Chris Stokes

Closure of the FAAM Airborne Laboratory - NCAS The National Centre for Atmospheric Science can confirm that the FAAM Airborne Laboratory will cease operations at the end of this financial year, following the withdrawal of funding by UKRI-NERC.

Following the withdrawal of funding by UKRI-NERC, we can confirm that the FAAM Airborne Laboratory will cease operations at the end of this financial year. Our immediate priority is supporting affected staff and the wider UK atmospheric science community.

ncas.ac.uk/closure-of-t...

NERC pivots investment in atmospheric research into new technologies NERC is transitioning its funding of atmospheric science infrastructure to exploit more flexible, scalable and sustainable technologies.

The UK atmospheric research aircraft (the FAAM) will cease operations in one month's time due to a research 'pivot' by UKRI...

www.ukri.org/news/nerc-pi...

Given this abdication by UKRI we badly need a Critical AI Research Council as a 'shadow' council to highlight where research is needed and _should_ be funded, and as an exercise in collectively and democratically addressing urgent questions.

4 March 2026 - Science, Innovation and Technology Committee - Oral evidence session - Committees - UK Parliament 09:00 - The Wilson Room, Portcullis House

'Following reports that the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is facing significant cost pressures, the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee will hold a one-off evidence session exploring scientific research funding. '
committees.parliament.uk/event/26683/...

While we sit around to find out how bad exactly it all is, a bit of cheer: the best baguette of Paris competition was won by a Sri Lankan who appears to have started as a dish washer in restaurants and eventually trained as a Boulanger.

www.paris.fr/pages/la-mei...

pab-lum /'pabl(e)m/ noun LITERARY noun: pabulum; noun: pablum bland or insipid intellectual fare, entertainment, etc.;pap.

the metaphor

Pablum - Wikipedia

'For 25 years (1930-1955), the Hospital for Sick Children and the Toronto Pediatric Foundation received a royalty payment on every package of Pablum sold'
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablum

My best 'overhear':

"I'm down to two a day now,"
"What's that - sea bass?"
"Yes, and it's still too much."

Sam Altman tweet: Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

My goodness.

It's available on Waybackmachine.
web.archive.org/web/20200924...

Depends what 'case' means, phaps. If in each case there were two voters involved, that would (if none were involved in more than one case) be 64 individuals or 12%. Counting like this would merit an adjective like interesting tho!

These buckets are a COVID hangover, aren't they? They once held the susceptible, infected and recovered. Now they hold poorly defined classes of research and innovation.

Some good UK science policy select committee sessions to look forward to next week, in both the Commons and the Lords:

🍿 Tuesday 3 Mar - Lords S&T Committee quizzing Liz Kendall, Patrick Vallance and Emran Mian (DSIT Perm Sec). I imagine they'll be trying to get a handle on those buckets (ahem).

Strange to hear Heidi Alexander telling Nick Robinson on R4 this morning that Labour's third place was down to its comms. How many Labour MPs were in PR before Westminster?

Like any decent Fellow of the Royal Society would.

The ears too. In photographs, the cylindrical tower on which the dome rests is not noticeably wider than the base of the dome. It is in this logo though.

I'm not sure I've read it myself! Your description gave me a flashback to what I thought must have been a film, but I couldn't remember the title of that either. Resorted to googling a few key words.

Siri Hustvedt's The Blindfold

Are you sure it would have recovered without confinement in the bin?

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

Nullius in Verba - YouTube

Or big fans of bassist Nicholas D'Amato
youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Yesterday I read Practice by @rosalindbrown.bsky.social walking into town & back (ten miles total) & was surprised by this line, p89: ‘Be damned the series of historical moves which created reading as a stationary activity. She wants to be walking all day.’

I'd like to know why ambulatory reading excites no comment only when the text is on a phone screen.

Talk about stating the obvious.

They found him. He died.

Another murder by our immigration goon squads

What? According to an massive PhD thesis by Jonathan Spiro published in 2000, General Karl Brandt introduced into evidence in his defence at the Nuremberg tribunal a German translation of Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race. Yet by 2000, no biography of Grant had been written. Hard to credit.

'We know now how to build new cities in which the automobile and pedestrian amenities are separated, parking is adequate, and traffic jams are largely avoidable, but it will probably be several decades before such cities will flourish.'

Written when, do you reckon?

So okay, DAMS. Baddies build 'em, right? And environmentalists try to stop 'em? Well, up to a point. It might seem like a straight fight between on the one side Capital and Growth and on the other side Unspoilt Nature, but it hasn't always panned out like that.

"Historians of science interested in the 1980s [...] can profitably learn from one another by comparing how scientists of different stripes moved through the greedy waters they swam in."

Joseph Martin's review of Greedy Science: link.springer.com/article/10.1...