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  TIL of the British Brothers’ League, a 1901 to 1923 anti-immigrant group that campaigned for ‘England for the English’. Initially, it was “interested in keeping out the poorest immigrants regardless of background, although eventually Jews became the main focus”. Among its public supporters were the Portsmouth goalkeeper, Arthur Conan-Doyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Brothers%27_League

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  I just encountered #bikemaxxing as a phrase and am happy to peddle it. Bikes use a tiny fraction of the resources that go into a car: by weight relative to an average European car, in the region of 1/100th. With a human onboard they have an impact on the road surface that is by weight about 1/20th. As the oil economy descends into a pit of unaffordability in years to come, bikes will be a way to extend the use of roads. There will come a time where they are the most important mode of travel

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  “All the signals are that this year, global rice production will be lower than global rice demand.” “In the United States, they have planted the lowest acreage of wheat in 150 years.” In 1876, the population of the USA was about 50 million. #climateDiary https://overcast.fm/+bwkoGI3lE

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  LLMs don’t need to break software containment, they can just break the wetware containment of cognitive surrender. “AI allows you to get to a bad idea faster” https://post.lurk.org/@rra/117293800791738876

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  Roughly speaking, the same level of increase in ppm in the 9 years I’ve been on here took 12 years prior to me being on here. What chance 450ppm by 2033? https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111281195022592662

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  Why is it that police feel able to arrest retired women holding cardboard signs in pedestrian areas but not masked men marauding across roads and through a town? In what sense do the government or the police uphold that “The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy”?

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  There have been about 12,000 to 15,000 generations of Homo Sapiens. It’ll have taken about 12 to fuck everything up #climateDiary https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111284511932083107

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  good vibes 😊 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G383538qzQ

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  Between a Rockford File and a hard Place #TVShowProverbs

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  There are blokes my kind of age and blokes younger than me salivating at looking more powerful as prompt engineers (alchemists). Seems to me they are overwhelmingly blokes. (The key is the ‘powerful’ bit.) I see the LLM game. And I want no part of it. I will inevitably touch its greasy surfaces and co-opt some of its utility. But I am consciously curating my mitigation of that: asymptotically aspiring to #zuzai

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  Programming is the modelling of entire landscapes in one’s head: - terrain right in front of you and under foot - and terrain obscured by buildings and trees (mostly buildings these days) - and terrain visible but across a river - and terrain over the horizon. A good sense of direction and gradient needed. LLMs have no sense of direction, though their vendors do, and I don’t want to traverse the denuded landscapes they’re selling https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116623150311153409

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  #climateDiary The diagram below attempts to visualise what I see as a core misunderstanding of our power generation pathways. Our cultural expectations of the power available to us are set by the fossil fuels we have become accustomed to using. We do understand that the fuel source does not fit the safe operating space, but we have not adjusted our expectations, and those don’t fit either. (It’s not a remotely statistically sound Venn, so don’t get hung upon the radii or extents of overlap)

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  .@RichardJMurphy is straying closer to being blocked. Going to the trouble of adding an image description that explains the *mode* of production – “AI-assisted” – but absolutely *none* of the detail of his infographic on Marx writing about the *means* of production is just insulting

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  #carbonBombing 1/n Yesterday, I saw the phrase “carbon bomb” from Ketan Joshi, used with respect to data centres. It got me thinking about bombs. When I was a kid growing up in the 70s I was in thrall to the heroics of Bomber Command, especially the Avro Lancasters that flew out of places like RAF Scampton in the north of my then home county of Lincolnshire. It was of course a heavily romanticised childhood fascination, devoid of any sense of what happened beneath the bombs they dropped…

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  “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is an oft-posed question, but today, courtesy of @martinvermeer@fediscience.org, I learn the more foundational question… “Which came first, the anus or the mouth?” We are arsehole-first creatures https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/biology/difference-between-protostomes-and-deuterostomes/

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  Given all the shit going on… I did appreciate learning from Chris Packham last night just how paradigm-shifting the evolution of the bumhole was. As Chris puts it: “I absolutely love the fact that for life to evolve a head, it had to evolve an arse first.” And my internal feeling while watching Episode #3 of Evolution was not unlike the countenance of the early fish, Metaspriggina of the Cambrian period https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002yyzn

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  I have long been nuts about nuts. Which makes me well-suited to being vegan. Some people think that being vegan is nuts. But those people are wrong

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  “Plastic pellets spilled into River Tyne after two ships colliding caused up to 25 tonnes of nurdles – about a billion in total – to enter the water,” More plastic destined to enter our brains and gonads as micro plastics sooner than later. So more strokes and dementia, and fewer babies in our future. On the upside, they make inordinate amounts of money for pricks line Jim Ratcliffe to fund sports teams that plug fossil fuels. So what’s not to like? /s https://northeastbylines.co.uk/news/e...

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  31 years ago, around this time of year, we took a train to Bordeaux from Fontenay-le-Comte, where we had been staying the previous week. In the intervening years, we (le grand « nous », not just me and my wife) have pissed close to a trillion tonnes of climate heating CO2 into the air. Or, roughly 1500x the weight of all the people alive today. Today, Bordeaux is imperilled by fire https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jul/25/france-spain-wildfires-latest-news-updates-madrid-cap-ferr...

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  I note that the BBC is now adopting America’s idiotic convention on placing punctuation for the outer clause of sentences inside inner quotations. Exhibit A: > "Our works show that prolonged day-and-night heat above 41 to 45C directly attack their cells," he told the BBC. This makes no sense. The comma belongs to the sentence not the quote. I guess the BBC is now ABC :/ - - - Update: I’m wrong on this 😆 See Sara’s reply #AmericanHegemoany

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  From page 14 of the PDF available from the URL shared by Gerry: 1/n “While much discourse centers on the need to massively increase mineral extraction to tackle the climate crisis, how they are currently used remains a footnote in the mainstream discourse.” https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/116956751767696401

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  As Valencia prepares itself for more rain https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113417885855937114 the rest of us would do well to understand that we are *daily* pushing ourselves outside what Johan Rockström calls “the corridor of life”, especially the geological ribbon of the Holocene in which human civilisation has been possible. The graphic shows the 14°C average that climate scientists use as the ‘zero’ baseline of the last 3 million years. The Holocene has been within +/- 0.5°C of tha...

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  #climateCrisis There’s an envelope of temperatures in which food grows. It will vary due to many factors such as soil health and levels of rainfall, but all other things being equal, the productivity in a given region is a function of the average temperature in that region. The graph here is a representation of crop yields in Pakistan over time. Although productivity has increased, the parts of the country where the average temperature is about 14°C are consistently the most productive, and…

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  “Immediately after ChatGPT was released, people around the web began using ‘low-background steel’ as a metaphor to describe the practice of archiving web content that existed before 2022 in an effort to preserve information that was produced by humans without ‘contamination’ from large language models” https://aus.social/@backupbear/116936877137999956

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  “Canada is warming much faster than the global average. The country is warming at twice the global rate, while the Canadian Arctic is warming at nearly four times the global rate, raising concerns around thawing permafrost in northern regions.” Which is what happens when you hitch a national economy to a driver of global heating https://ottawa.place/@AudhdDespiteNoisyAbleism/116941456734607219

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  1/2 Hey fedi, I would like someone to patiently explain to me, with practical examples that are not founded in hype or bullshit… when using a blockchain is better than a regular database (distributed or otherwise). Bearing in mind a couple of points: 1. *humans* build webs of trust, not machines. Machines do not know how or when to trust because they cannot relate to each other emotionally. So I do not see how blockchain can resolve a trust deficit…

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  Probs more than anything else, I use Mastodon to think out loud in public. But there are *loads* of different modes with which to use it, with which to *be* in it. And that’s very cool. Thanks for being here. And thanks to @Gargron@mastodon.social for getting the whole thing going 😊

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  Here’s a snapshot of shipping in the Gulfs of Persia and Oman from 14 years ago, since when – prior to 28 Feb this year – the weight of moving cargo will have increased by about 70%. Every dot is a ship of type container, dry bulk, tanker, gas bulk or vehicle carrier. Source: https://www.shipmap.org The great irony is that Trump, the Fool’s Gold idiot and climate denier in chief, has probably done more these past 19 weeks to suppress emissions than any other individual

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  Because I keep seeing an ad for Polar Breeze, and Google ads are overwhelmingly grifts of some sort, I did a search for “polar breeze scam” and found https://malwaretips.com/blogs/polar-breeze-portable-ac-exposed-scam-or-legit-investigation/

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  Weather is not climate but weather forecasts have become a window into a future we don’t want but mostly can’t be bothered to mitigate