Duncan Parsons

@penfriendrocks @lizzlipscombe @johnhackettband Oh.. and a video I'm very pleased with, quirky pop about Temptation - Lead Us Not Literal vibes. youtube.com/watch?v=hIUk5d… Bass on this by @lelandsklar :-)

Amazing how the media can tell you all about human rights abuses in Iran, but when the US is causing people on ventilators to die in Cuba, there is radio silence. Apparently, human rights only matter when we need an excuse to start a war.

@_Investinq Thing is, for me computer games peaked with Space Invaders - I haven't played them in decades so would be at a disadvantage in having to learn a completely new set of keystrokes and motor movements.. I would be demonstrating speed of learning/adapting, not analytical ability

This is CRAZY. Unilever stopped reading your resume years ago. Instead, they make you play video games and it's working better than anything they've ever tried. They put 250,000 job applicants through 12 neuroscience based games before a single human ever looks at their application. The games were built by Pymetrics, a company founded by neuroscientists from Harvard and MIT. Harver acquired them in 2022. The games don't test what you know. They measure how your brain actually works, how you handle risk, how fast you adapt, how you decide under pressure. It cut their hiring time from four months to four weeks and it saved over 50,000 hours of recruiter time. JPMorgan, BCG, Accenture, Mastercard, and McDonald's all use the same platform. Now here is where it gets serious and there is hard science backing all of this. Researchers at three European universities, Liechtenstein, Rotterdam, and Münster ran 40 business students through Sid Meier's Civilization, then put them through a Fortune 500-style management assessment. Students who scored highest in the game also ranked highest in problem-solving, organization, and planning, according to a 2020 study published in the Review of Managerial Science. In 2013, scientists at Queen Mary University of London ran 72 volunteers through 40 hours of StarCraft. The StarCraft group showed a massive improvement in cognitive flexibility, your brain's ability to switch between tasks and think on the fly compared to a group that played The Sims. The statistical evidence was 40 times stronger than what chance would predict. SimCity has been used in university urban planning courses since as far back as the early 1990s, when professors began assigning it to teach systems thinking. Now step back and look at what this all means. Your resume tells an employer what you have done while a video game tells them how your brain actually operates. One is a highlight reel, the other is a live test. The gamification industry is now valued at over $43 billion globally and is projected to reach $172 billion by 2030. This market did not get that large by accident. Companies figured out that traditional hiring was broken. Cover letters measure writing skills, interviews measure charm and neither one measures whether someone can actually think. Games measure thinking and that is why corporations are quietly replacing the old system not with interviews, not with degrees but with joysticks. The Civilization study only had 40 students and that matters. But it was one piece of a much larger pattern across multiple games, multiple labs, and multiple decades of research pointing in the same direction. The resume is not dead yet but its days are numbered.

@neuroglioma @_Investinq Indeed, and bearing in mind many emotionally clever people don't always score that well at IQ tests, one needs to be clear what is being tested anyway..

The part nobody talks about is what happens when candidates start gaming the games themselves.. The second you standardize any filter people reverse engineer it.. Resumes got keyword stuffed to beat ATS bots and these neuroscience games will get the same treatment eventually.. The real question is whether measuring cognition stays honest once millions know the rules

@AnishA_Moonka This is why I've never been interested in Kindles, etc, and always print out anything I'm researching where I need to retain the information - I then know where it is on a page and can visualise it for recall.

Went down the rabbit hole on this. Your brain treats a physical book like a landscape. It builds a spatial map of the text, the same way it maps trails, rooms, and city blocks. When you scroll on a phone, that map breaks apart. Seven large-scale research reviews and direct brain scans confirm what you already feel. A 2023 study in PLOS ONE attached brain-activity sensors to children’s heads while they read the same text on paper and on screen. Paper reading produced fast brain waves, the pattern linked to focused attention. Screen reading shifted the brain into slow waves, the pattern linked to mind wandering and daydreaming. Same kids. Same words. Measurably different brain states. A separate 2022 study from Showa University in Japan scanned the front of the brain, the area that manages focus and comprehension, during phone versus paper reading. Smartphones sent that region into overdrive, meaning the brain was straining just to keep up with basic processing. Paper reading produced a moderate load that triggered natural deep breathing, which helped regulate brain function and sustain focus. The phone suppressed that breathing pattern entirely. Since 2017, researchers have published seven major reviews combining hundreds of individual studies. Six of seven reached the same conclusion: people understand less on screens. A 2018 review of 54 studies and 170,000+ participants, literally titled “Don’t throw away your printed books,” found paper outperformed screens across the board for non-fiction. A 2024 follow-up with 49 more studies confirmed it. The gap has grown steadily every year since 2001. Being a “digital native” doesn’t help. The best explanation is how your brain tracks where you are. Your short-term memory can only juggle about 7 things at once. A physical book gives you constant location cues: the weight shifting from right hand to left, where a paragraph sits on the page, how thick the remaining pages feel. Your brain hands off the “where am I in this text?” job to those physical signals, leaving more room for actually understanding what you’re reading. On a phone, every screen looks identical. Your brain has to track position and process meaning at the same time, and something gives. A Norwegian eye-tracking study analyzing 25,000+ individual eye movements found screen readers processed text more shallowly. The students had no idea they were reading differently. In 2019, nearly 200 reading scientists from 30+ countries signed an open letter warning that screen reading was degrading deep comprehension. Since then, Scandinavian countries, among the most digitized school systems on Earth, have started putting physical books back in classrooms.

@NicholasGuyatt I have some tulip bulbs if anyone's interested..

The FT now reporting that, even without the energy shocks, there's a pretty good chance that the closure of Hormuz will pop the AI bubble and lead to a stock market crash

@Euro_toff @lowles_nick British negotiators were present in Feb before some idiots decided to launch a war

@lowles_nick The only way the Strait of Hormuz will ever open up again is with diplomatic talks and agreement and because Britain has not proscribed the IRGC as terrorists means that Britain is one of the few nations that can negotiate with them...

In a little under 26 hours, we will find out if Trump carries through with his threat to blow up Iran's power stations. If he does, then Iran have announced that they will take out the power, water sanitation and energy infratstructure of six Gulf states. The global economy will go into freefall and we could be moving towards a nuclear strike by the US or Israel. These are incredibly dangerous times

Please cultivate an interest in art, history, anything. If you don’t stay curious, you risk becoming one of those adults who think of nothing beyond coveting expensive cars/bags/whatever, and gossiping about who does or does not have money. An unfathomably boring existence.

So, now we know that the meningococcus bacteria typically only lives for a few minutes in exhaled aerosols, we can start to visualise what’s happening… The contagious person will be exhaling BOTH aerosols & droplets containing the bacteria 💨

Okay. I admit it. It was me wot done it: I was the producer who - almost 20 years ago - accidentally picked up Guy Goma - @RealWrongGuy - from the wrong reception area at BBC TV Centre and put him on air. Now I’ve written a book about it, along with Goma. “The Wrong Guy: the inside story of TV’s greatest cock-up” is a never-before-told, insider’s account of how a death-defying escape from civil war-wracked Congo put Guy on the path to a job interview at the @BBC - and 15 minutes of improbable fame that has endured for two decades.  
Delighted to say @NickPisa at the @DailyMail has written about the book (and Guy and me) describing it as a “hilarious account…telling in fine detail the buildup and the aftermath of what became television history.” The book is already available for pre-order. Do please take the plunge and buy it. amzn.eu/d/0aodh1Ng

@MartinSLewis A pair of such, surely..

Ps she suggested a compass, then the discussion just went round in circles.

@MartinSLewis ..the sin of the fathers..

Just had a long discussion with my daughter about which tool was best for measuring angles for her maths homework. It was a very protracted discussion.

please get a library card even if you won’t use it because cities will look at library statistics and use that to decide to keep libraries open and properly funded

Millions of people are carrying on their everyday lives, totally unaware of what's about to hit them. If Trump blows up Iran's power stations, Iran will destroy energy infrastructure across the Gulf. This would be one of the major "before-and-after" events of human history.

I have a friend in Cuba and what they just reported should end careers in Washington. Every single patient on a ventilator in their hospital died tonight. The power went out. The ventilators stopped. This isn't a rare incident anymore. Cuba's grid has collapsed 3 times THIS MONTH. The hospital staff told them they've had more emergency deaths in the last 30 days than in all of last year combined. A patient with leukemia at a Havana hospital told reporters: "Without fuel or affordable transportation, life has only gotten harder. We are fighting every day." NICU babies are on bare minimum power right now. Dialysis patients are playing Russian roulette with every blackout. Cuba has received ZERO oil in 3 months. That's not a shortage. That's a blockade. The US blocked a Russian rescue mission — 730,000 barrels of oil heading to Cuba — turned it away. Then the official story went: "We're sending $6 million in humanitarian aid." $6 million in aid. 930,000 barrels of oil blocked. You can't fix ventilators with $6 million when the grid is dark. And Trump's own words from March 6, 2026: "Cuba will fall. After 50 years, this is the cherry on top of the cake." The people dying in hospitals tonight are his cherry on top. I'll keep you updated. Turn on notifications. 🚨

Can we get this article about Palantir shared 1000 times?

@brownecfm And with MenB, vaccination does not prevent transmission at all so vaccinated people carry and spread it without knowing they are doing so. There is no level of herd immunity with MenB. So assuming people are not only infected but infectious is critical.

🚨Architects are going to hate this. Someone just open sourced a full 3D building editor that runs entirely in your browser. No AutoCAD. No Revit. No $5,000/year licenses. It's called Pascal Editor. Built with React Three Fiber and WebGPU -- meaning it renders directly on your GPU at near-native speed. Here's what's inside this thing: → A full building/level/wall/zone hierarchy you can edit in real time → An ECS-style architecture where every object updates through GPU-powered systems → Zustand state management with full undo/redo built in → Next.js frontend so it deploys as a web app, not a desktop install → Dirty node tracking -- only re-renders what changed, not the whole scene Here's the wildest part: You can stack, explode, or solo individual building levels. Select a zone, drag a wall, reshape a slab -- all in 3D, all in the browser. Architecture firms pay $50K+ per seat for BIM software that does this workflow. This is free. 100% Open Source.

@wanglaurentceo Hmmm.. well, that's not quite how TCP/IP works there would be a period of reset for affected traffic while it worked out other routes.. Some regional server farms would be knocked out, yes, but not everywhere

95 TO 99% OF ALL GLOBAL INTERNET TRAFFIC FLOWS THROUGH UNDERSEA CABLES AND IRAN JUST THREATENED TO CUT THEM Read that again. Not satellites. Physical glass fiber cables sitting on the ocean floor at 200 feet depth. ZERO protection. 30% of the world's internet passes through ONE chokepoint: the Strait of Hormuz. 20+ cables run through the active war zone RIGHT NOW. Trump gave Iran 48 hours to reopen Hormuz — or he obliterates their power plants. Iran's response: Touch our grid, we cut the cables. The Houthis already proved it works — they hit Red Sea cables earlier in this conflict. Iran watched. Iran learned. Banking. Cloud. Crypto. Communications. Financial markets. ALL of it runs through those cables. This isn't a cyberattack. It's a SCISSORS attack — and the world's internet has no backup plan.