the editors suggest your manuscript might find a better fit at a no-name journal that accepts every submission

Happy 🎂John Venn b #OTD 1834 (d 4 Apr 1923) A brilliant mathematician (Cambridge Wrangler 1857) he wrote an 1866 book on probability The Logic of Chance but he is better known for his diagram. He publishes his first diagram in 1880 but never says when or why he came to invent it.

One thing I only just realised is that sharks are old enough - not just marginally but by millions of years - to have eaten trilobites. This is somehow more odd feeling than the fact they pre-date Saturn's rings.

R > Stata

Elizabeth Picciuto@epicciuto.bsky.social · 2d ago

What is your favorite example of when the cheap version of a product is legit better than the expensive one?

Glasgow's subway may have some of the smallest trains in the world but its network map has one of the largest graph automorphism groups.

Some brief thoughts: 1. Discourse got polarised fast, not helped by some scientists (often not directly involved in response) speculating on how they'd run country 2. Media played role here – I gave up on interviews for some outlets, because would always start "is govt is getting everything wrong?"

Lewis Goodall@lewisgoodall.com · 4d ago

No need for anyone to agree with me - but some of the responses to this on here reminds me just how stifling and absolutist a period in our national discourse Covid was.

With various things in the news and maybe time passing, COVID discourse seems to be coming around again and the main thing I can share as a specialist is how different pandemic preparedness is from standard politics or almost all the other things in the Opinion columns. Primarily, a lot of >

The sec of state who has seen at least 15000 academics lose their jobs just said this. Out loud. Mercy me. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

‘It hurts to lose a job you love’: Starmer loyalist Bridget Phillipson fights on despite cabinet demotion

Exclusive: The former education secretary on her new role as Labour chair and continuing as the minister for women and equalities

theguardian.com

Imagine having served your country with distinction for decades, having saved countless lives, only to become the target of unhinged right-wing conspiracy theorists at the age of 85. A shameful way to treat a scientific hero. www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment at Rand Paul-led US Senate COVID hearing

Anthony Fauci, the former top U.S. infectious disease expert, declined to answer questions at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination and accusing R...

reuters.com

Brilliant thread on the history of Jodrell Bank, and why it's such an important part of our scientific heritage. It really mustn't shut!

Jon Agar@jonagar.bsky.social · last wk.

As a historian of Jodrell Bank, I agree! And the reason it is important is that it has been made to mean different things to different people at different times. Who's up for a mega thread on how and why? (I'm off for lunch now, but I'll do it after. I'll need the energy...)

When did people start sitting on the aisle side of bus seats, leaving the window seat free but inaccessible and how can this evil be vanquished?

What

Andrea Howard@drandreahoward.bsky.social · last wk.

What

In this blog post, #PhilTransA Guest Editor Desmond J Higham tells us about some of the important research highlighted in his recently published issue on 'Safe, secure and robust #AI for safety-critical systems’: royalsociety.org/blog/2026/07...

I agree with this response to the idea that the OpenAI hacking was just publicity. No-one should trust the tech bros, but these systems could do a lot of harm through hacking and that absolutely should be regulated.

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · last wk.

I used to think the same but the huggingface breach really exemplifies that these models can now carry out sophisticated cyberattacks without humans in the loop. With Moonshot releasing Kimi k3 open weights, these kinds of capabilities are now in the hands of anyone who can get a rack of H-200s.

Women drinking in the Bricklayers Arms, Ordsall, Salford, 1977, photo by Phil Portus.

Bluesky:

Did a piecewise linear function write this????

Soumaya Keynes@soumayakeynes.ft.com · last wk.

When I'm queen I will ban line graphs with curvy lines instead of jagged ones. Curvy ones make it hard to see how high frequency the data are and make it hard to read specific data points. I will hear no opposing views on the matter.

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

Fucking hell as if receiving automated rejection letters for jobs wasn't bad enough.

Shutting Jodrell bank is an act of cultural vandalism, absolutely shocking decision.

Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · last wk.

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I'm absolutely devastated for colleagues at Jodrell Bank who found out this morning that funding for the UK's e-MERLIN radio telescope array will be terminated. This is a short-sighted move, to save a tiny fraction of the overall UK science budget. #SaveJodrellBank 🔭🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Jodrell Bank's Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands

Astronomers warn it would tear the heart out of UK science, and leave a generation untrained.

bbc.co.uk

Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 3w ago

“What will the Lovell Telescope discover/enable 20 yrs from now? I can’t tell you, and that’s the point. It will either be something extraordinary that none of us can yet predict, or we will defund it and leave Cheshire with a rusting monument to unfulfilled potential and discoveries never made.” 🔭🧪

It’s time for your regularly scheduled Shark Week reminder: Megalodon was real, but is now definitely super-duper extinct. It is an ex shark. It has ceased to be. Narwhals and giant squids are real! Mermaids are not real. Thanks, The ocean science community

This is dreadful - I'd add one quick technical point which is that it was always predicted that we might get resurgent measles even if vaccination rates had stayed high, due to the complex dynamics of infection. It's going to be difficult to predict what epidemics we might see.

John Mullahy@johnmullahy.bsky.social · 2w ago

Jawdropping data visualization www.wsj.com/health/healt...

Three-quarters of eggs produced in the United Kingdom are free-range— Growing up in the United Kingdom in the 1990s and early 2000s, almost all the eggs in our supermarket came from battery hens, those raised in small wire enclosures.

"Results were analyzed using AI (Galton, 1885; Yule, 1897; Student, 1908; Box, 1958)" #stats

Thomas Nagel fuming at this one.

MU-Peter Shimon 🀄@mu-peter.bsky.social · 2w ago

Humans Can Learn to Echolocate Neuroscience has begun to look at capacity of sensory areas exhibiting a striking degree of plasticity Changes in primary visual and auditory cortex of blind and sighted adults following 10 weeks of click-based echolocation training🧪 academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

I don't know if the story about OpenAI going rogue and becoming a hacker is real or just hype but like most stories about AI no-one comes out of it looking like someone who should have control of trillions of dollars.

Let me expand upon this 🔽 and say something about AIs, mathematics, proofs, conjectures, problem-solving, goalposts, paperclips, genii and, more importantly, Campbell/Goodhart's law. 🧵⤵️ •1/38

Gro-Tsen@gro-tsen.bsky.social · 2w ago

… it turns out that, as LLMs have shown us, you can solve problems without developing any interesting math or teaching us much of worth, so the “problem solving” criterion was wrong all along (or only applicable for humans). Now this is embarrassing because it looks like the goalposts are moving. …

Hydration break.