Having just had a similar idea in Another Place... I blame outsourcing culture.
By getting a frontman in, the guru gets power without having to work on their personality.
By getting a guru in, the frontman gets the benefits of someone playing dirty on their behalf.
Division of labour, win-win.
#FridayFive
1. Black Eyed Boy- Texas
2. Generation Sex- Divine Comedy
3. All's Well Now- Everything But The Girl
4. Waiting for the Wheel to Turn - Capercaillie
5. My Finest Hour- Sundays
Few things worse for the soul than having to pretend that everything is sort of OK when you can't escape the evidence that they aren't.
NOBODY expects the Committee on Doctrine! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and accurate understanding of Just War Doctrine...
Either that or Bernard Woolley's.
The sooner Trump's exodus happens, the better.
It's classic market segmentation to get the most income in. Nothing else.
That the fair price is the one the seller and buyer agree is basic Thatcherism.
She'd be turning in her grave at this.
image from inside Artemis II text: i need more men to understand that two men crying and hugging in space after one of them announced they were naming a moon crater after the other one's late wife is actually what peak masculinity looks like.
I never thought I'd say this right - but, take down the mines, I'm opening the Straight of Hormuz, for an hour.
The curse of Permanews.
There are lots of situations where minute-by-minute public updates are exactly what isn't needed.
The strange thing is that we already know this. We have always known this. Every physics textbook ever written comes with exercises at the end of each chapter, and every physics professor who has ever stood in front of a lecture hall has said the same thing: you cannot learn physics by watching someone else do it. You have to pick up the pencil. You have to attempt the problem. You have to get it wrong, sit with the wrongness, and figure out where your reasoning broke. Reading the solution manual and nodding along feels like understanding. It is not understanding. Every student who has tried to coast through a problem set by reading the solutions and then bombed the exam knows this in their bones. We have centuries of accumulated pedagogical wisdom telling us that the attempt, including the failed attempt, is where the learning lives. And yet, somehow, when it comes to Al agents, we've collectively decided that maybe this time it's different. That maybe nodding at Claude's output is a substitute for doing the calculation yourself. It isn't. We knew that before LLMs existed. We seem to have forgotten it the moment they became convenient. Centuries of pedagogy, defeated by a chat window.
As a physics teacher, this is the part of student AI use that worries me. (Not all of us have decided that things are different this time.) 🎢 🍎 Ref: ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...
Love this photo, but also it feels slightly threatening: "Nice planet you've got there. Be a shame if the moon got pissed off enough with you all to slam into it."
Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot has much the same sentiment, and I will never stop ending A Level Physics courses with it.
But now feels like one of those times calling for a more direct approach.
This is so, so well-articulated.
NASA's Blue Marble picture of Earth, from 1972
It's only worth going back to the Moon if it makes us look properly again at Earth, and appreciate how beautiful, precious and fragile what we have here is. The most famous images from Apollo aren't about the Moon - they're pictures of Earth. We need to stop taking our home for granted.
It's increasingly clear that the aphelion was January 2020 and that the gravitational field is doing what gravity does. If anything, it's all running a bit ahead of schedule.
Maddening (and harmful) that we can't just fast-forward to The Answer, but that's people for you.
Those terms will be almost exactly the same terms as the rest of the EU.
Not because of punishment or revenge, but because that's what's on the table.
A black-and-white comic strip featuring a child asking his dad for a traffic safety poster slogan. The dad enthusiastically suggests a slogan promoting cyclists' rights and criticizing motorists, saying "I hope gas goes p to $8 a gallon". The child responds by deciding to ask his mom instead.
It's finally happening!
Funny you should mention Radio 1... One of the first great Boomer tantrums was when they were cleared out of Radio 1 by Matthew Bannister.
In return for information about the thieves, Crimestoppers are offering a large bounty.
There are no Welsh Conservative MPs to worry about Wales; only a handful in atypical bits of Scotland. And Starmer's travails are an excellent distraction.
Anyone who works in education will be able to see the flaw in the logic here.
On the importance of editing, and why it matters.
Pretty sure the same is true for content generated in schools (all those one-off worksheets!), and that part of the problem is that it's easy to produce things that look professional, but without the underpinning.
Also "we need sovereign hydrocarbons no not like that."
Confidence is always more attractive than fear.
The world does not need more undergraduate history essays but does need more people who can write good ones.
Starmer = Proven Lawyer = Don't ask a question unless you are certain of the answer.
Just unpleasant to live through.
Another reason why we could really do with a generational shift in top tier politics away from veterans of the Brexit wars of 2016-20.
Starmer's cohort are too scarred by the experience. Understandable on a human level, but a problem when running the country.
Give the man the Napoleon Prize.
He likes prizes
They are very good at digging up lawns.
There's also a kid's book called "Stinkbomb and Ketchup Face and the Badness of Badgers", which is actually a better read than it sounds.