Trump obviously writes his own tweets, but do you think even with current GenAI he has the patience for the iterative process of writing his own prompts? There will be two or three people with memoirs to write who helped out with this obscenity.

I found _The Invention of Nature_ (which is mostly a biography of Alexander von Humboldt) gave interesting and useful context for what Thoreau was getting at

Two small children notoriously can fill as large a playroom as is available, and it’s a real problem to work from home out of a living room containing Barbie’s Dream House and eighteen plush guinea pigs.

Have things got to the point where something like the Airbus rocket factory in Stevenage or Mercedes in Milton Keynes is extremely selective and gets requests for apprenticeships from across Britain and the EU?

Is radio basically the first instance where the science came first? Maxwell was some years dead by the time Hertz, working from very thorough understanding of the equations, built a spark gap receiver.

A photo of a contestant at Mister Global 2025

Mr Sri Lanka. This is a rare case where I think the outfit would be better without the giant gold snakes around his head. Maybe add a cape, but I think the rest of the outfit (what little of it there is) is so great that he doesn't need the snakes.

‘ “Dark doings,” Ingold added. The way he pronounced dark as dahhhk was so pure that I had an involuntary urge to snatch up the teapot and find a harbor to dump it in. ‘

I have started the new @tkingfisher.com Sworn Soldier book

Welcome to Bonnie Blue’s Britain A place of sin, spin and soft power

Bonnie Blue, a lady who also managed to get a write up by the Economist’s political editor earlier this year www.economist.com/britain/2025...

(Amateur) orchestra today: two trumpets, two horns, four clarinets, two bassoons, three oboes, four flutes. So far so good. Two first violins, two second violins, one viola, two cellos. Not quite sure this is the balance Beethoven intended.

Teeny bijou cherry-blossom-biomette

There does not seem to have been much carry over between the newspapers of 1930 Germany and the newspapers of 1950 Germany. Tyrannical regimes can be in power for significantly longer than the life cycle of newspapers under tyrannical regimes.

Tried to watch _One Battle After Another_ this evening and walked out after 45 minutes; super slow moving, something about the cinematography felt unanchored in time - is this the seventies or today? and not a moment of amusement in what I'm sure was claimed to be a dark comedy.

My new iPhone absolutely fails to recognise my face when I’m wearing glasses - to the point of saying ‘FaceID doesn’t work’ if I try to enroll without taking my glasses off. Any ideas?

Because there's a substantial group that works in restaurants while applying for a better job (consider the archetypal actor between roles) and if they're not quitting the restaurant job it's because they haven't found the better jobs

For a real brain melting experience, the subtitles for the Disney+ version of Miyazaki’s Pompoko are taken from a different translation to the English audio: I would much rather watch in Japanese (of which I speak three words) with the subtitles than have the cognitive dissonance at every line

They kind of ruin all the timing aspects of acting! I read the sentence in half a second when the actor probably did mean to pause meaningfully in the middle, at best I’m laughing well before the laugh track and at worst I am spoilered for the ending.

I’m surprised it’s only a bit more than twice the stadium capacity; I kind of expect live events to be much more badly oversubscribed than that.

Rabies in bats: how to spot it and report it Signs that may suggest rabies in bats, what to do if you spot them and measures to prevent exposing yourself to the disease.

Because Britain has so much nationalistic pride in being ‘rabies-free unlike the Continent’, I suspect. The occurrence of lyssavirus in tested bats seems to be going up with time: www.gov.uk/guidance/rab...

I wonder what anatomical image was inscribed deeply enough into the roof lead of Carfax Tower to require a patch to be welded in …

I am quite surprised that a professionally made tapestry from the 1660s has so many of its N embroidered as И but no other letters mirror imaged (Sheldon Map of Oxfordshire in the Ashmolean)

I am deeply amused by my old college’s response to the prevalence of pink hair among undergraduates …

I found my old college’s copy of Lucretius (as a special treat, returning alumni were allowed into the Old Library). It does not appear to have manuscript annotations @adapalmer.bsky.social

“The world must be round because the shadow during an eclipse is round” illustrated in 1545 by Peter Apian

Isn’t the isotope geochemistry lab kind of the absolute last place that you would want to have radioactive material? Or do you need to mix in a known minuscule amount of something active and known not to be in the rock to have an internal standard when counting/spectrographing ?

There isn’t - I was sufficiently impressed with the content to want to subscribe to the print version but it was not to be found

Science and Math News | Quanta Magazine Illuminating mathematics, physics, biology and computer science research through public service journalism.

If you’re doing it commercially you’re competing with www.quantamagazine.org which has the Simons money from Renaissance Technology behind it - but there really ought to be room for two! Popular Mechanics is click bait, Scientific American is still out there

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

What I never quite figured out from your book was to what extent was Camp Alphaville part of the Wirecard reporting and to what extent was it the chance for your readers to meet up that it advertised itself as … I went to it twice and it was fantastic fun.

Photograph of John Lee Hooker with diagram of the evolution of the Blues. Black and white photograph. He’s wearing a suit and sitting at a table with a mug in front of him and notepad etc on table. Behind him is a chart diagram of the evolution of the Blues, connecting genres over time. Photograph by Clemens Kalischer, 1951.

John Lee Hooker with a diagram of the evolution of the Blues.

The region of the British Isles and Scandinavia has been moving as a block since at least a hundred million years ago, so the local geology is about what it is now; looking at tectonics it might have been a thousand kilometres further south-east than it is now, say 45N rather than 50N