Tony pro-democracy pro-biosphere Durham

@newscientist Isn't there a Tarkovsky movie about this?

There are new hints that the fabric of space-time may be made of "memory cells" that record the whole history of the universe. If true, it could explain the nature of dark matter and much more. #Echobox=1750880429" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">newscientist.com/article/248284…

From now on I expect to be posting mainly as rhamdu.bsky.social

@keithfrankish @Philip_Goff If God had much curiosity, surely they would create an infinity of universes and see which of them turned out interesting? This universe may be a real flop, compared with God's best efforts.

Qs for @Philip_Goff: Do you believe that God created the universe or just tuned an already existing universe to make it capable of supporting life? If the latter, what is the prior probability that a universe capable of such tweaking would exist without God?

@newscientist That's @elisecutts of course. Now, the only one I am subtweeting is, unavoidably, Karl Friston himself.

@newscientist Elise Cutts has done a great job getting scientists and philosophers to voice their doubts about Karl Friston's theory. FEP is a heroic stab at a general theory of cognition, agency and life, but I fear it has fundamental flaws - not least, equating 'expected' with 'desired'.

In this week’s issue: Can this sweeping idea from neuroscience explain the entire universe? Grab a copy in shops now or download our digital editions. newscientist.com/issue/3513/

Both very deserving. Physics? Hmm. Everything is, I guess. I interviewed Hinton years ago at the University of Sussex, where he cut his AI teeth, and near where I now live in Brighton. Very bright guy. Possibly the first person to try to make me understand backpropagation.

Justin Schmidt is to be admired not only for his dedication in getting himself stung by every bee, wasp and ant he could find, but also for his poetic descriptions of the peculiar quality of each pain #qualia #phenomenology en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_s…

Nematodes. I just bought 6M of them for pest control. They are invertebrates smaller than mites. But I think you knew that. You just wanted to give us a reason to listen to the next series @BBCMoreOrLess

What was the Cassington biogas tank, breached by lightning yesterday, made of? Metal? Glass fibre? Carbon fibre? I'm guessing metal would be safest, and carbon fibre - a composite of conducting and insulating materials - most vulnerable to lightning.

@BGatesIsaPyscho Different site but perhaps the same regulatory authorities and perhaps the same faulty design. As with high-rise cladding, it may turn out that similar fires have happened in UK and internationally.

No fucking way. 7 years ago lightning struck in the same location in Oxford resulting in a fireball during 2016. I statistically analyse coincidences & the chances of this happening are literally of the charts. Truth is stranger than fiction. bbc.com/news/uk-englan…

Seems there was a similar lightning strike and fire at a biogas plant, also near Oxford, in 2016. Why aren't these installations adequately protected by lightning conductors?

@StuartJRitchie Stuart I am loving your thread and the original John Green thread for the diversity they reveal. I suspect it's 80% genuinely different experiences (phantodiversity?) and 20% semantics - different understandings of imagining, seeing and hallucinating.

@StuartJRitchie I can successfully imagine that there is a full-colour apple, a red apple, a grey apple, an outline apple or an invisible apple inside my head. What I can't imagine is that my head is a 2D outline with white fill, separated from my body

@MarkReckons You can't just deny something. Denial must be strenuous or it didn't happen.

@HanselTim @StuartJRitchie I can imagine sensations. I can also imagine actions such as singing a tune - and I just don't mean I imagine the sensations the action would cause. I think mental imagery has to be understood as a sensorimotor phenomenon.

@StuartJRitchie I was thinking about this with music. Before a vocal performance, I run through the song with different tonation, dynamics, phrasing, pronunciations, etc. All of these things could be described as me hearing the music in my head, but I don't truly have an auditory experience.

OMG Anne Atkins promoting Neurolinguistic Programming on #BBCRadio4 Thought For The Day #TFTD #neurobollocks

Got an email purporting to be a job offer. But the idiot spammer had pasted an alphabetical list of about 100 email addresses into the To field.

@declanfleming Ha! So I didn't imagine it. The evening of metal oxide errors continued. Later on the same channel, Chris Packham described a green mineral as copper oxide. Cu(1) oxide is red. Cu(2) oxide is black. Great programme otherwise, though! #chemistry

My heart absolutely going out to the chemist on #universitychallenge ... been there myself! Like Amol I was crying out for them to pull it back. But... wasn't Fe2O3 *also* wrong? Surely magnetite's Fe3O4?!

Old and 'new' Radox shower gel. The convenient hook has gone. And the pack has shrunk from 250ml to 225ml.

Only a problem if they also sent the decryption key to Mali. Oh hang on, were these emails not encrypted? bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…