David J. O'Brien

Suddenly Spring again. Here are a couple of poems that sprang to mind this week as we went from wet and windy to balmily sunny in much of Spain…. A few of the first daffodils in the local park last week  &nbsp…

Seems it was just Solstice a second ago...
davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2026/02/27/s...

Solstice Inspirations… Just a couple of poems as we head into the holidays and solstice starts a new season (for us Irish, we’re in the middle of winter, but here in Spain it’s still autumn…). No negati…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/12/18/s...

Two Poems; Two Pigs & Persisting Until the House Blew Down… . How fragile it’s all turned out to be… We see, as we watch with wonder  Turned …

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/t...

A Writer Sees the Light about Artificial Intelligence… Well, I never thought I’d say this, but the LLMs are making me happy all of a sudden! No, I’m not using them to write my poetry or novels, nor even this little missive, but I am on the receiv…

Large Language Models can't be all bad!

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/a...

Helping Hands Lifting a Lacewing . I lifted a lacewing from some dewdrops Dragging it back as it hauled itself Slowly across a wet morning beam. . It paused where I placed it upon a dry spot As I sipped my …

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/11/03/h...

Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

This whole section really.

Assume the worst… Sunset near the village below the mountain of San Pelayo. .             Thoughts on the Top of San Pelayo, August 15th, 2025 . The distan…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/08/27/a...

“A Good Summer” Well, it’s been a summer. Here in the Valdorba, autumn seemed to come straight after the heatwave abated, with the contrast leaving us less than eager to swim when the day before we were only…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/08/24/a...

My conversation with the man behind The Rewildlife YouTube channel, Jack Morley. Learn about practical rewilding, communication about nature and much more. 🌍🦤

All The Honey .        All the Honey Like beekeepers, we’ve lived like kings: Scraping the sweetness from the comb; Our wheat growing from the dee…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com?p=3468

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/06/30/s...

Orchids like Dandelions An eroding bank which still supports a plethora of common orchids             Orchids like Dandelions Cycling through June vale, past fie…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/06/25/o...

Police launch investigation after Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister says he received a death threat Police have said that an investigation has been launched after Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister Andrew Muir said he received a death threat.

Northern Ireland’s agriculture minister subject to death threat following his plans to reduce pollution in Lough Neagh

www.independent.ie/farming/news...

Poems of TV Screaming… Wish I’d happier poetry for you all, but this is all I’ve got this week. Perhaps best not to upset some demographics of my potential readers, as a novelist, but really, it’s impos…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2025/02/14/p...

Two of the five cheapest cars for sale in Ireland are full EVs. If charged at home, those EVs cost a fraction to run compared to the petrol equivalent.

Driving 50 km/day, the EV costs less than €1 to charge on the cheapest night rate versus €5 for petrol, saving nearly €1,500 each year.

Driving through the South of France… Scenes from the Motorway on the way to Pau, France . As we speed along from Bayonne to Pau, we pass endless Brown stubble fie…

davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2024/12/22/d...

There's a secret code that service workers use with other service workers to get great service and free shit and it's making eye contact and treating people with respect.

I always do these things and I pretty much never get bad service around the world and I do think there’s a correlation

Frankenpolitics: An Interview with George Tsakraklides - The Wicked 7 Project George Tsakraklides has a diverse background in the sciences, having trained in molecular biology, chemistry, food science, and Earth sciences. He has also worked in data analytics and marketing scien...

“Activism should never be “easy”, and has never been easy. You never revolt because you think you will succeed. You revolt because you are desperate, and angry. ”💥- from my interview about my brand new book FRANKENPOLITICS by @christiansarkar.bsky.social
www.wicked7.org/frankenpolit...

A collage of book covers of new nature & science books. Featured here are Atlas Obscura Wild Life, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party, Every Living Thing, Alien Earths, Becoming Earth, and Deep Water

A collage of book covers of new nature & science books. Featured here are Frostbite, The Inner Clock, How to Kill an Asteroid, The Great River, The Last Fire Season, and Hoof Beats

A collage of book covers of new nature & science books. Featured here are The Serviceberry, Not the End of the World, Nature's Ghosts, Meet the Neighbors, The Light Eaters, and Our Moon

A collage of book covers of new nature & science books. Featured here are Turning to Stone, The Weight of Nature, What If We Get It Right?, Waves in An Impossible Sea, The Tree Collectors, and Why We Remember

I was deeply disappointed by the lack of nature/science/climate/enviro on many major end-of-year book lists—so I decided to make my own!

Introducing: ✨🎁📚 The 2024 Holiday Gift Guide to Nature & Science Books ✨🎁📚

Please share: Let's make this go viral in time for Black Friday / holiday shopping!

🌊 The Baltic Sea - balancing pressures in a changing ecosystem
We have published an updated Ecosystem Overview highlighting the pressures impacting this ecosystem.
📄 doi.org/10.17895/ice...

ℹWe talk to Carolyn Faithfull & Riikka Puntila-Dodd who led this work www.ices.dk/news-and-eve...

Nuclear power for AI: what it will take to reopen Three Mile Island safely As Microsoft strikes a deal to restart a reactor at the notorious power station, Nature talks to nuclear specialists about the unprecedented process.

Oh, but here's a great Nature write-up that I used as a source on the Three Mile Island issue. Again, it's not easy to fit big conversations into tweets, but the climate issues we face require a serious reckoning with surging energy demands to prop up bubble economies like generative AI. Cheers!

Data center emissions likely 662% higher than big tech claims. Can it keep up the ruse? Emissions from in-house data centers of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple may be 7.62 times higher than official figures

I highly recommend the episode, along with legacy media coverage of massive accounting issues around data centre emissions (e.g., this piece by the Guardian). I wrote on the technical challenges (paired with PR hype cycle) around the Three Mile resurrection project, too, but that's behind paywall.

Environmental grants promised to farmers in England frozen Scheme to fund activities such as hedge-planting paused owing to budget constraints, sources say

4. You can read more about it here: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

How do you like them eggs? The Price of Eggs The price of eggs: A simple reason To make a significant decision. Perceiving puppetry, The president with …

I think enough days have passed to make this sting a little less than when I wrote it. Forgive me if not....
davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/2024/11/28/h...

I love this Joelle Taylor poem that takes the form of a school report

wow. just wow.

I just read And then there was one, after years of trying to find it in Spanish libraries, and bought a 75th anniversary edition in the shop during the summer… a prize for after Ulysses, which I started on June 16th of my 50th year after decades of waiting till I had the capacity to enjoy it!

Bought the set when I heard the movie was coming out. On to book 5 this winter… amazing stuff

Our Nature Based Solutions for Floods are in action today during #StormBert . Iv'e posted a short blog here: tinyurl.com/26dytdxe