancer risk of formaldehyde, how DuPont studies were misleading in concl no increased risk, & how risk assessment shouldn't be separate from risk management errorstatistics.com/wp-content/u...

Hi pals. Today I wrote about the unsettling mismatches between what climate models say should be happening and what is actually happening. We're pushing the Earth past the limits of our physical understanding. This is a gift link: www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

OpenAI doesn't report a single number for its climate impacts - not anywhere, in any way, shape or form. It sounds kind of obvious but the fact that a company with such incredible electricity hunger isn't disclosing basic information about its energy consumption and associated emissions is v bad..

5 Women in Philosophy of Science You Should Know www.thecollector.com/women-philos... 🧪

Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, who translated Principia into French, was born 17 December 1706 #histsci thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/a...

Why is it bad for Coca Cola to fund and share independent, high quality research on exercise and dietary disease? In our new *Industrial Distraction* - forthcoming in Philosophy of Science - we use causal models to show how distraction techniques can mislead even rational learners #philsci

Where exactly does learning happen, where precisely is knowledge practiced? Reading both of these 👇 side by side is a delight - from the workshop to the anatomy theatre; from the library to the laboratory, science is embodied and takes place somewhere specific! (Ref in alt text) 🗃️ #earlymodern #c18

Something very important is that the environmental impact of these two different applications is very different. Companies consciously blend, confuse and muddle the two so that the extreme destructiveness of one can be justified using the nice public relations sheen of the other

An underdiscussed aspect of ecological economics is how weird Georgescu-Roegen and some of his followers are about statistical mechanics.

The problem with AI as a “replacement” for historians is that it makes up the past according to the biases that its creators are comfortable with. It is not research but simply an entrenchment of old stereotypes. It actually, in the long run, stuns progress and perpetuates disproved narratives.

should be required viewing for physics majors youtu.be/TwKpj2ISQAc?...

I am so proud of this @isisjournal.bsky.social's focus section! From @aseh.bsky.social panels in 2020 (cancelled) then 2022 in Eugene (yay!) to this really terrific introduction to scholarship working on modern #Volcano knowledge. Please share! #histsci www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Our first piece for the Alameda Institute’s upcoming dossier “Energy transitions: just and beyond” is out. I got to talk to Lala Peñaranda, from Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, about a public pathway to energy sovereignty. alameda.institute/dossier/trad...

A thread of my papers. The first was recently published with Cell Press, coauthored with Andy Smart and Abeba Birhane. It tackles the connections between epistemic deficiencies in deployed ML and ethical consequences. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It's odd that this keeps needing to be said, but science is not value-free. www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar...

Many climate scientists I know are skeptical of our ability to scale CO₂ removal.

🔥 New article alert! "Economic Models as Argumentative Devices" In this, I argue that conceiving of economic models as argumentative devices has many benefits! 📥 Download for free*: lnkd.in/dwJYUcV8 *Free as in 🍺! Beware of opportunity costs though. #philsci #econsky

This survey of 211 IPCC authors is quite interesting. Most are skeptical that warming will be limited to <2°C, or that we’ll have enough CO₂ removal (CDR) to achieve Paris targets. There’s more optimism that net zero CO₂ emissions will be reached before 2100. 🧪

Aviation emissions are booming. With climate targets looming, you would expect governments to act. And yet they don't - if anything they work to make sure that emissions increase even further. But why? The answer is in this new article, which I was honoured to help with doi.org/10.1080/0969...

Maybe our book? www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1... and our Handbook www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

"Exxon began shifting the debate from transitioning to renewables to looking at the “molecular” impact of fossil fuels - to convince politicians that it was possible to reduce the climatic impact of fossil fuels via CCS & carry on using oil for decades." www.theguardian.com/business/art...

What if Direct Air Capture grew like ammonia synthesis did, with massive state support due to its strategic significance during two world wars? Maybe we could reach ~1GtCO2 / year by 2050. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🚨 THIS WEEK🚨 Go back in time with @goingmedieval.bsky.social to explore the real lives of medieval women. From peasants to guild members, their stories are finally being told. #MedievalHistory #women #empowerment #HistoryPodcast Listen now 🎧 https://pod.fo/e/261e63#MedievalHistory#women#empowerment#HistoryPodcast#history #podcast

Hey I wrote something on the blog about that twee witch merch, historical inaccuracy, and the horrors of capitalist profiting off forgotten victims. You know, a little Friday treat! going-medieval.com/2023/10/20/y...

There was no such thing as feudalism. We've known it for decades. 19 out of 20 students in my freshman seminar were all taught about feudalism in middle school. ARGH. [Free newsletter. Click, read, share, subscribe. Do not use the F word]

Finally got myself a physical copy of @alisabokulich.bsky.social's Reexamining the Quantum-Classical Relation, way better than reading it on a tiny kindle haha Hopefully it won't take me this long to get my hands on the upcoming phil. of geoscience volume