Michael Preager

Personal View: BBC journalism is disgracefully maligned by my old newspaper world, by Trump and commercially-focussed idealogues, yet here at home I just watched @BowenBBC on Iran, followed by @FrankRGardner, followed by the wonderful @VitalyBBC from Kyiv…. I was in US last week… let me tell you NO news organisation is as good as this, no journalists as clear and free, the new DG needs to fill the newsroom with confidence and….defiance…. it is time to wave the BBC flag.

@elonmusk I wonder how much of it has beeen fact checked. or does it exactly meet the generator's requirments?

AI content will vastly exceed all human content

@_HenryBolton @ahmedsohail Fortunately Oran does not possess any ICBM's.

In case your’e wondering, the UK-has: - no exo-atmospheric Anti-Ballistic Missile interceptor system - No layered missile defence architecture - No integrated national system protecting our cities or infrastructure. Our best system is the T45 Destroyer with the Astor/Viper. But it’s primarily a fleet protection asset. The fact is that we and Europe depend heavily on US detection, US interceptor missiles and platforms, and US command architecture. The harsh reality is that capabilities amongst European states, incl. the UK, are very limited and patchy indeed.

A brief thread on the Diego Garcia strike, in response to some of the more...creative interpretations going around:

@simon_schama @shanaka86 Simon he’s feeding public news into an LLM, probably Claude. Anyone can do this

@heygurisingh thread unroll

BREAKING: OpenAI and Anthropic engineers leaked a prompting technique that separates beginners from experts. It's called "Socratic prompting" and it's insanely simple. Instead of telling the AI what to do, you ask it questions. My output quality: 6.2/10 → 9.1/10 Here's how it works:

Trees release invisible chemicals into the air to protect themselves from bugs and disease. Turns out those same chemicals also switch on your body's cancer-fighting cells. They're called natural killer cells. They're a type of white blood cell that patrols your bloodstream looking for cancer cells and virus-infected cells. When they find one, they punch a hole through its outer wall and inject proteins that force the cell to self-destruct from the inside. You're born with them. Unlike most of your immune system, they don't need to be "trained" on a specific threat first. They just attack anything that looks wrong. The 50% number in this tweet comes from Dr. Qing Li at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, who has been studying the effects of forests on the human body since 2004. His original 2007 study took 12 men on a 3-day, 2-night forest trip, walking two hours a day. Blood tests showed 11 of 12 had roughly 50% more cancer-killing cell activity afterward. A follow-up with 13 female nurses found the same thing. But the part the tweet leaves out: the boost didn't vanish when they went home. It lasted over 7 days in both groups, and in men, it was still detectable in blood work 30 days later. Li's conclusion is that one forest trip per month could keep these cells running at a higher level year-round. The obvious next question is whether it's the forest itself or just the vacation. Li tested this directly. A separate group took a city tourist trip with the same amount of walking. No boost to killer cells. No stress hormone drop. Zero effect. Then he ran an even more controlled test: 12 men stayed in a regular Tokyo hotel room for three nights while a humidifier pumped tree oil (from Japanese cypress) into the air overnight. Their killer cells still went up. Their stress hormones still dropped. That isolates the cause to those tree chemicals, called phytoncides. Pine, cedar, and cypress trees release the most. These chemicals were found in forest air but were nearly absent in city air. A 2021 lab study showed that one of these tree chemicals directly switches on killer cells and slows colon tumor growth in mice. The bigger picture connects these cells directly to cancer risk. An 11-year study published in The Lancet (one of the world's top medical journals) tracked 3,625 Japanese people and found that those with weaker natural killer cells developed cancer at significantly higher rates. A separate study screening for bowel cancer found that people with low killer cell levels were 7 times more likely to be diagnosed. Li's own research across all 47 regions of Japan showed that areas with less forest had higher cancer death rates for lung, breast, uterine, prostate, kidney, and colon cancers, even after accounting for differences in smoking rates and wealth. The caveats: Li's original studies used small groups (12 and 13 people), and the regional data show a pattern but don't directly prove that forests prevent cancer. No large-scale clinical trial has confirmed that yet. But the chain is consistent: trees release chemicals, those chemicals wake up the cells in your blood that kill cancer, the effect lasts weeks, not hours, and people with more active killer cells get cancer less often. Japan now has 65 government-certified Forest Therapy sites across the country, each tested and approved based on the physical effects they have on visitors.

May 16, 1963. Gordon Cooper was orbiting Earth alone inside a capsule barely big enough to turn around in, moving at 17,500 miles per hour. He had been up there for over a day. Then the warnings started. First a faulty sensor screaming that the ship was falling — it wasn't. He switched it off. Then something far worse: a short circuit knocked out the entire automated guidance system. The one that kept the capsule steady. The one that was supposed to bring him home. Without it, reentry was nearly impossible. Too shallow an angle and the capsule would bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Too steep and it would incinerate. The margin for error was razor thin — and every computer that was supposed to hit that margin was dead. Down on the ground, NASA engineers watched the telemetry in silence. They could see everything going wrong. They could fix nothing. Cooper didn't panic. He uncapped a grease pencil and drew lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon. He looked up at the stars he had spent months memorizing and used their positions to orient the ship by eye. Then he set his wristwatch. Because when you have no computers left, you become the computer. At exactly the right moment — calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars outside — he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shook. The sky turned to fire. For several minutes, no one on Earth could reach him as plasma swallowed the ship whole. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 hit the water just four miles from the recovery ship — the single most accurate splashdown in the entire Mercury program. The man with a wristwatch and a few pencil marks on a window had outperformed every automated system NASA had. We talk a lot about technology saving us. And it often does. But Cooper's story is a quiet reminder that behind every machine, there still has to be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under pressure, and decide what to do next. The final backup was never the software. It was him.

Really recommend this interview between @freddiesayers and energy expert @HelenHet20 where Helen lays out why markets may be wrong in assuming things will return to normal once Iran is neutralised. The chaos may be the strategy. And whichever way you look it's bad for Europe, which is exposed as incapable of becoming strategically autonomous. The key points are: 1. The US intentionally benefits from chaos in the Strait of Hormuz because China heavily relies on Persian Gulf oil imports, whereas the US is largely self-sufficient. 2. Artificial intelligence development is incredibly electricity-intensive. By degrading China's energy security, the US directly undermines its primary competitor's ability to succeed in the global AI race. 3. The strategy deliberately aims to make European nations heavily reliant on American liquefied natural gas (LNG) rather than Middle Eastern sources, effectively undermining Europe's push for strategic autonomy and tying them closer to the United States. 4. The real disruption relates to Western shipping insurance companies, like Lloyd's of London, refusing to insure transit through the Persian Gulf after a US attack on an Iranian ship. Although the Trump administration claimed it would step in to provide insurance and military convoys to ease the market, it has taken no meaningful action to do so. Consequently, ships bound for China are forced to operate without Western insurance. 5. The US agenda is to leave Europe to fend for itself in the region since it has little strategic interest in securing the Red Sea or the Suez Canal, as almost none of its own hydrocarbon or trade imports rely on that route. 6. Europe's leaders are trapped: they do not want to rely on an antagonistic Trump administration, they cannot rely on Russia, and they currently lack the unified military power to secure their own energy supply routes. youtube.com/watch?v=fZorjJ…

The double slit experiment is the probably most misunderstood experiment ever. I have no idea who created the myth that if you 'look' at one of the slits, then the particles (photons/electrons) stop behaving as waves. It's wrong! They of course STILL behave as waves! Because particles are also waves, always. Photons and electrons make a self-interference EVEN ON A SINGLE slit. Don't believe it? Below an actual measurement from a laser diffracting on a single/double slit from Wikipedia. What happens if you measure which slit the particle goes through is that you get no interference between BOTH slits. And no, you don't need a conscious observer for this. Believe it or not, there have actually been experiments where they had people literally look at a double slit to see if that makes any difference and the answer is no, it does not. The entire mystery of the double slit is in the path of the particle TO the double slit. Because it seems that the particle must "know" whether it WILL be measured at one of the slits before it even gets there. It must "know" whether to go through both or just pick one. Seems like the future influences the past? Not really, it just means you have a consistency condition on the time evolution.

Qq legal.x.com/en/purchaser-t…

@MikeyHotspurs You forgot Tell. Every time he gets the ball he looks down and start dribble, which he is not good at. Made a greedy decision when he should give Gray a tap in, and we would have gone to the next round

Archie Gray has been magnificent tonight. One of the best performances from any #Tottenham player for a while.

Germany has tried monarchy and republicanism. It's had fascism and socialism. German history is complex and fascinating. So I've teamed up with Chris Dillon from King's College London to launch a brand new podcast: REICHS AND REPUBLICS is out now. Find us on any platform 🧐

@clement_molin @threadreaderapp unroll

Vitaly has very good points here on where the russian 🇷🇺 offensive will happen this year in Ukraine 🇺🇦 I agree 100% with his conclusions and I also gathered a lot of data during the last 2 weeks (not publicly) that are showing the same thing. 🧵THREAD🧵1/14 ⬇️

Callum Olusesi a prime example of why you trust the academy btw. Absolutely class when he came on, didn’t look out of place one bit.

Kevin Danso appreciation post. Has to start every week. ° Reliable. ° Solid defender. ° A fighter. ° Top professional. Outstanding today, Big Kevin Danso !! #THFC #SPURS #COYS #TOTTENHAM #LIVTOT

@RudolphN17 Include me if it is a constructive group

A criticism arrived this week suggesting that Gerald represents a "fantastical, cherry-picked version of British beef farming that bears no relation to industrial reality." Let's address this directly. There are no beef cattle in factory farms in the United Kingdom. Not some. Not most. None. Factory farming of beef cattle: the indoor, grain-fed, densely stocked system that generates the statistics most people cite when they cite beef statistics, is an American model. It does not exist here. It is not legal here in the form it takes there. The land, the climate, and the regulatory framework do not permit it. Every beef cow in Britain is raised outdoors on pasture. Approximately 85% are grass-fed for their entire lives. The majority are grass-finished: they reach slaughter weight on forage, with some grain added in the finishing period. The beef in British supermarkets comes from fields, not feedlots. Gerald is not a carefully selected exception. Gerald is the norm. Gerald is what British beef production looks like. The farmer near Ledbury is not running an artisan heritage operation. He is running a standard British beef farm. The statistics people reach for: the emissions figures, the land use figures, the water figures, are global averages heavily weighted by the American feedlot system, the Brazilian deforestation story, the industrial grain-fed model that does not apply to a field in Herefordshire and has never applied to a field in Herefordshire. Gerald grazed permanent pasture today. Gerald has grazed permanent pasture every day of his life. Gerald is the rule. The feedlot is in Kansas. Kansas is four and a half thousand miles from the south corner.

Letter to Antonin Kinsky: you are a superb footballer. You have had dozens of fantastic matches. You are described as a brilliant teammate. Yes you had a tough night on Monday but now you have a choice. Are you going to let one bad match define you? thetimes.com/article/1d9b48…