I'll pop it into my diary, wouldn't want my knowledge to get out of date.

I do find tube noticeboard art incredibly charming. This one is from Euston, classic old TV cartoon. One of the things I miss about living in "The Cally" as they now call that bit of North London, is tube noticeboard art from Caledonian Kimmy.

England have got as many world cups by the "dug up by dog" route as by the "playing football" route. Feels like we could really achieve something in football with a significant investment in dogs.

Maybe it is like flying ant day? I was really furious yesterday because I knew it was in the neighborhood and managed to catch its bum end disappearing over a row of houses in Lambeth. I chased it and it got away which is a bit humiliating as it does not look speedy.

If you're in London and you enjoy saying "Look, it's the Goodyear Blimp" here's how to track it with Flight Radar. It's been flying around all week. Here's a terrible shot from the balcony. www.flightradar24.com/DLZFN/40980aa1

End of another year of networks presentations. Enchanting/comic GenAI of myself and co-organiser @garethtyson.bsky.social as the final slide.

The traditional "networking researchers awkwardly saying cheese" photo. #Coseners26

That time of year again. #Coseners26. @garethtyson.bsky.social kicking us off.

I was at a Safari Park today. They paint the vehicles in the lion enclosure in a zebra pattern. Isn't that a bit weird? What are the lions meant to think? Delicious delicious jeep full of rangers? I have been on shark dives and they don't paint the boat like a rotting whale corpse or a bait ball.

My PhD supervisor Maurice passed away last month. I was genuinely lucky to have such a great relationship with him. He was a role model for me as to how an academic should be. www.yorkpress.co.uk/notice/30724...

Turner and Turing are all very well but I'm genuinely excited by the possibilty of puffins, seals and basking sharks being on our bank notes.

In case anyone was nostalgic for previous labour governments, Blair criticised Starmer's party for: (1) increasing the minimum wage (2) too much emphasis on workers' rights and (3) phasing out fossil fuels. Were those on your list of bad things the current government did?

You will live a much richer and happier life if you embrace the idea that people are not just pretending to have different tastes than you out of spite

Dorian Lynskey@dorianlynskey.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The most psychologically weird reaction to the 100 novels list is the suggestion that writers who like literature are just showing off or pretending or being snobs and they don’t *really* like these books at all. God forbid writers sincerely enjoy great writing

AI language does not only raise the question of truth and lies. It also raises the question of what happens when belonging can be simulated. I’ve written about it in Substack. substack.com/home/post/p-...

The problem of artificial belonging

AI language is not only a problem of truth and lies. It is also a problem of belonging.

substack.com

This is amazing www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

French professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prize

Authorities investigate Florent Montaclair over award given to himself and others including Noam Chomsky

theguardian.com

⚡TENET satellite at @netsciconf.bsky.social never stops surprising you: we're happy to announce our 4th keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Ingo Scholtes! 🗣️Temporal Graph Isomorphism and the Expressivity of Temporal GNNs 📅 1 June 2026 t.co/GwaqJTcwzV

A road traffic modelling program I used to work with in the 90s used to just produce the error message "NOGGIN" if you gave it a badly inputted data file. It wasn't a cheap amateur thing either it was I think the largest selling one of its time.

Doug Clow@dougclow.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A friend of a friend (Pete Fenelon, RIP) in a compiler writing class produced a compiler with one error message: "you lied to me when you told me this was a program". I briefly adopted this approach myself before learning better the hard way. This cricket approach is genius.

@eleanormorton.bsky.social I have been getting lots of well meant adverts from the globe theatre that make me think "Craig the tour guide doesn't give a f**k"

Cave diving warning signs hit hard. Pretty certainly you only see this for real if you are doing fairly advanced diving anyway. (I was relatively far - yet still within daylight range - into a cave system in Yucatan peninsula.) These are (rightly) signs that tell you clearly you will die.

jonty@jontyscorner.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Post your warning sign (These are signs I printed copies of to put on my welder because people seemed to wildly underestimate what it could do to you.)

I have seen some curious uses of spoiler tags but I just saw the one I think is the most charming. Someone on Reddit used spoiler tags on a post about the fundamental theory of calculus in case the reader did not get to the plot twist where the integral gives you the anti derivative.

Unintended irony: presentation on satellite communications shows photos of Werner Von Braun and Elon Musk. Speaker apologises: "I know a lot of people don't like Musk's politics."

Can confirm the headline is backed by the text

The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived | Quanta Magazine

AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning.

quantamagazine.org

Not much of a surprise. Some kaggle datasets are genuinely awful. I reviewed a project about using a camera to classify recycling (photo it, the app answers "does it go in recycling"). ~25% of the images were of curtains hung on a wall. Images of "food waste" were farmers proudly holding veg.

NetScience@netscience.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data idp.nature.com/authorize?re...

These are wild examples of rejecting students (original article is from The Times)

Dan Sohege@danielsohege.bsky.social · 4mo ago

It is almost, almost, impressive just how Labour have taken the massively dysfunctional and incompetent Home Office and managed by dint of policies and rhetoric to make it even more dysfunctional and incompetent. It is a true testament to how hostile they are to migrants. archive.today/07Hdr

Now added to our Gendered timeline of technology cs4fn.blog/2023/05/07/a...

A gendered timeline of technology

Women have played a gigantic role in the history of computing. Their ideas form the backbone to modern technology, though that has not always been obvious.

cs4fn.blog

Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN)@cs4fn.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Polina Bayvel's team at UCL have just set a new record for sending data over an existing optical network - 10 times faster than current commercial speeds. It is enough capacity to stream 50 million movies simultaneously in real conditions. cs4fn.blog/2026/04/11/f...

As side product here is that AI could allow the academic community to develop higher and enforceable reproducibility standards (at least for insilico research) because of the lower cost of reproduction studies

Stefano Palminteri@stepalminteri.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🧵 I gave Claude two things: a short paper (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) and a raw behavioural dataset with 3 lines of variable descriptions. Then I asked it to fit three computational RL models described only by equations in the manuscript. No code, no toolbox, no guidance on the fitting procedure. 1/3

This feels absolutely crazy. If you offer money to students to do a course it is immoral to turn around and say "we made a mistake we need it back".

Doug Clow@dougclow.bsky.social · 4mo ago

My goodness HE is in a shocking mess with students getting the worst of it (closely followed by staff): 20,000 students face having to pay back their maintenance grants immediately www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Minister says it’s not students’ fault but does nothing to help them.

I am actually quite proud of the course on digital signal processing I co-teach. When I was an undergrad I took standard physicist courses on Fourier transforms. When I started coding using them I had some shocks. Why on earth are all the frequencies popping up mirrored?

Mathematically when we analyse music as frequencies we are forced into a universe where it plays lopped from the start to the end of time. The nearest to a practical realisation was "(Everything I do) I do it for you" by Bryan Adams played looped for a subjective ten years in the summer of 1991.

Honestly this is what would happen if your confused elderly racist relative got control of a major funding agency.

Leslie Rissler@ljrissler.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”