Astronomy Prof at Open University. 26.2. #RejoinEU. Views not OU’s and often not even mine. He/him 🐘 https://mas.to/@stephenserjeant 🧵 https://www.threads.net/@prof.stephen.serjeant ORCID 0000-0002-0517-7943 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0517-7943
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"Farage has given two contradictory versions of the purchase. One that he bought it and the other that his girlfriend owns it. If the second is correct then he has engineered a massive saving on stamp duty, larger than the one that forced Angela Rayner to resign." www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news...
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Help!
Crikey
wow. Is Kay still a grad student or has he gone on to greater things?
Everyone is rushing to defend Graham Linehan as some martyr to free speech but don't actually state what he tweeted. He explicitly called for people to violently assault trans women in the bathroom. In another instance, he cyberstalked a trans minor. He's legitimately a danger to trans people.
When I was announced as the lead in a Doctor Who spinoff in 2023 Graham Linehan tweeted about me for TWO DAYS, tagging the BBC and others to say that I am pro-child abuse and they shouldn't work with me.
My absolute favourite thing about Melvyn Bragg is his singular attitude of No Mucking About. Literally every episode starts like “HELLO IN 1492 COLUMBUS SAILED THE OCEAN BLUE WITH ME ARE TWO EXPERTS OK TELL ME RIGHT NOW WHERE THE FUCK IS GENOA?”
A few yrs ago,someone high-placed in the BBC gave a talk at the OU,showing footage of Melvyn Bragg being asked something. MB started, stopped & thought, then continued. BBC guy: "How rare to see someone thinking on TV",playing to OU audience ofc but still true. MB makes some of the best BBC output ☹️
Still one of the best and most entertaining media interviews of an environmentalist. Inspired use of silence and intelligence 🧪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICVP...
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Destroy this myth. Please share if you have visited and researched in a library this past year! RT And give a shout out to your favorite library you have ever visited.
I don't think I've used this word much, if ever, to talk about public policy. But some of the things being both said and implied about migrants are evil. And we should say that.
I see and I hear and I speak no evil; I carry no malice within my breast; yet quite without wishing a man to the Devil one may be permitted to hope for the best. -“An Ethical Grook” by Piet Hein
I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)
The EU Delegation in Kyiv was damaged by today’s Russian strikes on civilian areas. I strongly condemn these brutal attacks, a clear sign that Russia rejects peace & chooses terror. Our full solidarity goes to EU staff, their families, & all Ukrainians enduring this aggression.
Thank you for the reply. I think you have misread my intentions but I will bother you no further.
I’m fascinated by the idea of an atheist rabbi. If I promise to try to avoid your negative descriptions of Xtian atheists, would you mind if I ask a few questions about how this works please?
Sunlit uplands update 🧪
I don’t want to be too shrill about this but I think the BBC, ITV and Sky have disgraced themselves in their coverage of the anti-refugee protests. A massive failure of judgement. But now we know the next time a progressive protest “isn’t news” that it’s nothing to do with numbers
Adam makes a good point. I'll add that it's worth noting this isn't just right wing press and Labour amplifying their cause. It's the left wing press, and all the left wing people online saying "we're a racist far right country". It's all part of building up this myth.
Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority".
On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵
woohooo!
Just checking….Are we absolutely certain that the British patriots are the people who hate British cities, British law, British judges , British democracy, the British civil service, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and large swathes of the British people?
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Perhaps, one day, schoolkids will study this squalid little chapter in British terror-panic history. When they do, I hope these two headlines from today are printed side by side, with clear annotation of which individual faced more outrage and condemnation.
🇬🇧 looks okay from here in Blighty
so which one was the one where Captain America fought General Zod? that was McDowell right? I think that was in a Judge Dredd movie or maybe the matrix
Bad luck :/
I’m kind of speechless with this one. I can’t imagine the kind of person who continues to make the argument that it doesn’t count as real starvation if the kids were already sick.
I genuinely find it difficult to tell the difference between Terence Stamp and Malcolm McDowell. Is it just me?
BREAKING: Police have confirmed they did not arrest the protesters holding a "kill 'em all" banner outside an asylum hotel because it's not like they did something really bad like object to genocide x
Not sure if that’s a rhetorical Q, but the paper is a 78 page PDF paper with 15 figs (mostly composite), 4 tables & 6 equations (not counting the appendices) & 6 pages of references. This is not Sally’s Baking Addiction. If your bar for “not a blog” is peer review, nearly all Einstein’s work fails.
You might at least get to speak to them in person though
Regardless of how good or bad the work is (and I’m content to accept the consensus of ‘very bad’), you must surely know that a paper on arXiv is not a blog post. This is a misleading comparison.
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Woohooo! Congratulations @playingwithdust.bsky.social ! And a very fine winning image it is too, in the thread. 🔭
Tagging 🔭 just to point out that you could in principle stand on the surface of a comet
Tagging the 🧪 and 🔭 feeds
From the outset of the war, even allies of Ukraine have failed to grasp rhe importance of winning, and to strategise and support accordingly. We will bear the consequences of that for a long time.
The contrast in reporting these stories is nuts, right? It's not just me?
There is just no precedent in recent world history of an advanced industrialized country sabotaging its own scientific establishment, and destroying the base of scientific knowledge necessary for basic policymaking. An avowedly, actively anti-knowledge regime.
This is a perfect analogy. The dark ages only happened in territory where the Roman empire collapsed. The rest of the world like Egypt, Ethiopia, Persia, China and India never experienced a "dark ages." Education and science didn't go away, they didn't stop reading and writing, they weren't affected
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As predicted by every trans person over a decade ago, the UK's gender critical shitshow doesn't work for anyone.
When this confirms, cis people please CALL your MP and say you're not going to carry your birth certificate everywhere and ask what are you supposed to do if someone says you're trans? Say this is an absurd law based on absurd assumptions and it LIMITS YOUR FREEDOM.
Can I keep guessing? 😁 Are the BBC bringing back Top Of The Pops and you're the presenter? Are you playing a klingon jedi in the first Star Wars/Star Trek crossover film? Will you be the driver of a world land speed record attempt in the rare subcategory of cars powered entirely by elastic bands?
Have you been selected to play for QPR?
My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.
Wild case of ChatGPT almost killing a guy by telling him to substitute sodium bromine for table salt (sodium chloride) #medsky www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...
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197/1461
Oh that’s disappointing
Ah yes good point
V sorry to hear about your experiences 😢 Not looking to justify the attitudes but in fairness to the bbc it does say Dr Beth Upton in the timeline graphic
I am glad I saw this video and would like to give a full Stone Cold HELL YEAH to this message.
Hoping friends & colleagues in Japan & Hawaii (especially at UH & EAO) stay safe for the tsunami. Meanwhile, stay off Twitter/X 🧪🔭
Congratulations to Prof Dougherty! A marvellous appointment of a superb scientist to become the next Astronomer Royal. Genuinely delighted 😁 🔭🧪
Is it possible there could be more than one lava world in one solar system? Would the irradiation & orbital stability allow it? Also could you even have four lava worlds around a white dwarf? Because then it would be lava, lava, lava, lava, mega mega white thing
Back from AM run, find house open,kitchen being taken apart, plumber with wide-eyed smile that said "phew you're here", MrsS with wide-eyed smile that said "WTF dumbass", me with smile that said "I forgot plumber asked if he could replace our boiler this week". Anyway how's everyone else's day going
If you were alive in the 1980s, this is among the most wonderful & truly incredible things you have ever witnessed in your lifetime.
Isn’t football so much better than men’s football?
Violent or destructive left wing protest is framed as delegitimising the protesters' stated cause. Violent or destructive right wing protest is framed as emphasing the need for urgent action on the protesters' stated cause. As always, right wing men are treated as elemental forces without agency.
ok this is proper funny news.sky.com/video/share-...
wowwwww!
wait they point where??
This is really rather lovely! Congratulations @chrislintott.bsky.social ! Chris is looking super-young in that early footage so here's me from about 20-25 years ago. OMG I'm a 👶
Feels confusing to have more than one DAG in my legal-y feed. I don't suppose you'd be open to slightly changing your name purely for my personal convenience @davidallengreen.bsky.social ?
Heard from a colleague spending a few months in the Netherlands. "Went on a 35-mile bike ride today, entirely on bike paths, through all kinds of landscapes. Turns out I love biking, I'm just scared of biking with cars." 😢
Criticising the ban on Palestine Action is not the same as saying "I support this organisation". It cannot be reasonably be stretched to mean I back a group, because the premise of the statements are different. But the doubt is designed to shut people up. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
Ian Hislop calls arrest of man holding Private Eye cartoon at Gaza protest ‘mind-boggling’
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When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.
you found it www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5k5...
Enjoy!! Still interested in reading at least the abstract of your glorious tome
HST 1/3 🔭
I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better
I vote for the Cookie Monster and the Swedish Chef
When I visit colleagues in Annecy or Strasbourg, I'm struck by how often people just blithely commute across the borders every day. I can't speak for all the policy complexities behind the scenes, but from a citizen's perspective, Schengen, and the Four Freedoms, are genuinely the work of genius.
Whether there are or are not opt outs if the UK sought to rejoin the EU is a secondary issue - if the UK's pro-EU folk don't make a broad pro-EU case about why the UK doesn't need opt outs then the question is never going to arise in reality.
Or if it’s not a constant 100%
Generative machine learning can do many wonderful and useful things in scientific contexts, from image deconvolution to simulation based inference and more. 🔭🧪 And then there's this.
oh this is interesting. i pretty firmly believe, just as a matter of observation and experience, that complaints about affirmative action are a psychological salve for people who aren’t confident of their ability to succeed
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It's also one of those modern day myths, a bit like US gun laws or mediaeval chivalry; invented or embellished by a later generation for anachronistic reasons. The British currency is younger than me. The name might have history but the currency is a child of the 1970s.
Unpopular opinion (but it shouldn’t be): we in the UK have a weird fetishisation of £ sterling. I can’t speak for the subtleties of economics, but as a random traveller life would be SO much easier if the UK adopted the €. From a user perspective it’s the work of genius, as are the Four Freedoms
The Cass Review has not been peer-reviewed. But it has now been critiqued in depth and from every angle and fully discredited as pseudoscience by ELEVEN peer-reviewed publications. So when the government uses the Cass Review to justify any policies it is not “following the science”.
What do you think is more likely, that Musk’s Nazi robot has made new discoveries in materials science or that Musk can’t tell when he’s being told scientific-sounding gibberish?
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If anyone else is threatened by Kathleen Stock - or any of those other GCs who love free speech so much they have defamation lawyers on speed dial - please do get in touch. We employ a full time lawyer to fend off this intellectually dishonest bullshit.
Doing a mid-air somersault during a long jump in athletics. Apparently better for dealing with generation of angular momentum leading to longer jumps, but banned because of the danger to competitors
omg!! I stand corrected! I’ve seen hot water taps, microwaves, so very many diverse crimes against nature
Kettles in the USA. Genuinely bizarre. Sorry transatlantic friends, but unless you like tea to taste like piss, this is the one kitchen appliance you’re missing
youtu.be/b0wWOKwmvkM?...
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Rob Hewes 