I love opera, I attend opera festivals. I’m aware that I’m one of about three dozen people under 55 who attends opera with any regularity, and I’m pretty sure I’ve met them all.
Everyone who rhapsodizes about agricultural labor should be forced to spend a year as the lowest tier of farm worker. And not on a ‘organic’ , ‘sustainable’, ‘regenerative’ etc farm. One of the big commercial, mass-market operations that actually supply most of the world’s food.
Same-sex sexual behavior in North American field crickets, including courtship singing, mounting, and “booty bumping,” is not the result of sex recognition failure but is associated with reduced aggression. In PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506022123
The first book review section of my time as book reviews editor for Ibis @bou.org.uk is out; thank you to all the reviewers for these excellent reviews. Books received & contact details are at the bottom of the section for any potential reviewers #ornithology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
"Ms Badenoch has ranked MPs based on how well they are performing on X, Facebook and LinkedIn."
Why sure! Get retweeted by hordes of bots and Nazis - win a promotion!
Shared from my PhD lab’s WhasApp chat, how a journal published a paper about the Arctic fox which is 100% an AI hallucination, and journal isn’t retracting it.
www.canids.org/resources/Le...
Damn depressing how fake science and AI is increasingly flooding real science and real work.
Down the workingmen’s in Ushaw Moor and the Baptist Chapel in Esh Winning, all anyone talks about is restoring the Pahlavi dynasty
In productive ecosystems, larger animals capture more energy per species biogeography.pensoft.net/article/1644...
"The sprint to clean energy is the only way to get off the volatile international fossil fuels markets, cut bills & deliver energy security"
Fair play to Starmer - this is exactly right. Meanwhile, Badenoch & Farage would have us hooked on more fossil fuels
www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...
5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.
Ask the public what services they want to cut, or what services they're happy to be rubbish, and you get a very different set of answers.
They'll say cut foreign aid, ofc, but that's all but gone already. What next?
100% this. The only addendum to this is that, at least anecdotally, the anger at Labour is greater amongst open voters where we are the minority (eg various pit villages in Co. Durham, including the one I now live in) than where they’re the majority (Oxford, where many of my friends still live)
The govt could look at these numbers and, in essance,declare victory. Really focus on stopping boats/dealing with the asylum backlog/ending hotels.
Instead we're embarking on a policy that hurts us economically, splits our base and distracts from core goals. For, seemingly, I'm tough vibes.
Net migration in 2025 was about 160,000.
That headline 2025 net migration figure will come out in May: it will clearly be significantly below the 205k for the year to June 2025 (est range: 130-180k) as 2025 visa data is now published.
But the 2026 figure is likely to show negative net migration.
New paper in @ecography.bsky.social led by Francesco Santi from @unibo.it:
Plant diversity estimates of Mediterranean islands differ among biodiversity databases
We show complementary biases among biodiversity data sources and highlight the need for coordinated sampling and digitisation.
"Continue as we are, and laws of physics, chemistry and ecological realities will seal our fate: an ever more inhospitable and perilous existence."
This is the pain of every biologists who has ever considered leaving academia for industry
Maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t have been spending two years telling our voter base to sod off in the vain hope of recreating a half remembered version of our 1974 voter coalition
The past is a different country — when finishing up his PhD the ornithologist Peter Grant (who at this point had lived in Canada four years) was offered a spot in the Canadian national hockey team
Always nice to published some natural history observations in @ecol-evol.bsky.social
Turns out the Andean Gull engages in kleptoparasitism and predates on Titicaca Grebe chicks and on the Titicaca Giant Frog
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
#ecosky #ornithology
One of the main reasons bosses wanted to crush the tight 21-23 labor market, and elected Trump to ensure they would, was because workers wouldn't put up with shit like this in a world where unemployment was 3%
Don’t forget keeping a smattering of seemingly random geographically named constituencies for geographic features that aren’t necessarily in the constituency anymore
Oh to have the bluster and confidence of a Times columnist writing about something they know bupkis about
Worse — 2 parts vodka, 4 parts amaretto, 8 parts Tia Maria. If the cirrhosis didn’t kill you the diabetes would
At least when my mate Howie at uni invented a cocktail it was original (even if in retrospect vile and lethal)!
The men at the top of Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have built, released, and promoted machines that tell teenagers to kill themselves and military decision-makers to kill everyone else.
This is why they should be treated, as individuals, as hostes humani generis.
These are the Lord Haw Haws of our era — unfortunately the anglophone world seems more susceptible to this bile now than it was the first time around
To clarify-she has just said 'it's no wonder Labour are being called the paedo protection party'
Which is exactly the language the extreme far right are using at Labour MPs - often alongside threats of violence. She is backing that up, from the dispatch box
Restore Britain's language is not just racist it's now indistinguishable from Neo-Nazi groups.
