Jane

When something takes you unawares . . . 🤣🤣🤣

Brilliant. Did not see that coming. Laughing very much out loud here

Read the first two sentences nodding sagely. Then chuckled at the third! I was definitely brought up to 'put another jumper on' and that has stuck

The UK was better off in the EU and Europe was better off with the UK in it.

All of this Trump driven chaos underlines that and you can practically hear Putin rubbing his hands in Moscow.

WE have deliberately weakened ourselves, our security and our region for absolutely no good purpose at all.

So many beat me to it . . . . Damn . . .

Not planning to go anywhere near the US anytime soon so . . .

This and this.

While so-called 'patriots' do everything they can to talk down the capital, a majority of people who actually live in London say they feel safe in the city 🤷‍♂️

Decline, what decline? The myth of dying Europe There is a widespread view that, by comparison with the USA, Europe is in economic and social decline. But, Zucman argues, it's not true

🔥🇪🇺 “Europeans enjoy more free time than Americans, a higher life expectancy and lower levels of inequality – all with roughly comparable productivity.

Whichever way you look at it, this is a significantly superior economic performance.”

‘Cities need nature to be happy’: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife Attenborough, 99, enthuses about tube-riding pigeons, foxes, parakeets and others in Wild London for the BBC Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes. Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary. Continue reading...

‘Cities need nature to be happy’: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife

Sounds good to me

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

Driving home for Christmas THE best Christmas song imo. Will take no questions. As this article/list says, not necessarily Chris Rea's best song but up there.

On this day in 1843, "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens was published. It’s a cautionary tale, and if only Scrooge had kept his nerve Christmas would be a lot cheaper for all of us.

In what sense is Tommy Robinson a genuine Christian? None that I can see | Ravi Holy The extremist, who is said to have converted in prison, is now planning a mass carol service. But look at his words and deeds: hardly Saint Tommy, is it, says vicar and stand-up comedian Ravi Holy

In what sense is Tommy Robinson a genuine Christian? None that I can see | Ravi Holy

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree. Ate it.

Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.

I thought I had turned off my camera

Geigraphy really does explain everything

The second half of the 1980s called and want their bows back. As they say, if you wore it first time around . . .

'By design, LLMs also tend to reproduce and reinforce the most statistically prevalent ideas, creating a feedback loop that narrows the scope of accessible human knowledge'.

Ecologist and evolutionary biologist? That's my sort of interesting. Followed 🙂 Oh and in my experience 'look at the degree on that chick' (expressed slightly differently obvs 🤣) is definitely a thing (and has been since forever)

AI Is Hollowing Out Higher Education Olivia Guest & Iris van Rooij urge teachers and scholars to reject tools that commodify learning, deskill students, and promote illiteracy.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

“The promise of a world-changing technology that isn’t here…companies are stealing every scrap of data they can find, throwing computer power at it, draining our aquifers of water, our national grids of electricity and all we have is some software that you can’t trust not to make things up.”

Donald Trump destroyed public service broadcasting in the US - it's little surprise Nigel Farage wants to do the same thing here.

Trump’s America, don’t let it become Farage’s Britain.

Ken Clarke, "Politically you can't rejoin the European Union at the moment it would cause its own nightmare, divisions and crisis"

"Brexit is doing damage to our economy"

"The time has come to rejoin the Customs Union and the EU Single Market would be a huge, huge advantage to us"

Nowhere in the hysterical pile-on against the BBC in the British press has anyone mentioned that BBC News now has 77 million viewers & listeners in the US and has established itself as the second most trusted news source there.

Brilliant!

This is still a fine, fine country (and really, really is still quite empty/undeveloped)