I like the trolley memes subreddit, but it sorely lacks the Koenigsberg Trolley problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Trolleymemes/

#philosophy #trolley #trolleyproblem #mathematics #memes

As a small action against the Palantir attack on your health records you can use the NHS national data opt-out service

https://digital.nhs.uk/services/national-data-opt-out

Related story: Palantir to be granted ‘unlimited access’ to NHS patient data https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/palantir-to-be-granted-unlimited-access-to-nhs-patient-data/

#nhs #palantir #ukpol

Short Nature piece on scientists abstaining from using AI: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00508-w

Main reasons cited:

- Accuracy, reliability, hallucinations
- Inefficiencies from needing to fact-check AI
- Ecological impact (~ 50 Mt CO2, 500 Mt H2O in 2025)
- Social impact (job loss, skill atrophy)
- Copyright ethics

I strongly agree with: "I don’t think outsourcing it to a large language model is the goal of a PhD for me."

The AI-generated (?) luddite pic is an unnecessary dig though.

#ai #academia #phd

Any chemists here? After watching the recent Veritasium on Disappearing Polymorphs, I saw on Wikipedia that progesterone (an important sex hormone) has become more difficult to produce in its more reactive Form 1, possibly due to higher prevalence of the more stable Form 2 in the atmosphere from synthetic production. Could this explain the global decline in sperm count and fertility? A hormonal ICE-9 situation?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksn5yrsC3Wg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph

#chemistry #fiction #scifi

The Xteink X4 is an affordable pocket sized ereader with a community working on improving the firmware. I've had mine for a few weeks now. Here is a guide on setting it up https://hollie.eilloh.net/xteink
It has a magnetic strip on the back that I use to fix it to the back flap of my moleskine notebook. A good combo to carry around to combat that phone addiction.

@hollie Looks familiar?

#xteink #ereader #books #bookstodon #notetaking

Leibniz envisaged the computer, he worried about spaghetti code and used the battle cry "Calculemus!" ("Shut up and calculate!"). A true visionary!

https://www.leibnizpapers.org/combinatorial-machine.htm

> this proposed device was intended to carry out calculations with letters that represented general terms; in other words, the manipulation of algebraic variables like a, b, and c. Leibniz was essentially conceptualizing a kind of seventeenth-century symbolic processor.

#mathematics #programming #tech #computer #blog