Great advice to protect everyone from COVID and this is the advice the government should be giving but sadly isn’t. We are in yet another unnecessary wave, no learning from the UK Covid inquiry whatsoever 🫠 www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX9t...

Don't breathe it in

YouTube video by The John Snow Project

youtube.com

Day 11 of the UCU workers' strike at the University of Edinburgh, over deteriorating conditions for staff and a resulting deterioration of educational conditions for students. All of this, while senior management awards itself with ever bigger pay increases. This is a scandal.

The proposed closure of arts and craft courses at the Edinburgh College of Art is particularly devastating, and I am pleased to support Q's parliamentary motion calling for this decision to be reversed: buff.ly/VAZJgTE

The Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament examines what the Scottish Government is doing, makes new laws on devolved matters and debates the issues of the day.

buff.ly

EXCLUSIVE: Objections against plans to build the world's biggest AI data centre campus in Dumfries and Galloway will be hidden by the local authority, The National can reveal

What a weird world we live in - Ukraine hits a data centre deep in Russia - Irish twitter users see racist posts about IPAS centres in Offaly fall off a cliff

Alina Pereverzieva 🇺🇦@perevaa.bsky.social · 3d ago

And now the best part: Bot traffic from the #Yandex network has plunged to near zero following the strike on its Vladimir data center. Bot traffic includes automated requests from search crawlers, scrapers and other online services. Twitter must be a ghost town by now.

Yet again, Labour showing itself to be the single most racist and hostile anti-asylum government in living memory. It can take decades, if ever, for refugees to be safe returning to countries they fled, and that's when those countries are stable which Syria is not www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Surgeon faces deportation as Home Office revokes refugee status for Syrians

UK classifies Syria as safe to return to despite UN refugee body’s advice

theguardian.com

@europaeditions.bsky.social has been a solid source of Japanese literary fiction in translation, introducing authors like Mieko Kawakami to the English-speaking world. I'm not the only one who will no longer review or promote their editions if they're being translated by AI.

Jenny with a Green Ribbon Around Her Neck@readingtheend.bsky.social · 5d ago

oh my God. this is all so fucking dystopian. this bit in particular really got me:

I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground

Shannon Vallor@shannonvallor.bsky.social · 4d ago

We are soon going to have to come to grips with the fact that this shit is asbestos for the mind

four years ago I posted this image of paleontologist Jan Smit looking at rocks and his son-in-law replied with something even better

A wee reminder that we have three brilliant events on next week - from hosting Gina Gwenffrewi (@ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social) and Russell T Davies on Tuesday night to welcoming Natasha Devon (@natashadevon.bsky.social) on Wednesday - there's something for everybody!

Bethany wore a “Protect The Dolls” t-shirt during rehearsals. The BBC posted it on their socials then quietly deleted and reposted it without showing her from the front. On TV last night they actually blurred the message #Strictly

Back on Twitter, when autumn proper arrived I would always post the video someone made for Sandy Denny's No End (Demo) by holding a camera phone up against the train window. By popular request (well, from @robinallender.bsky.social) I'll start doing that here. youtu.be/o9sERw40Pes?...

Sandy Denny - No End (solo piano demo) - Heading south, winter 2009

YouTube video by other_pete

youtu.be

Required reading for doctors, journalists, & anyone who cares about anyone w/ ME or Long Covid ⬇️ Includes excellent history of #GreatestMEdicalScandal & how the ignorance of doctors re #MECFS is continually renewed through informal (mis)training + biased media www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Chloé de Canson@chloedecanson.bsky.social · last wk.

Why do people with ME claim to know more about the medical aspects of their disease than their doctors? Because the mechanisms that usually ensure doctors' knowledge fail in the case of ME, and sick people have created mechanisms of knowledge production and dissemination to pick up the slack.

I am once again asking/begging cultural, heritage and environmental groups in Edinburgh to stop using Gen AI images of a city that has been photographed from nearly every conceivable angle and for which a vast portfolio rights-free images already exist to use if you don't have a budget to pay

Edinburgh & Lothians Greenspace Trust@greenspacetrust.bsky.social · 5d ago

Opportunity Reminder: We’re looking for up to five new Non-Executive Directors to join our Board and help shape the next chapter of ELGT. If you’d like to find out more go to elgt.org.uk/about-us/vac... Applications close: 5.00pm, Friday 30 October 2026

Imperial College London researchers studied 24,095 people and found Long COVID is linked to measurable attention and memory deficits, independent of fatigue alone. Brain fog may reflect distinct disruptions in cognitive function. academic.oup.com/braincomms/a...

A cognitive architecture for Long COVID: the interplay of brain fog, fatigue, attention and memory

Higgins et al. report findings from a large dataset of COVID-19 patients. The findings show deficits in memory and attention specific to patients with Long

academic.oup.com

Nottingham bought a campus for £37.5m. Spent £40m more on it. Its own accounts say it could now sell for £14m. Staff and students are paying for that. 609 jobs. Three departments. More than 40 courses. That's why we're on strike. www.thetimes.com/uk/education...

Lecturers on strike till Christmas: welcome to Nottingham University

Bad business decisions have been blamed for the decision to shut entire departments — as academics protest it is students who suffer

thetimes.com

If it doesn't get inside you, it can't make you sick. N95 respirators and air cleaning stop the aerosols that plague, COVID, etc transmit in. If you need advice on protecting yourself, talk to someone #Covid / #longCOVID aware. Even if you think we're nuts, we're pretty 🤬 good at this by now.

41% staffing cuts in the Faculty of Arts at UoN. We're entering a wilderness of creativity and critical thinking.

If you see this, recommend a short book. Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü.

grantrintoul.bsky.social@grantrintoul.bsky.social · last wk.

If you see this, recommend a short book. The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke.

"Street Nocturne". Lyonel Feininger. 1929.

Please, for the love of God, leave me behind with all the books because you don’t read. I want to be left behind!

Chuck Wendig@chuckwendig.bsky.social · last wk.

“GOTTA LEARN AI OR BE LEFT BEHIND.” Good. Fuck off! Leave me behind! Enjoy your artbarf rapture, your janky Temu future. I’ll be back here looking at real birds and writing weird, also real, books.

I think it’s a big problem that most of the public is totally unfamiliar w/one of the worst yet common outcomes from Covid, namely ME/CFS. I often share this Sundance doc bc I think being able to visualize the harm (as we can for, say, polio) makes it easier to understand the desire to mitigate it.

UNREST Feature Documentary (With Captions and Multilingual Subtitles)

YouTube video by Unrest Film

youtube.com

Hazie@hazie.bsky.social · 2w ago

@pacoonpause.bsky.social

Lucien Lazare, Jewish fighter in the French Resistance, has died at 101. After fighting the Nazis, he was rejected by his synagogue later in life for translating an article saying “Israel, today, is nothing but a formless mass of corruption, oppression and injustice.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/w...

Lucien Lazare, Jewish Resistance Fighter in Occupied France, Dies at 101 (Gift Article)

He and a small troop of French Jews worked with the Allies to distribute supplies and fight the Nazis, ambushing a German train and liberating a city in the south.

nytimes.com

The Mona Lisa of Faras, an eight-century masterpiece of late antique African art. This wall painting of St Anne, mother of Mary, comes from the cathedral of Faras in Nubia. Today in the National Museum in Warsaw.

The world's largest data centre is being proposed for Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway. The proposals could use more energy than over two million homes in just one year! Join the campaign to stop these dangerous plans: greens.scot/ChapelcrossD...

A very special lady is celebrating her 80th birthday today. 80 years ago today, on 2 October 1946, the paddle steamer Waverley was launched at the A. & J. Inglis Pointhouse shipyard in Glasgow, where the River Kelvin meets the Clyde. 📷 Bob Dougans #Glasgow #history #waverley

A bit of Friday fun with moquette! Looking back at this shoot, where Andreya tried her best to go incognito in her camouflage jackets, blending into the colourful upholstery of the Circle, Bakerloo and Victoria lines.

Super pleased to see this out (and open access!). Moluag was clearly an important figure in Pictland, here we got to help the team who made such important discoveries at Moluag's monastery get the word on the street about the importance of Lismore and the new findings! tinyurl.com/5cb9vf3p

A major monastic centre? Rethinking Lismore’s place in the ecclesiastical landscapes of early medieval Britain | Antiquity | Cambridge Core

A major monastic centre? Rethinking Lismore’s place in the ecclesiastical landscapes of early medieval Britain - Volume 100 Issue 413

tinyurl.com

Great video about Dr Fangzhe Qiu's ERC project FLEXI, exploring how medieval legal digests ensured the survival of Early Irish Law, through scribes re-interpreting the texts over many centuries. #AncientWorld_UCD www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCvS...

Ancient World: Exploring early Irish Law in ancient texts

YouTube video by UCD Research

youtube.com

Universities cannot expect researchers to take risks if they are repeatedly at risk of redundancy while losing professional services support, grappling with the gratuitous vagaries of home and international student number swings and both teaching and assessing in an age of unregulated AI.

Research Professional News@resprofnews.bsky.social · 2w ago

Opinion: Universities are failing at mission-led research—here’s how to fix it. Jonathan Breckon and Geoff Mulgan explain how institutions can tackle society's most urgent crises. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-v...