N Beingessner

Cartoon of two pumpkins screaming in terror beside the traditional Irish Samhain carved turnip #Art #Samhain #SpéirGorm #SpéirGhorm #Ireland

Reject modernity, embrace tradition

Don't forget the UK health surcharges.

The OP misrepresents what's happening. The CPC members are screaming about woke and the research councils are explaining how EDI reduces unconscious bias.

Archaeology of the plastic hair curler.
All found on Cornish beaches.

If you’re an activist, you can call for steps that make clean alternatives in every sector as cheap and practical as their fossil fuel counterparts. The public is more likely to switch to clean technology when it’s cheaper and better than fossil fuels.

That's right climate activists: stop fighting for enviro justice, against corporate profits, new fossil fuel projects etc

WHAT DO WE WANT

SUBSTANTIAL REDUCTIONS IN THE 'GREEN PREMIUM' FOR A RANGE OF EARLY TRL-STAGE TECHNOLOGIES

WHEN DO WE WANT IT

NOT SURE WHEN OR ALSO WHY WE'RE SAYING THIS

As part of a seed grant project funded by the AIAI Network, Damien P. Williams, assistant professor of Philosophy and Data Science at the University of North... Religious Belief and Practice in the Age of AI

…'These actions are performed on us w/o our input, w/o our knowledge, and without our consent. And we have another word for magic performed on us without our knowledge and without our consent:

'Binding and subjugating magic… is called a curse.'

From "Religious Belief & Practice in the Age of 'AI'"

Just sitting here giving off radiation for the next 3 hours.

For the record, Melissa's main targets of Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and the Bahamas account for, respectively, 0.016%, 0.0089%, 0.064%, and 0.0038% of the global annual total of CO2 emissions.

Preach!

YouTube video by CAPE | ACME Clean Air, Healthy Kids & Communities: The Case for Strong Methane Regulations

Methane is fueling the climate crisis — but we can fix it.
Watch Clean Air, Healthy Kids & Communities to see how #methane escapes from #oilandgas infrastructure and why cutting it is the fastest, easiest win for climate and #cleanair.
#CutMethane #ClimateAction
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EJ8...

Question adaptability?

Ah, the new empire...

Carney says Canada should prepare for ‘sacrifices’ as he outlines plan for budget | CBC News Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canadians should be ready for some “challenges” and “sacrifices” in a speech outlining some of his government’s priorities for the upcoming budget.

Those of us struggling to pay bills hear Carney’s talk of “sacrifices” with fury.
WHAT IS GALEN WESTON SACRIFICING?
WHAT IS DAVID THOMSON SACRIFICING?
WHAT IS EDWARD ROGERS SACRIFICING?
WHAT IS CHIP WILSON SACRIFICING?

Graphic showing two graphs, which compare the costs migrants have to pay on specific routes to other countries.

The UK has some of the highest visa costs in the world, particularly compared to other "science nations" as the Royal Society data shows. This is not only costing migrants thousands of pounds just to work in the UK, it also undermines the whole country.
royalsociety.org/-/media/poli...

At a recent event in San Antonio, about 50 educators received a three-hour crash course in AI, organized by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and largely funded by Big Tech. An Associated Press report from Monday about the seminar sheds some light on what it’s like when AI companies fund an effort to help more teachers AI-generate their lesson plans. “We all know, when we talk about AI, teachers say, ‘Nah, I’m not doing that,’” Kathleen Torregrossa, a person described as a “trainer” said to the group as part of her introduction, according to the AP. “But we are preparing kids for the future. That is our primary job. And AI, like it or not, is part of our world,” Torregrossa added. According to a September Gallup poll, 60% of K-12 teachers have already used AI in their work. Increasingly, parents appear to not want this. One poll over the summer found that support among parents for AI-generated lesson plans has fallen from 62% in 2024 to 49% this year. Another recent study looked at some of the lesson plans themselves and found them academically substandard according to the two benchmarks the researchers used.

Absolutely most of the harm from AI is being caused by people who rationalise their actions by saying something like, or exactly, this

Declare something inevitable, and then set about causing a massive amount of totally avoidable harm

gizmodo.com/big-tech-fun...

That's me getting kicked out, hopefully after costly cancer treatment ends, but...

DAILY EXPRESS BACKING BRITAIN FOR 125 YEARS express.co.uk TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2025 EXCLUSIVE 'Magnificent Seven' Darlington nurses continue their female-only spaces fight FOR THE SAFETY AND DIGNITY OF EVERY WOMAN AND GIRLY

Almost 60,000 women have signed this petition by @nionwomen.bsky.social women to say that the transphobes do not speak for them. Meanwhile the Daily Express front-pages seven transphobes, falsely claiming that they “represent women”. If they do not represent you. Please sign.

notinourname.org.uk

Some good news, as a little treat.

50-year immigration wait stuns lawyers and families, but IRCC says it's no mistake | CBC News Processing times for Canadian immigration applications have reached unprecedented lengths — up to 50 years under some permanent residency programs — stunning applicants and lawyers who say the system ...

Wow, Canada! This is even worse than the UK, especially if, as feared, applications are cencelled en masse.

"Families who recently applied for permanent residence under Canada’s humanitarian and compassionate stream face waits of 12 to 600 months"

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Solidarity!! Last week, Indiana University fired the director of student media & halted print on the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Yesterday, Purdue’s student paper printed the banned edition & drove two hours to deliver it. Incredible www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/l...

UK, Canada could both learn from this.

PITA. But, I remember the halcyon days of being able to use Boolean operators in searches. Much has been lost since then.

Are you referring to the Western Canadian Wheat Growers? I suspect the Taxpayers Federation has a similar number of members. (5? 10?)

Screenshot of text reading: Significance Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Yet, what appears as alignment with human or expert judgments may conceal a deeper shift in how “judgment” itself is operationalized. Using news outlets as a controlled benchmark, we compare six LLMs to expert ratings and human evaluations under an identical, structured framework. While models often match expert outputs, our results suggest that they may rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification. Our findings suggest not only performance asymmetries but also a shift in the heuristics underlying evaluative processes, raising fundamental questions about delegating judgment to LLMs.

We. Told. You. So. But also, that "May Rely" in the significance section ( 👇🏾 ) is *way* too… let's go with "generous;" lexical associations and statistical priors are what these systems are literally made of, and all that they do. Literally. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Rainbow Rowell actually has Silicon Valley denizens voluntarily becoming vampires for the eternal life bennies in a book in the Simon Snow series.

Thank you! I will soon have tests to determine the extent, so trying to repress any fears until I know more. Not sure what else to do.

What an article to read, with such promising therapies just out of reach, days after hearing my cancer may have metastasised.

This is something people who are chatbot-curious should be doing by default: ask it about something you *do know about*, not something you *don't know about*.

Who Controls Agricultural Land? The shift from farmers to financiers | IPES-Food’s Nettie Wiebe - IPES-Food Nettie Wiebe exposes the land squeeze and its devastating impact on farmers, communities, and biodiversity.

It's #WorldFoodDay. Let’s talk about the source of our food – land.

Just 1% of agriculture operators now control 70% of global farmland.

That’s not just inequality, it’s a #foodsystem crisis.

🎥 Canadian farmer Nettie Wiebe explains:
ipes-food.org/video-and-me...

Note, the ambitious emissions reduction scenario is calculated using the IEA’s net zero emissions scenario42 for Power and Light Road Vehicles and UNEP’s 2050 Paris-aligned target3 for Meat and Dairy.

A rising trend in climate space has been to claim that vague "AI" technologies will result in massive, deep and permanent cuts to global emissions.

These analyses leave out the effect of big tech's software on helping fossil fuel companies. You can guess why.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...