"Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think." — Werner Heisenberg

A 4,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet records a teenager complaining about uncool clothing. Around 1800 BC, an Old Babylonian student named Iddin-Sin penned a cuneiform letter to his mother, Zinu, that reads remarkably like a modern, overly dramatic text message. Writing from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Larsa, the young man was outraged by the quality of the homemade garments she sent him. Rather than opening with warm pleasantries or asking about her well-being, Iddin-Sin immediately complained that the other young gentlemen's clothing was improving every year, while his mother insisted on making his 'poorer and more scanty' despite the household having plenty of wool. His indignation perfectly captures the timeless teenage horror of not fitting in with peers. To twist the knife, the ancient teenager compared his wardrobe to that of his father’s assistant’s son, who proudly boasted two brand-new outfits. Iddin-Sin then delivered the ultimate ancient guilt trip, writing: 'In spite of the fact that you bore me and his mother only adopted him, his mother loves him, while you, you do not love me!' Preserved for millennia on clay, this dramatic message serves as a comforting reminder that schoolyard peer pressure, status anxiety, and dramatic parent-child dynamics are not modern inventions of the social media age, but have been deeply hardwired into human nature for thousands of years. source: Oppenheim, A. L. (1967). Letters from Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia. University of Chicago Press.

🚨 This is the statistic Britain should be talking about 👏 @dsmitheconomics Real GDP per head has risen just 9% in 18 years. In the previous 18 years, it rose 43%. Brexit did not cause the whole of Britain’s growth problem 👉 the financial crisis came first. But we responded with damaging austerity and then chose to erect new barriers with our largest neighbouring market precisely when our economy could least afford another structural shock. Now we are paying the price for years of weak investment, weak productivity and strategic complacency. You don’t fix a growth crisis with austerity and by making trade harder.

Your Nightly Toothbrush May Be Protecting More Than Your Teeth Most people brush before bed to prevent cavities. But what if those few minutes are also helping protect your heart? While you sleep, saliva production drops. This gives bacteria in your mouth more time to build up, especially when plaque is left on the teeth and along the gums. Here’s where it gets interesting. Scientists have found a connection between gum disease, inflammation and cardiovascular health. Some oral bacteria have even been detected in artery plaques. This does not mean brushing your teeth prevents heart disease—but keeping your mouth healthy may help reduce one source of inflammation in the body. That makes nighttime brushing more important than it may seem. It removes plaque before your longest period without eating, drinking or brushing begins. A toothbrush cannot replace a healthy lifestyle or medical care. But this simple habit takes only a few minutes—and your body may benefit from it in ways you never noticed. Source: Lockhart, P. B., et al. (2012). Periodontal disease and atherosclerotic vascular disease: Does the evidence support an independent association? Circulation, 125(20), 2520–2544.

PROTECT your countries, your identity, your kids’ future. BAN political Islam and any party that uses religion for power! DO IT NOW Tomorrow is already too late!

A rewrite of quantum mechanics that includes the force of gravity could finally achieve one of physicists’ biggest goals and reveal the ultimate fuzziness of time. Read more: newscientist.com/article/252…

🚨 Diesel has exposed the problem. Gas could prove how deep it really is. Britain spent decades inside highly integrated European energy markets while running down spare domestic capacity. We then left part of that European architecture without rebuilding enough national storage, refining or resilience to replace it. Now we are discovering what that means in a world of war, disrupted shipping and increasingly transactional trade policy. Diesel, gas, fertiliser and food are not separate problems. They are parts of the same national resilience system. Gas is not just about heating homes. Gas makes ammonia. Ammonia makes nitrogen fertiliser. And synthetic nitrogen fertiliser supports roughly half the world’s population. Boris Johnson’s government had an opportunity to help keep the Ince fertiliser plant operating. A consortium sought a bridging loan of up to £10 million to buy it. The government refused, and the plant closed. Britain subsequently became more dependent on imported ammonia and fertiliser. Defra’s own food security assessment records that domestic ammonia production was permanently closed and that the UK now imports both finished fertiliser and raw materials to meet demand. That dependence matters far more when gas markets, shipping routes and geopolitics are unstable. If gas supply becomes insecure, fertiliser becomes vulnerable. If fertiliser becomes vulnerable, food production becomes vulnerable. You cannot call yourself sovereign if your essential supplies depend on somebody else always being willing and able to sell them to you. Food security. Energy security. Fertiliser security. They are one national security problem.

The key problem is that until a few years ago there has never existed an intelligent entity that is not obviously conscious, leading us to believe that consciousness is necessary for intelligence

Сьогодні ми дякуємо всім нашим освітянам. Вчителям, вихователям, викладачам та всім працівникам освіти за вашу працю і турботу. Дякую всім, хто навчає наших дітей і щодня підтримує їх у цей непростий час. П’ятий рік повномасштабної війни. Постійні повітряні тривоги, навчання в укриттях, онлайн-уроки. І зараз, коли Росія знову посилює терор та б’є по школах і університетах, ви продовжуєте робити свою роботу. Я вдячний усім нашим освітянам, хто залишається опорою для наших дітей у такий час, продовжує навчати та підтримувати. Щодня це великий внесок у майбутнє України. З Днем працівників освіти! Дякую кожному й кожній за все, що ви робите.

Newton was wrong about gravity. Einstein was incomplete. What replaces them is stranger than both. For a century, physicists have shoved gravity into the same box as electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, hoping to find a particle called a graviton, that carries it. But, nobody has ever detected one. Every attempt to quantize gravity the way we quantized light has collapsed under its own math. The new frameworks emerging from Queen Mary University and Physical Review X suggest we were staring at the wrong shelf the entire time. Gravity behaves less like a force and more like pressure in a gas. An emergent statistical tendency, born from information trying to spread out. Matter curves spacetime because the universe is running an entropy calculation, and mass is what happens when quantum information gets locally concentrated. Gravity is like reality reorganizing itself toward states with more available microstates. This quietly explains the deepest embarrassment in physics: why gravity is 10^40 times weaker than electromagnetism. Weak forces don't need a particle. They need a gradient. And a gradient across the entire observable universe would feel exactly as faint as gravity does. Dark matter, dark energy, the cosmological constant and every ghost in the machine may just be entropy accounting we hadn't learned to read yet.

Tracking the Silhouette of Orion's famous Horsehead Nebula.😍

This is a reason for diversification of portfolios - AI can assist with this

Incredible video shows a Russian drone attempting to destroy a Ukrainian ground robot but being disabled when the robot deploys an anti drone net and catches it. We literally have robots fighting each other on Ukraine’s frontline.

Brexit increased food prices and hollowed out choice. Brexit imposed fixed costs on each consignment: certification, customs declarations, veterinary paperwork, agents and delays. Those costs are manageable when Aldi or Lidl moves lorry loads through an integrated European supply chain. They are ruinous when a small producer sends a few cases of regional cheese, charcuterie or olive oil. One industry account put the additional importing cost at £2.50–£6 per cheese; another producer found the veterinary certification cost was effectively the same for two pallets as for a 40 foot container. So the mass-market line survives while the small artisan producer withdraws. Supermarkets rationalise their ranges, independent importers struggle, and anything sufficiently special to remain becomes a luxury product. That creates an extraordinary Brexit paradox: a project sold as supporting British independence has strengthened large German owned retailers with continental scale purchasing power, while diminishing smaller British shops and importers. Aldi and Lidl increasingly become our remaining window onto ordinary European food culture. Before Brexit, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, regional salami and good olive oil were normal choices across many supermarkets. Now they are either discount-chain specials or expensive delicacies. Britain has not become more self-sufficient; it has become more dependent on fewer, larger European supply chains with less choice and higher prices. Climate and poor harvests have also driven olive oil prices, of course. But Brexit determines how many producers can economically supply Britain and how much additional cost is added before their products reach the shelf.

🇪🇺🇬🇧 Everyone wants Britain back We must put maximum pressure on Labour 🔸 Rejoin polling at 61%, its highest level since 2016 🔸 Spain, France and Germany welcome Britain’s return to the EU 🔸Britain would return as Europe pushes to complete its single market for services before 2030 We need Britain back notimerica.com/politica/noti…

When Earth Sleeps, the Milky Way Paints the Sky with Infinity. ✨🌌

Plague in Russia Really A lab worker in Siberia has died from pneumonic plague Not good

I've been working with Opus 5.5 for a couple weeks, finally, and it's an awesome model. For explanations and teaching me stuff, it's far preferable to Fable. I have evals that show that while Opus 5.5's precision rivals Fable 5.1's across all tasks in my system, its recall is not as good. For any given specific task they're about equal. But when the task is more open-ended, Fable correctly spots and acts on important issues more often. It shows better perspective. I still think Opus 5.5 is an incredible model and I use it for the majority of work now.

54.9% of voters in a new megapoll now describe Brexit as a failure. Politicians spent years insisting the subject was closed. Perhaps the better approach is simpler: look at the evidence, admit what hasn’t worked and decide what relationship with Europe serves Britain now.

Every day i'm blown away at what i can do in an hour with frontier models like Opus 5.5. I didn't know what to do with an old iPhone, so I built Bluey, w/ Opus 5.5. It's powered by GPT Realtime 2 (i think... whatever Opus decided to use). Bluey is an iOS app + mac app that is made to be a computer companion. It can point, comment, and even control my entire computer. github repo below