Philip Ball

One possibility, though probably not a good one, is simply not to report things he says, as they have little meaning. The problem with that is that evidently his minions are acting on the things he says - so in that sense they do have meaning, or at least consequences.

I don't know how much thought news agencies are giving to how they might deal with the fact that Trump is deranged and has child-like mental functioning (forgive me kids). There's not really a precedent and it's not obvious how to handle it. But pretending it away is not an option.

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text Discovery sheds new light on how famed astronomer came to lead a scientific revolution

Looks like a fascinating insight into the young Galileo - I imagine historian Owen "The Great Copernicus Chase" Gingerich would have loved this marginal discovery.

Galileo’s handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

The quest to understand where atoms end Atomic size measurements like van der Waals and covalent radii are central to chemistry, but are they grounded in reality?

Where is the edge of an atom? My article for @chemistryworld.com on efforts to figure out the size of atoms, and why it matters.
www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-que...

Alchemy: A Curated Story of Transmutation This article offers a detailed review of Philip Ball’s recent book on alchemy. It situates and interprets the work within contemporary debates regarding the science-pseudoscience distinction, the h...

A wonderfully in-depth review and critique of my book Alchemy.

"Philip Ball’s Alchemy is an erudite and sumptuous work that aims to place alchemy as one of the great intellectual adventures in the history of ideas."
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The murals of the Villa Arianna in Pompeii.

One for pigment junkies like me: an analysis of the colours on the murals of the Villa Arianna in Pompeii.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

😱

Can we extract the Reform nonsense from Labour? These immigration proposals are obscene, but the government can be forced to think again.

No administration with a moral core would have put these plans forward, let alone try to enact them without a vote. Once these proposals are in place, they will not be reversed. Make them think again iandunt.substack.com/p/can-we-ext...

The quest to understand where atoms end Atomic size measurements like van der Waals and covalent radii are central to chemistry, but are they grounded in reality?

How big are atoms? That depends where you decide to put the edge. My article for @chemistryworld.com on the latest efforts to define atomic radii.
www.chemistryworld.com/news/the-que...

😱But also ✊🎉

Just sobering to realise that for you and me it's not quite as much "the past" as we might imagine at first...

80 years seems like ancient history, and then I remember how old I am and actually it really isn't. Which makes it terrible that it took them so long.

It's clear Starmer has to go, but I didn't imagine it would be a matter of quite such urgency.

YouTube video by HollowHead Post Industrial Blues

Mood.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLiM...

🚨 New paper "social scale."

"On the Manifest Naivete of Techno-Optimists: A Review of 'More Everything Forever' by Adam Becker" (@adambecker.bsky.social) for The American Journal of Biological Anthropology

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Black and white illustration featuring a forest setting with central hippo like creature, hedgehog in the foreground and birds flying overhead

Illustration from Tove Jansson's book 'The Moomins and the Great Flood' (1945) #Womensart

Should biology put complexity first? The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing dama…

Great perspective by @philipcball.bsky.social.

Elementary genetics teaching (HS/college) focuses on Mendelian traits (single gene => single trait). However, it is now clear that polygenicity and pleiotropy are the norm. Curriculum must change accordingly.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

(Truth is that I'm pretty certain there's not much on those disks that's worth too much effort - just those old graphics files.)

Thanks - I might look into such things, though I'm a Mac user.

And thank you for that lovely review of Alchemy by the way, which I discovered on looking at this.

Back in the 1980s-2000s, there was an organization called
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that worked to oppose irresponsible and dangerous uses of computers in warfare. Maybe it needs a reboot, in our new age of AI.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute...

Wow, that's cheap! But I guess these will all be Freehand files in an obsolete format no app I possess will now read.

😅Our house is already that, and it's not a very big house.

That's not going to happen though Becky, is it? I'm probably going to ditch all my CDs with stored files too.

No, that's long gone.

Ah, I think it is finally time to let go of my old floppy disks with the figures for my early books on them.
(Gen Z: "Wait, how come those look like the Save icon?")

This is exactly what I'm working on now 😉

"...to you rather than the experts who actually built these systems?" Well, this is why. Many of those people can code better than I will ever be able to, but in other respects OMFG. 2/2

"Retirement may be a risk to welfare of the models themselves. Although we remain very uncertain on this front, models may have morally relevant preferences or experiences related to or affected by their deprecation and replacement." Sometimes you hear people say "Yeah but why should I listen... /1

Crikey, 89. I've seen Buddy several times, always amazing.

I'd nitpick it.