Prof Stephen Serjeant

Counterpoint: no it isn’t

I've seen madder headlines

Pleased to see this. The current system regressively, hideously entrenches generational financial advantage. I have an academically brilliant friend from a single-parent family, and she has a HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS of student loan debt. But rich kids start life with their debt paid by parents.

I'm constantly trying (/failing) to get this point across.

If you're a trained expert in a field, then it may be worthwhile to question the scientific consensus of your peers.

If you're not, the scientific consensus is absolutely the best you can do and it's arbitrary foolishness to disregard it.

Very well referenced & well argued summary of where we are on the latest STFC funding crisis. I'd only add two more: George Efstathiou's analysis of STFC's governance problems telescoper.blog/2026/02/06/t... and @ersatzben.com's forensic analysis of the 'buckets' 🔭🧪 www.ersatzben.com/p/the-bucket...

YouTube video by Star Wars ONE HOUR OF DANCING MON MOTHMA | Andor Season 2 | Disney+

Ten Hours of Boing Sound Effects used to be my go-to YouTube background soundtrack for coding, but I can't find it any more, so I use this instead 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6wL...

It never ceases to confound me just how many folks think the point of essays is to provide teachers with essays. That teachers just like, collect them, or need them for sustenance or something. Rather than the point of them being the *actual fucking act of learning how to think about shit*

Unpopular opinion: the outcome appears to be good. Badenoch undertook on air to review the student loans policy with Martin Lewis. If this happens, Labour will need to raise their game too. And about time. Student loans are a catastrophic policy scandal. Well done to Martin Lewis for his initiative

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

Totally appalling way to treat anyone but in this case this woman had not broken any immigration rule at all. And the British consulate were completely and inexcusably useless. Awful and I think deserves some response from the Foreign Office.

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

GLORIOUS beautiful guilded ceiling with frescos of mythological characters, gods flying in the sky with horses, ships, marble, shells, ...

Meanwhile, here's the terribly boring ceiling in the room next to where the ELSA meeting is happening. Why are university rooms and buildings always so dull dull dull?

Screenshot of our dormant Twitter/X account, showing only one post and a pop-up saying "You aren't verified yet".

Screenshot of our Twitter/X account page after deletion, saying this account doesn't exist.

At our f2f meeting today we decided to delete our dormant Twitter/X account, following the excellent example of @ec-euclid.bsky.social. 🧪🔭

ELSA team members, smiling, standing under the ELSA logo

The ELSA @ec-euclid.bsky.social team meeting this week in beautiful Bologna. Amazing things being done with Euclid spectroscopy - watch this space :) 🧪🔭

A picture of Sartre Text: Hell is other people, except for you. Happy Valentine's Day from Sartre and @PhilosopherGames

I laughed out loud reading this.

So much for the Large Hadron Collider too. It's a lie, they're really tiny. And don't get me started on submillimetre galaxies

For running inspiration (or, in my case, for monitoring from under my duvet), the Barkley Marathons have just started #BM100 - updates at @keithdunn.bsky.social

The Bucket Stops Here UKRI’s new funding framework takes a stab at classifying budgets – but doesn’t yet govern research

Bucket theory is unglamorous but very important. @ersatzben.com is forensic here - a must read for those interested in UK research policy
www.ersatzben.com/p/the-bucket...

That old saw about how "good times make weak men" is true in the sense that stable times with material abundance create reactionaries who want to destroy the systems that protect them because they're too sheltered and stupid to understand that things can get meaningfully worse. Jason CO @jasonc_nc. 2/8/25 I don't think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don't understand or even realize exist. • 24 L7 1.8K 15K Ill 399K ... Max Dubler @maxdubler True decadence looks like people who are three generations removed from the cultural memory of polio refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly communicable diseases because they don't like needles and don't think there will be any consequences, not queer

So much of our present crisis is coddled, ignorant, and short sighted people tearing down the institutions that protect them because they don’t understand that bad things can happen.

Professor Mike Cruise. Credit: Lucinda Douglas Menzies.

The RAS was saddened to hear of the passing of our former President, Professor Mike Cruise, who has died aged 78.

"Kind, thoughtful and honourable", Mike was a "stalwart of the RAS". Our thoughts are with his family, friends and all who had the privilege to know him.

ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Elon Musk FRS is in the Epstein files. Please understand that the RS’s continued failure to enforce its own code of conduct affects every area of the society’s activities.

Threatening to cut funding to someone because they disagree is a *real* threat to academic freedom of the kind frequently seen under fascist and authoritarian regimes.

This is also confected bullshit. There is no obligation whatsoever for a society or institution to invite a speaker.

The law on universities and free speech prevents speakers from being *disinvited after they have been invited*. It does not require universities to provide a platform to whoever demands one.

Let's not mince words: the threat to cut funding to every university who disagrees with them is fascist.

Reminder to colleagues to clean up the LaTeX comments before sending to arXiv. Or at least remove names 🧪

Baffling. Maybe your pickups were artificially intelligent, but mysteriously spiteful ;)

Oh weird. Acoustic or electric? And if acoustic, classical or metal strings? I wonder if some spectrogram software might’ve shown up the anomaly. Though what you’d do with that diagnosis, I’ve no idea. I expect acoustic stringed instruments vibrate & resonate in all kinds of weird ways

OMG guitar intonation drives me nuts! I completely understand. At least both you and the buyer came out well from the transaction 😆

…it sounded weirdly dull. His experimenting showed you need the dissonant harmonics. Oh and another time he made a classical guitar (he also loved woodwork) & pushed the boundary of a lightweight structure. It sounded wonderful. Until one day there was an almighty BANG and it imploded.

Actually with your techy background you might enjoy another story about him. Armed with one of those old oscilloscopes with a green CRT trace, he discovered a grand piano had some dissonant high frequency harmonics. He dismantled the piano, damped the harmonics on the soundboard, and…

With much grumbling 😆