Paul Harland

Today in the papers: "‘Out of touch’ hereditary peers criticised for voting against workers’ rights."

From the ancient Irish goddess Tiredness, patron saint of the end of ropes

Same in Leicestershire, it probably means "corner of the meadow" or something.

This wins the internet today, though it might be slightly lost on audiences beyond the UK.

But who is playing the game? 👨‍💻

Less than a week remains to apply to this exciting PhD position and join my team at Osnabrück University 👇

What is going on? Where is the hot buttered toast and jam?

Where's the Kellogg's Cornflakes?

Why? The post is from a serious person?

"Why Most Published Research Findings Are LLM written" will be a worse blow for the public perception of scientists than the original 2005 essay by Ioannidis. Doubly true for sociology. As a signal, I'd favor a ban on synthetic text, even if not enforceable. I use LLMs, but never for writing.

Use-case for AI as a writer. A quick way to exorcise cliche and small-c conservatism: after you've written your first draft, ask AI to write something on the same topic; compare your draft to the AI piece, and cut everything from your draft that appears in the AI piece. #writing #books #AI

Hang on, this one looks more like things all the way down!

But maybe this thing that needs explaining is more sort of... emergent?

Been reading "What is Innateness?" by Paul Griffiths (2002) philpapers.org/rec/EGRWII in which he offers this very sound advice:

YouTube video by HACHETOOTH Del Close & John Brent - How To Speak Hip - A1 - Introduction

youtu.be/1f-9r4WFPEw?...

We all need to wear more hats, @digitaldang.bsky.social

I don't know... Maybe the whole "AI economy" is chasing an unequal idea of how intelligence works best? Are there really no better ways of organising the world than the way we mostly do it now?

I don't actually need to reply to this, but anyway, I can't.

We don't really, do we, @davidgunkel.bsky.social? We just want to be able to talk about the possibility of an edit button. Having the button in your hand would be too much power.

bsky.app/profile/pabl...

Very proud of this paper in BioScience :

« Too cute to be wild: what teddy bears reveal about our disconnection from nature »

🧸 are more than toys, they shape among our first emotional connections to nature. But their design may also distort how we see wildlife !

👉 doi.org/10.1093/bios...

🧪🦤

Modern physics thinks about quantum field theories as trajectories between two fixed points in the space of coupling constants, with motion defined by the renormalization group. The trajectory of the Standard Model seems fine-tuned from our perspective.

Endocardium, cells lining the heart chambers, in the beating heart of a two-day-old transgenic #zebrafish. Credit to @anjaliesch.bsky.social & Nikon Small World Competition. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

Networks: The Visual Language of Complexity Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Netwo...

Excited to be in Valencia this week for my annual master’s seminar at the Master’s Degree in Bioinformatics, coinciding with the publication of our new book chapter based on course notes.
Thanks to @julipereto.bsky.social for the ongoing collaboration!

📚 link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

The world feels noisy — storms, headlines, heat — everything turned up too high.
In the garden, the noise fades. Patterns return. 🌿

From a longer piece I’ve written about #Neurodiversity, nature, and quiet resilience — finding calm in a loud world. 🌱
#IrishGardens #Biodiversity

Recovering the pre-colonial population structure of Khoe-San descendant populations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.05.680541v1

Windmills, windmills, windmills!

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks, will come back and have a look later but really appreciate that! Agree concept of "illegals" is increasingly dubious and unhelpful, although - this is the way language works - some extremists seem to talk hatefully of "asylum-seekers" oblivious to the meaning of the words in front of them.

Yes... what is being intelligent, over what scope, at what scale? Depends who's observing, and what is observable to them, maybe.