Benjamin Pope

Can't fault the clarity of Labour's message on protest. There are BAD protesters who must be punished (Irish musicians, anti-genocide vicars) and there are GOOD protesters whose views deserve respect (masked thugs with petrol bombs trying to start a pogrom)

Addendum to the new consensus that lying should be stigmatised in public life, lying *at scale* just such a sick and twisted thing

An eye popping thing to me is that fraud is so common in *cancer research* (eg the QIMR scandal). Surely that’s like 1000x worse

My Mondays this semester are meetings all day then a 6-8pm lecture… this is not how I would optimally schedule my life

A reminder that the 70+ year-old research discipline of AI is much bigger than genAI, much bigger than just deep learning, much bigger than Big Tech. AI includes symbolic reasoning, multi-agent systems and statistical machine learning and is used for astrophysics, renewable energy and climate models

The killing code: strange symbols in a WA settler’s diaries lay bare frontier atrocities Exclusive: Stories of murders passed down by Yamatji elders are confirmed by a cipher hidden in the 1850s journals of prominent pastoralist Major Logue. Now descendants on both sides want to break the...

It is 2025, and someone *now* is preparing to publish an 1850s pastoralist’s diary *editing out* all the coded bits where he describes murdering Yamatji people.

In 2025.

But sure, let’s hear more about how the Great Australian Silence is over.

screenshot of email announcing the proposal call for JWST cycle 5

ready to be hurt again

This week Shashank, Cormac and Cole talk Bayesian statistics. Cole brings up a flashy new paper about a potential biosignature on an exoplanet and Cormac counters with some rebuttals. Along the way, we discuss probabilities, priors, likelihoods and posteriors! 🔭

astrosoundbites.com/2025/08/03/e...

great bit of astronomy history there!

A dense crowd of protestors walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, waving Palestinian flags.

There were babies in prams, elderly people in wheelchairs, families, friends, organisations, unions, and a sea of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs. It was the largest and most moving protest I have ever seen. #MarchForHumanity

Have the police commended the discipline of the protestors anywhere? Incredible to see 100k people come together, little notice, unpleasant conditions and have no problems, despite the existential urgency of the cause

I’ve seen estimate of 100,000-300,000 people in today’s march. A sobering thought: these are also the conservative (100k) realistic (300k) estimates of people israel massacred in Gaza.

Over 100,000 Australians marched across the symbolic heart of Sydney today, and together we showed more leadership on one rainy afternoon than our PM and Foreign Minister have shown in 2 years from the comfort of their offices. Free Palestine. Sanction Israel. 🇵🇸 🕊️

(Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest funds a lot of science!)

👏

no joke I think we could get Twiggy to do this

Easily a bigger crowd here than anything I’ve been to, not concerts or cricket or any political rally

Hard not to see this turnout making a difference. Going to be demanding answers as to why the crowd couldn’t cross the bridge

whoaa .... this is a huge protest.

This is from the Sydney Harbour Bridge live traffic cam now.

From Gadigal to Gaza!

If you're interested, you can watch many thousands and thousands of fellow Australians right now marching across the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge for peace in Palestine

It's bucketing down rain, and still they keep coming, and still they keep marching

#MarchForHumanity #FreeGaza

webcamsydney.com

Today was a huge demonstration of support for Palestine and, as always, it is critical we all stay safe. Please listen carefully to directions from police and organisers and ensure everyone stays safe.

there are tens of thousands of people filling a several lane road going over the sydney harbour bridge (centre of frame). it is raining heavily, and most people are wearing raincoats or using umbrellas. there are several palestinian flags being waved.

i’ve never seen so many people in one place as i did today while marching over the sydney harbour bridge. end the genocide now.

Scenes from Sydney’s #savegaza march across the harbour bridge.
If our Govts too servile to speak up, we the people assert our democratic rights to protest!
& we did in huge numbers, regardless of the politicians, police or stormy weather

Where is the reporting of this in Australia?
Where are the condemnations of it by Israel’s supporters?
It’s an Israeli minister stating his intention to genocide.

Solidarity

Mamajek's law showing number of exoplanets doubles every 27 months

Recalculated Mamajek's Law: since 2016 we've fallen way below on exoplanet discovery rates.

Interesting to revisit Mamajek's Law from 2016 - that the number of known exoplanets is increasing exponentially - in light of new data.

Extrapolating this discovery rate to 2025 we should have found nearly 47k planets (!) vs actual: 5967

Gaia save us!

even worse, learning to use AI as implemented in any particular model will be a completely outdated skillset in 12 months

Oh wow, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of this!

Good.

Regardless of your position on this issue, the police and legislators should never dictate where and when protests should happen. A protest is meant to disrupt to draw attention. Slippery slope if that power is taken away from people.