LMadgit @LMadgit

I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism. As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.

"Red Bull Lightning" Lockheed P-38 Lightning "Red Bull" makes an evening pass past the crowds during Air Venture 2026. © Sellin Photography All Rights Reserved

DUDE THIS VIDEO OF SHIP 40 IS INSANE!!! 🤯🤯🤯

jacobruh 🚀 @jrxcket

a day ago

IMAGES OF SHIP 40 GETTING TOWED BACK TO CHRISTMAS ISLAND!!! 🤯🤩🤩

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After approx. 24 days at sea, the SpaceX Recovery team successfully guided Starship to a location just off the coast of Christmas Island. A team of SpaceX engineers is on their way to conduct additional analysis on the vehicle in calmer waters before attempting to return it to Starbase

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Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan: An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution. At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.” It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday. The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir.. IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” . . . The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.” On Tuesday, in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed had been given the prestigious assistant professorship. We noted that in a 2002 pamphlet, republished in 2017, she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching that child marriage is wrong. Like the paper’s author, Mirza, Ahmed has also said that modern science is a problem, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.” After that story created a storm, the education faculty took decisive action. It removed the names of all its staff from its website, presumably to stop anyone who doesn’t know about web archive tools checking to see if they’ve hired any more wrong’uns (spoiler alert: they have Other action has been less forthcoming. The faculty clearly hopes to ride this one out, issuing a statement that it is “committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.” Well, we must reluctantly agree that Ahmed – benefiting from the democracy she condemns – should have the freedom to say that English is “one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach, or (while teaching at Cambridge) write that Muslim students shouldn’t have to worry about “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.” But that’s quite different from believing that Cambridge University should fund her to promote her ideas to the future leaders of the country. Still more indisputable is that a university subject, even one as debased as Education at Cambridge, should not promote baseless, anti-scientific twaddle in the name of academic research. But it does.

Today in Middle-earth, 10 August, T.A. 3019, Théoden King was laid to rest. Almost five months had passed since his death on the Pelennor Fields. His body was finally brought home to Edoras, where he was buried among the kings of Rohan who came before him. It was the final homecoming of a king who had ridden to Gondor’s aid knowing he might never see the Riddermark again. He had led the Rohirrim onto the Pelennor, broken the enemy lines, and died with his people still fighting around him. The people of Rohan sang for Théoden as they laid him in his barrow, and afterwards Éomer was hailed as the new King of the Mark.

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Monaco 2024 is the race with one of the records that will be the hardest to break in history The top 10 finished in the same order they started from, and even more remarkably, without a single change of position throughout the entire race

Deliberately misspelling words is one of my favourite types of humour because anyone can misspell words normally, but it takes a special type of genius to breakdown words into phonetic, layered jokes...heindzeit, the back-time, is actual genius

Catherine Warr @HiddenYorkshire

5 months ago

the greatest spelling i've ever seen

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Guys, Amazon paid $8.5 billion for MGM specifically for the Bond franchise. They’re not going to ruin it with “wokism.” That would be like paying $1 billion for Lord of the Rings and then making a WB-style show of Sauron Dating Galadriel. Not happening.

Polymarket @Polymarket

a week ago

JUST IN: James Bond producer Amy Pascal reveals the next 007 actor will offer a “really different” take on the character.

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Amen. We needed more not fewer. Plus a host of technology schools as prestigious in their own way as Grammar schools. As the 1944 Butler education act envisaged (but never happened).

Recluse of Welbeck @mwd892

a week ago

@afneil Abolishing grammar schools destroyed social mobility in this country. You are a prime example of why they worked.

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'Matt' is the finest political cartoonist in Britain today, and it ain't even close. 😆

The SpaceX Recovery team is still working to recover Flight 13’s Starship from the Indian Ocean. They’ve been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port

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Stefano Domenicali: "A German GP return will definitely happen" 📰@matcoch

Wanted to give an update on the hotfire anomaly investigation. Progress continues. The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections. Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations. The path forward is clear. We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis.

Me reading Jeremy Clarkson’s description of Concorde after it’s very last flight

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57 years ago

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Cutting wheat yesterday: roughly 100 grains harvested for each grain sown. In the 1300s on the Bishop of Winchester's manors, 5:1 was a good harvest, 3:1 a bad one. Thank you, Haber-Bosch nitrogen fixation and hydrocarbons, for feeding billions and sparing land.

Churches in West Suffolk are raising every penny they can to keep the roof up. Many have valuable - sometimes unique - architectural features. They are all part of our national story - our inheritance. For Lambeth Palace to pursue gesture politics with such huge sums - while our churches crumble - is grotesque. Like Welby before her, the Archbishop is indulging in theologically nonsensical politics. Welby said, “there can be forgiveness [of those from the past now deemed unacceptable], but only if there’s justice: if we change the way we behave now.” Just the same, the Archbishop says “I pray that we have the courage to continue our journey of repentance.” But we cannot repent the sins of others. Forgiveness is not conditional on the behaviour of different people and generations. The Bible says, “a son will not bear the iniquity of the father, and a father will not bear the iniquity of the son.” This money should be invested in our parish churches.

BBC News (UK) @BBCNews

3 weeks ago

Archbishop of Canterbury committed to £100m slavery fund bbc.in/4fJRgKa

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Starship in space set to Moonlight Sonata

View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13. This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to continue testing methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions

Jodrell Bank is the most visible causality of UKRI’s short sighted ‘vision’ for science, but as you’ll see below, there are many other valuable UK facilities and collaborations at risk. We became aware of the problem in the autumn of last year. It is not a result of the overall funding settlement for science after the spending review, which was quite generous I would say in the circumstances. Neither as far as we can tell is it a direct decision by ministers (all of whom have now gone in any case). Rather the problems appears to have been caused by senior management at UKRI focusing on short term economic ‘impact’ (whatever that means) rather than doing their job as custodians of the foundations of science. What must happen now is that the new ministerial team make the time (and space ;-)) to review the upcoming catastrophe, and instruct UKRI to do their job and focus on making Britain the best place in the world to do science, now and in the future.

Martin Bauer @martinmbauer

3 weeks ago

The announced closure of the UK's largest telescope at Jodrell Bank is only a small part of the cuts in UK physics

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