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aeonmach.bsky.social
I LIKE a *lot* of shit: sci & tech (my day job!), environment & energy (ecomodernism), politics (~moderate, social-liberalism), culture & language(s), outdoors (mountains, cycling/MTB, sailing), travel, nuance & irony. 
I HATE black-&-white simplism!
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Posts 15 Comments 35

For the first time in history, we can proudly show you a DOUBLE German bollarding. This has NEVER been seen before so congratulations to us. #WorldBollardAssociation

submitted 1 day ago • 98 comments

For for the West of England mayoralty More in Common have: Lab: 23% Con: 21% Reform: 18% Green: 18% LD: 15% It is genuinely absurd to have an election with that kind of spread decided by first past the post. Unjustifiable.

submitted 23 hours ago • 40 comments

As a specialist in judicial independence, gonna go out on a limb and say that a justice minister explicitly declaring her intent to purge the judiciary is … bad.

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

When I'm bored and stuck in a political conversation I like to fake-attribute stuff to the Foundation for Law and Government. Then see if anyone is old/smart enough to remember that was the name of the people who made KITT in Knight Rider. They almost never are.

submitted 2 days ago • 11 comments

Amen. Randall using his voice like this is *wonderful*. XKCD forever.

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

submitted 2 days ago • 603 comments

Familiarise yourself with digital resources! Historic Environment Scotland has a Gaelic thesaurus that provides translations of vocabulary related to the historic environment: buff.ly/xUnZHNf #Gàidhlig #Gaelic #Cleachdi

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Interesting thread: if you read the detail you will find that 8% of fatherfuckers claim to never swear…

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

To clarify, fatherfucker was included because Frankie Boyle was once able to get round restrictions on motherfucker by using it, so we wanted to test whether the public would actually draw a distinction.

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

The tendency for ratings for issue handling to move together over time is a core theme of The Politics of Competence by @profjanegreen.bsky.social and me (CUP, 2017). This in part reflects the generalised way that voters make evaluations of competence of political leaders and parties.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

105 cyclists/yr are killed by cars in the UK. Cars kill or seriously injure 1,233 child pedestrians (u16) per year. Changing the law is meaningless because so few people are killed by bicycles. The only effect will be to give drivers an even greater sense of entitlement to endanger others

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

Might write on this soon but my general view is that excusing a few stumbles the UK government is handling the major trade powers OK. Nothing special but could be an awful lot worse.

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

I was told the following joke by a Hungarian. There's an international swearing competition, where the challenge is to swear as fluently without repetition of any word for as long as possible. An Englishman goes first. He swears with full variation for 37 seconds. The audience applaud politely. 1/3

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

But Charles Grant, director of the @centreeuropeanref.bsky.social think-tank, says France is losing this argument, because Germany, Italy and most eastern EU members think building stronger European defence without Britain would make no sense.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

I don’t think it’s in good faith to pretend the extremely narrow use cases that require an expert to read the results of an LLM and the attempts to push LLMs into wide, popular, and frivolous use are the same.

submitted 3 days ago • 13 comments