Colin Silver

My piece on Keats & Wordsworth at the really excellent Romanticism blog @Wordsworthians

@SkyNews About 10 seconds of 'news' that climate change is pushing the world 'beyond its limits' before adverts and then a jolly piece about country music. You KNOW this is not real journalism, not serious, a shameful dereliction of duty, don't you? Or don't you? #climate #news

A terrible indictment of the water privatisation experiment in the UK. Don't let your children play in the water. Utterly deplorable. #sewagescandal #DirtyBusiness #Devon @SouthWestWater

Sir David Attenborough explained to Professor Brian Cox that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is uniquely compelling because of its accessibility and lack of scientific "jargon".

I'm not an American but I think this powerful piece by @NathanJRobinson should be shared as widely as possible. #Iran #IranWar

@sciencegirl We're much closer to chimpanzees than we think we are.

What is stopping humanity from living peacefully together?

I wish we lived in a world where I didn't feel constantly compelled to post this video, but until then here's Tony Benn speaking on war with clarity and moral conviction that you won't see from the evil people running the world today

When you’re watching #DirtyBusiness, remember that these are REAL stories, REAL lives, REAL families that have been devastated by the greed of “our” water companies. It’s a national outrage and they must be held to account #sewagescandal

I love the 'insect painting' of Jan van Kessel I (1626-79) so did my own little pencil & ink version of it. It's relaxing and meditative. #art #drawing #MentalHealthMatters

@elonmusk We went to the moon half a century ago. There's nothing there, it's a lifeless rock. You'd have thought we'd want to protect and nurture our uniquely beautiful planet which is teeming with colourful life. Instead, we are destroying it and talking about going back to the moon.

For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years. The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars. It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city. That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.

@jeremycorbyn I thought the same when I travelled around the UK with work in the 1990s and saw CCTV cameras proliferating in public spaces. I couldn't believe there wasn't an uproar then, and I don't expect one now. Through sheer ignorance, we seem happy with a growing Big Brother presence.

I am very concerned by the government's mass rollout of facial recognition technology. This is a grave threat to privacy, and turns the presumption of innocence on its head. We are hurtling toward a mass surveillance state. It must be opposed!

@SkyNews Just switched to @BBCNews to continue hearing EU Commission President speech at #Davos26 after you interrupted her to show David Beckham saying... literally nothing. Please be more serious, that was ridiculous.

@RoyalMail is the most beautiful stamp you ever produced? #stamps #Tennyson #PreRaphaelites #philately

@SteveBrusatte What are the chances of two sociopaths being accidentally recruited into the same law enforcement team?

What Americans have lost in one short year because of Donald Trump:

@MarinaPurkiss Explanation? More vindictive cruelty.

What possible explanation could there be for this, other than making the condition and suffering of Palestinians even more horrific and accelerating the genocide?

Just another example of the vindictive #cruelty being imposed on the desperate and dying people of #Gaza. Israel to bar 37 aid groups from Gaza bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

I miss the days when all my computer files were saved in a lockable box of floppy disks, labelled and sorted like a pack of cards. There was something reassuring in their physical presence, their square, hard plastic cases. #computers #data #nostalgia #1990s

I wanted an update on the #Gaza genocide but gave up trying to find anything approaching factual reporting here. X is drowning in AI generated slop when we need factual reporting now more than ever. I will buy a quality newspaper and so should you. @guardian @FT

The @demishassabis film The Thinking Game is brilliant, has already been watched 160m times - and is probably the best advert for the UK’s centrality to the future of high level globally important research and therefore for the world economy… from AI itself to its applications in every corner of frontier science… the film is a great introduction for any young people in your life to this frontier. Both a former PM and a current Cabinet minister told me, separately, that Demis’ insistence on staying in the UK as a condition of Deepmind sale amid attempts from Musk, Google & others to move him and it over to Silicon Valley has been of critical importance to the UK… I asked a number of related questions when I visited Google HQ including inside DeepMind’s US HQ last month including a visit to its academic library below… will tweet out some of the details you may have missed from that in the next few days, in the mean time, very much worth watching the film… perhaps even more than Elf! Merry Christmas… and a happy NY!

From our archive ~ Abraham Werner's wonderful 19C book Nomenclature of Colours gives swatches of all colour tones, & where to find them in nature. So, for example, Bluish Green is the colour of thrush’s egg, underside of rose leaves, & the mineral beryl mymodernmet.com/werner-nomencl…