Tony Durham

One of the weirdest musical quotations in jazz is 3m30s into the Bitches Brew album with what seems to be 4 bars of Auld Lang Syne. Just like that. Amid the taut, throbbing, anxious groove and fluid tonality of Pharaoh's Dance.

Fascinating #BBCR4Today interview with Emma Walmsley, outgoing boss of GSK. You certainly get a different perspective on healthcare when your job is to maximise profit from the sale of drugs.
Only 9% of NHS spending is on drugs. And... that's bad?!

I you are allowed to mention Comic Sans, I am allowed to mention the Gothic fonts that were popular in 1930s Germany. Typography is political.

Coming late to this but I am v interested in what is behind dexterity and skill.
The obvious benefit of more neurons is more synapse weights and more precision. So (1) can you distinguish between the effects of neuron number and synapse number? And (2) is the CST the/a locus of learned dexterity?

Forgive me, I skipped the video, read Kuhn's New Scientist article instead. The 350 are mostly not experimentally testable theories so much as philosophical positions. Kuhn's 10 top-level groupings are good, and account for most of the variance. Is panpsychism not one of the monisms, though?

So if I have got this right, speech production is lateralized and speech perception is bilateral. Something to do with having one mouth and two ears, or is that too obvious?

The cunning Tasselled Wobbegong
Waits for its lunch to come along.
That shaggy carpet on the reef
Hides powerful jaws and vicious teeth.
Large fish that pass its smiling trap
Are swallowed with a single snap.
The lesson could not be more clear:
Wobbetide those who enter here.

Further evidence that widespread covid vaccination is better for everybody.

Costa's paper is intriguing but does my head in. Daily Neuron's rehash of it is incoherent. I think it's me that needs an intelligence loan.

I used to take the kids swimming at weekends. My son, aged 3, was standing on the edge of the pool, facing away from the water. Before I could really take in what was happening, he executed a perfect backflip into the water. How do things like that happen?

The kind of thing I have in mind here is Rick Grush's emulation theory www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

As the sun rises, the last full moon of 2025 sinks far in the NW, where summer suns set. Won't see another full moon until January when the days are getting longer again.

Slime moulds execute parallel search algorithms out there in the environment, before our eyes. Vertebrates presumably execute similar algorithms in the privacy of their own brains.

I know bugger all about this but it seems useful, feasible, indeed likely that organisms learn both predictive (generative) and retrodictive (inverse) models. Forward and inverse models can substitute for each other, but only if you have the compute power to search the space of possible scenarios.

My old laptop trying to install the latest Windows update is like a snake trying to swallow a pig in a single mouthful.

Oh and it was fun doing this as a presenter on the World Service because it's a very diverse and educated audience. You're like: (eye roll) this guy thinks you're thick, but hey, we know that's not true, ha ha.

I interviewed Eysenck for the BBC World Service. He was hard to pin down on race/IQ because he knew his stuff, the genetic arguments are (for non-geneticists) super subtle, and though IQ tests are obviously bollocks it's hard to prove, and maybe they aren't complete bollocks anyway.

What musical tastes get you targeted as a potential ICE agent? 🤔

It's because cis girls never harass anyone, right?

This is a great story, even though the link between chaos theory and cancer metastasis seems pretty flimsy.

It's an old tradition. I was amazed when I learned the extent to which manuscripts were circulated among libraries in medieval Europe. If you wanted to make a copy, either you went to the book, or the book came to you.

I agree. For as long as I can remember, it has been clear that suitable CHNO molecules are abundant. They are thermodynamically stable, i.e. very dead.
The arguments have been about the first replicator. Clay has gone out of fashion. Is RNA still a goer?

Skipping across the ground might itself be a metaphor from the motion of a coastal vessel, hoping from port to port. I just don't know.

Great article but the headline triggers my inner pedant. Because clearly there are people who continue to think despite losing all their toes - or even two whole legs.

Which leaves the question of skipping, in the sense of jumping or, metaphorically, omitting. Does that have anything to do with boats? Skipping bail, for example, might involve slipping away on a boat.

A propos of nothing: 'skip' is part of a cluster of 'ship' words including skiff and skipper, which are presumably related to the Dutch 'schip'.

Classic start to 2wks garden work here. Unexpected 7am brick delivery. Pallet dropped in skip space. Driver arrives with skip but can't leave it. Builders arrive 8am and move the bricks. Council tows away an illegally parked car. The suspended parking space is now clear for 2nd attempt skip drop.

All your test belong to us 🤖

Time for Britain to invent the stop sign junction (and its etiquette)?