A monochrome ‘spot the mistake’ scene featuring a postman cycling along a lane besides a half timbered thatched cottage
An observation test for your inner 8-year-old.
Can you spot 12 deliberate mistakes?
From Treasure magazine, 1965
Official answers coming soon
(Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)
Title slide reading “Book covers but we added birds.” Smaller text notes "created by RSPB staff". A Gull wearing red reading glasses peers over an open book. The book is a bird-themed parody titled The Gull Who Played With Fire, with playful review quotes like “Brilliant”, “Talon-biting stuff”, and “A must-read”.
It’s #WorldBookDay!
Admittedly, not a particularly bird-related day.
Don’t worry. We’ve fixed that by asking RSPB staff to redesign their favourite book covers… with birds. 📚
A photo of the main entrance of the Natural History Museum, flanked by two towers, on a sunny day.
Time for a Nature News Roundup from the Natural History Museum!
Stay up to date on some of the latest animal updates from the past month (1/4) 🧵
An intricate octopus cut from a single piece of paper
Japanese artist Masayo Fukuda hand-cut this life-sized octopus from one sheet of paper. Known as Kirie in Japanese (translated as “cut picture”), the art form involves cutting intricate forms from a single sheet of white paper and then contrasting it against a black background to reveal the design.
*bursts in, sweating, out of breath*
“Drop everything, fish doorbell’s back”
visdeurbel.nl/en/
It is not quite true that Stratford International has never seen an international train: it sees them rather a lot. What is true, however, is that they don’t stop. Not once; not ever. What, you might wonder, the hell?
open.substack.com/pub/jonn/p/w...
The simplest known single axiom for groups in terms of multiplication & inverses:
((z * (x * y)^{-1})^{-1} * (z * y^{-1})) * (y^{-1} * y)^{-1} = x
(Source: K. Kunen. Single axioms for groups. J. Automated Reasoning 9 (1992), 291-308)
once your email storage is full you should be allowed to graduate from it. no more emails for you. you’ve seen enough emails. you’re free now
Mothering Sunday on March 15th. It's hard if she's not around. I'll be reading out the names of our remembered #Mums26 from the top of the Ashton Memorial in Lancaster. You can see across the sea to the Lake District. If you'd like your Mum/Mam/Mom's name added to the list, reply with hashtag! ❤️ 👑
An aerial view of a flooded river valley with rolling green downland above the floodwaters. The surviving earthworks of the medieval settlement can be clearly seen in this image, on the spur of land on the right of the photo.
This morning we're sharing this stunning aerial view of #FrogFirle in the flooded Cuckmere Valley, in E Sussex. The earthworks of the medieval settlement have recently been investigated as part of #ChangingChalk - find out more: heritagerecords.nationaltrust.org.uk/HBSMR/MonRec...
📷Ian in London
The Postgraduate Combinatorial Conference is at Warwick University 15-17 April. It should be a great experience for PhD students: fantastic invited speakers, and students can give a talk too. The deadline for registration (£30) is this Monday: wozmit.github.io/pcc-2026/
Spring is coming! A great ornithological thread.
Prince of mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss, exceptional mathematician, known for Normal Distribution; astronomer & scientist, Professor at Göttingen University, he made significant contributions to algebra, geometry & number theory; died #OTD 1855.
Portrait by Christian Albrecht Jensen, 1840
Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).
A cat who once had a big suburban house and a hugely stressful prestigious job and now lives on a cliff instead, free of the trappings of modern life, to the admiration of its friends, who, as they idealise its life, never imagine the terrible loneliness it feels during cold winters, six miles from the nearest shop, cinema and pub.
THREAD.
A collection of photos I have taken of excellent cats I have met on walks.
You will find the all-important captions to the photos in the alt text.
UKRI pledges to ‘invest at scale’ in research fields underpinning AI.
Agency to channel funding to mathematics, computer science and engineering, alongside major skills push.
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.
I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion
People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it
A huge pile of rock, chalk and soil that has fallen from the sized cliff side to resemble a frowning, aquiline-nosed, bearded man
A huge pile of rock, chalk and soil that has fallen from the sized cliff side to resemble a frowning, aquiline-nosed, bearded man
While sudden cliff falls at Birling Gap (near my home town of Eastbourne) are no joke, I really love how much it looks like we’ve roused a grumpy, sleepy sea-wizard.
In ancient Greece, it was considered bad luck to be attacked by a shark on Friday the 13th
Tuning the Dial We’re lost in music, caught …………… at second slip, low down, by the outstretched hand of ……………….. the US vice president, JD Vance, who was spotted ... …………..….…. working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when …………………. Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 was premiered in the …………………..… Forties. South or southwest 5 to 7, occasionally gale ………..………… from Croydon is on the line, who wants to talk to us about ……………………….… why Aviva life insurance is right for you and …………………………………... offers me protection, a lot of love and affection whether I’m right or ………….…….….. left wing but there’s nobody in the centre and the ball gets cleared to ………..…….. ….......….…..... Oscar Wilde, who famously announced ‘I have nothing to declare except …………….…………… .……….….. I can boogie, boogie woogie all night long. Brian Bilston
Happy Radio Day to all those who celebrate.
Ah I see. Maybe (say) the percentage of the 2022 figure would be good? But I do take your point!
That logarithmic scale is a strange choice!
#RecipeOfTheDay sounds ridiculously rich I know, but my beloved blue cheese and avocado dip that goes by the name Roquamole is actually divinely easy to eat! And it is the perfect accompaniment to an evening’s viewing of the Winter Olympics. www.nigella.com/recipes/roqu...
A reminder of one of the loveliest pairs of siblings in the dictionary: ‘muscle’ and ‘mouse’. To the Roman imagination, the flexed biceps of a (typically naked) athlete resembled a rodent scuttling under the skin. ‘Musculus’, in Latin, means ‘little mouse’.
I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!
bluesky-map.theo.io
I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.
Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
When people talk about the idea that some universities must go under, there’s a certain tendency to behave as if these smaller local campuses are negligible- regrettable casualties perhaps but not ‘real’ universities. This report does a great job of illustrating why that’s wrong.
UCU elections 2026: recommended votes. All information is available at https://ucucommons.org/election26/
From tomorrow, Friday 30 January, ballot papers will start to arrive by post for VP (HE and FE), and several key positions on our NEC.
We're supporting our own @markpendleton.bsky.social for VP (HE) and independent @suzitoole.bsky.social for VP (FE) & lots of other great people. Please share! #UCU
A List of Complaints from 1926
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