Agree - especially impressive because Lawrence Renes stepped in as conductor at the last minute.

The Long Ukrainian Winter How You Can Help

Russia’s full-scale invasion began 4 years ago. It began in winter, and so this winter is the 5th. And, for civilians, the worst. Russia launches missiles and drones at energy infrastructure to force Ukrainians to endure the freezing cold. Here's how you can help
snyder.substack.com/p/the-long-u...

Incessant pocket-patting.

By 'shame' I mean: there are no adverse consequences for a LLM model of serving up wrong information. Unlike a gambler, when a LLM makes a statistical wrong guess about what the next word, sentence or paragraph should consist of, it loses nothing.

The fourth week since 27 October in which the collections have been inaccessible.

Do large language models have a legal duty to tell the truth? Abstract. Careless speech is a new type of harm created by large language models (LLM) that poses cumulative, long-term risks to science, education and sha

Do large language models have a legal duty to tell the truth? url: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

The hallucination problem reveals a lack of accountability for accuracy. The LLMs have no inbuilt shame about serving up junk answers and their developers are moving too fast to care.

Great culture can save lives. Literally.

Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

'Exhibition Extraordinary at the Horticultural Society of London' (later the RHS), George Cruikshank, 1826, City of London archives. Presiding over this mockery of the Society's pomposity sit the chairman, John Elliott, 1/2

The British library is in crisis: why does nobody care? The widespread indifference to the British Library's crippling cyberattack demonstrates a perilous failure to value the knowledge infrastructure vital for national prosperity

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight
www.cityam.com/the-british-...

Grimly fascinating to see how much devastation these motorways would have caused to places I know and love in London.

'November' from Eliot Hodgkin's 'The Months', 1950. A brocade-coloured chrysanthemum, reddening geranium leaves, the first blanched chicory, arbutus unedo fruits, bulbs and seeds for autumn planting.

New Town Plans Threaten Rousham’s Iconic Landscape Situated to the southwest of the site, the Grade I listed Rousham House & Gardens has expressed concerns regarding the potential development encroachment

New town plans threaten Rousham’s iconic landscape ...read more on thedirt.news #Planning #Rousham #gardens #conservation #WilliamKent #Bridgeman #gardenvisiting #gardendesign #landscape
thedirt.news/new-town-pla...

The Kaufmann office was a highlight of my first visit!

I agree with Liz. This is not fringe science - the role of folate in foetal neurodevelopment is well established. But an important caveat in the article: children who test positive for autoantibodies that block a receptor essential for transporting folate into the brain are more likely to benefit.

The drug Trump plans to promote for autism shows real (and fragile) hope Leucovorin brings hope as the first potential autism treatment, but with RFK Jr. weighing whether to fast-track approval, scientists worry about trust.

Good, balanced article on leucovorin & autism. Bottom line from Irva Hertz-Picciotto: While the research on folate is early and evolving, it’s not fringe science. It's generally quite safe, so worth testing more broadly. We can't just be contrarians.

www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

I have zero regrets about making asparagus ice cream at the weekend. (Agnes Marshall, 1894, mainly tasted of cream and sherry).

Really enjoying this fascinating series on reading and publishing during WW2.

Check out today's posts of J.M.W Turner's works by @peterpaulrubens.bsky.social - every one a startling use of light and colour.

Bites on gladiator bones first evidence of combat with lion Experts say the discovery provides the first physical evidence of gladiatorial combat with animals.

It's the idea that York may have had an amphitheatre with lions I find most exciting - although archaeologists are still hunting for it.

As the global economy crashes and global alliances are torched, Bluesky has ramped up the cat content of my feed to 80%. Here are happier days.

Systema Naturae, a double page spread chart, tightly packed with names of animal species. It is split into Quadrapedia, Aves, Amphibia, Pieces, Insecta and Vermes.

It is #TaxonomistAppreciationDay today! A big day for Carl Linnaeus, who we happen to care about (just a little.)
100 years before Darwin's evolutionary theory was published, Linnaeus was classifying animals based on shared traits. He created #SystemaNaturae in 1735, and we still use it to this day!

‘Military Keynesianism’? Reeves faces British defence dilemma after EU spending surge Even Berlin and Brussels are bending fiscal rules in the face of Russia’s threat. Will the chancellor still stick to hers?

Calling something “military Keynesianism” suggests a deep misunderstanding of Keynes’ economic thinking in general and his views of financing the cost of the Second World War in particular Short 🧵 www.theguardian.com/business/202...

The Collaborators The real “threat from within” comes from those fake British patriots loudly cheering on attacks on our own country by a hostile foreign power

“The real “threat from within” comes from those fake British patriots loudly cheering on attacks on our own country by a hostile foreign power”
@adambienkov.bsky.social 👏
www.adambienkov.co.uk/p/the-collab...

Appeasement at Munich World Wars, Past and Possible

"Appeasement at Munich: World Wars, Past and Possible"
The symmetry between Germany-Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Russia-Ukraine in 2022 is uncanny, and pausing for a moment on the resemblances might help us to take a broader view of today.
snyder.substack.com/p/appeasemen...

Current gap seems to imply 3p on the basic rate? For historical context, basic rate went from 22.5% in 1935 to 27.5% in 1939 for rearmament.

An Ethiopian wolf, that looks a lot like a fox, licking the orange-to-gold inflorescence of a plant.

Ethiopian wolves surprise scientists by sipping flower nectar! These endangered predators may double as pollinators in Ethiopia's Bale Mountains, revealing unexpected connections in highland ecosystems.

https://wp.me/pdRZhH-lGR

#Botany #PlantScience 🧪

Dozens of Clinical Trials Have Been Frozen in Response to Trump’s USAID Order The stop-work order on U.S.A.I.D.-funded research has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.

“We've betrayed the trust of ministries of health and the regulatory agencies in the countries where we were working and of the women who agreed to be in our studies...I’ve never seen anything like it in my 40 years of doing international research. It’s unethical, it’s dangerous and it’s reckless.”