Stephen James

Also in AI news, Alpha Go team used Alpha Zero to create the perfect animated TV show, and spontaneously recreated Bojack Horseman.

Now she’s just some Bondi that we used to know.

@PHChess So what you are really proposing is a change to castling kingside, which now moves the K to f1/f8 and the rook to e1/e8.

The perfect compromise? I am actually serious now: This is a much better starting position if we want to have just 1. It keeps all the opening names, its structures, but seems to kill most of the destructive boring ones. After 1 d4, 1...d5?! is already dubious.

One of most unusual endgames I ever saw. Believe or not, but only ''mysterious'' 1.Ra8 wins! Can anyone explain? 😲

The main thing to understand about climate change is LAG TIME. A drastic degree of heating is already 100% locked in due to PAST carbon emissions. The only questions are how long it will take to catch up with us and just how hot it will get.

The last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere, temperate forests covered Antarctica and crocodiles swam around the North Pole. (Now watch how this post summons the climate denial bots working to convince you that there’s no scientific consensus on these things.)

The antivaxers have double-downed on recirculating the long debunked claims of Michael Yeadon. We didn’t fall for it then, we’re not going to fall for it now.

An hour after announcing his resignation, the US Army Chief of Staff says: "A madman is about to lead the great US military to ruin."

Prof Dolores Cahill of Dublin warned that everyone who got a Covid vaccine would be dead within 3-5 years Anyone out there who got a Covid vaccine and is still alive? ✋

BREAKING: Donald Trump meets privately with Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth to assure them their jobs are secure, amidst swirling rumors that they may be the next cabinet members to be fired.

I'm 36. I'm a physician. I take a statin—and ezetimibe—every day. No symptoms. No cardiac history. Just an honest read of the evidence. Here's what I found—and why I stopped waiting for a reason to act.

It's not psychological It's scientific Covid vaccines saved lives. Many. Me, all my family and friends had the vaccine and none of us regrets it

Your doctor measures cholesterol because it predicts who gets carried out of the hospital. Insulin, by contrast, mostly predicts who will buy a glucose monitor on the internet. LDL has causal evidence, randomized trials, and therapies that reduce heart attacks and death. Insulin has influencers, fasting curves, and arguments about what “optimal” even means. We don’t ignore insulin—we measure its consequences: glucose and HbA1c. Because medicine prefers endpoints over vibes. If insulin were as actionable as cholesterol, it would be on every lab panel already. It isn’t. That’s not a conspiracy—it’s a clue.

False. Paul Thomas did not lose his license simply for ‘publishing a study.’ Oregon’s board record shows he surrendered it amid broader disciplinary findings, including misleading claims and negligence. And the study you’re citing was later retracted because the journal found methodological problems and concluded its claims were not supported by strong scientific data.

For over 10,000 years, Earth’s CO₂ concentration was stable. Since the Industrial Revolution, human emissions have disrupted this balance, causing CO₂ concentrations to rise. PIK’s @rahmstorf breaks down the science in a series on climate change myths: youtube.com/watch?v=rYb-je…

We haven’t seen atmospheric CO2 levels consistently this high in 14 MILLION years. We’re in so so SO much trouble, & pretty much every politician & journalist has just decided to ignore it. No time to wait. #ActOnClimate #climate #energy (graph by Dr Thomas Ronge)

I’m a disbeliever in accidental discoveries (at least, in biology). Whenever I’ve looked into one, the story turns out to be false. The most famous is penicillin – supposedly, the fungi wafted in through a window, fell into a petri dish of cultured staphylococci, and suppressed the bacteria’s growth. But in a recent article (asimov.press/p/penicillin-m…), @kevinsblake explains that doesn’t really work (grown staphylococci aren’t affected by penicillin; it only works if introduced before the bacteria begin growing); plus, Fleming’s notes on the discovery provide very little detail and the specific results he described couldn’t be replicated by other scientists (even though penicillin does work against staphylococci when introduced correctly.) There are more: Pasteur’s supposedly accidental discovery of a chicken cholera vaccine was more likely the result of systematic work by his then-assistant, Émile Roux. (jstor.org/stable/2332836…) And, as @NikoMcCarty writes, the discovery of GFP, nanopore sequencing, and optogenetics are also often described as accidents, but none of them happened that way either. nikomc.com/2026/04/01/opt… People love serendipity, so why am I bursting their bubble? I don’t think this is limited to accidental discoveries; I think many historical science anecdotes are highly embellished: - Edward Jenner didn’t deliberately expose a young boy with full-blown smallpox to test his vaccine (he used variolation); and he wasn’t the first to try using cowpox bsky.app/profile/scient… - Cobra catching bounties in British India didn’t lead to a rise in the number of snakebites, and there was only hearsay evidence that cobras were bred in response at all twitter-thread.com/t/169650089580… - Barry Marshall didn’t develop stomach ulcers from drinking a concoction of H. pylori (he did develop gastritis though…) cdn.centerforinquiry.org/wp-content/upl… - No one knows who actually found the highly-productive strain of penicillin on a cantaloupe, but it probably wasn’t 'Moldy Mary' scientificdiscoveries.ars.usda.gov/tellus/stories… But in this case it irks me for an additional reason – it gives the impression that innovation happens sporadically, by chance, when there are actually ways that we can systematically speed it up – such as better funding, institutions and incentives. So: are there any true accidental discoveries that hold up to scrutiny?

The MMR vaccine has no aborted fetal tissue in it. This is the kind of nonsense that only a committed anti vaxxer like RFK Jr would say to scare people off one of the safest and most effective vaccines in history.

Don't be #fooled by the serial #Clintel cheaters! The increase in solar irradiation isn't missed at all, but is caused by a feed forward albedo change caused by the man made warming and amplifying it; not causing it

Breaking News! Code Meh! March, 2026, finished with a global average surface temperature at 1.48°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial baseline, making it the 4th warmest March on record, and likely the 4th warmest March in the last 120,000 years. Hotter days ahead.

Don't be #fooled by the #Clintel cheaters & #Wielicky's malignant false suggestivity: Holes in warming exist in more places and of course are studied by science and have logical explanations nature.com/articles/s4146… And regional cherry picks NEVER disprove global mean temp trends