Romain Tartese (@romiche29)

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09.03.2026 14:51 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

War crime upon war crime upon war crime

08.03.2026 14:18 👍 1017 🔁 396 💬 5 📌 1

Meanwhile, in nazi land..

07.03.2026 23:47 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The same technological pinpoint accuracy that was used to slaughter children in Gaza now being used to slaughter children in Iran.

05.03.2026 08:24 👍 792 🔁 398 💬 35 📌 17

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

05.03.2026 05:17 👍 17401 🔁 5763 💬 128 📌 102

Schrödinger’s QR funding, which both is and isn’t funding research. 🙄

Basically the bucket is a label which allows the government to say it’s putting billions into “curiosity-driven research”, while most of that money isn’t actually funding research at all.

03.03.2026 16:09 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0

Definitely. Which is why the best academic AI policies I’ve seen make it clear to students that “submitting work that was produced by “AI” (chatbots, LLMs) *is* plagiarism and will be treated as such.”

03.03.2026 14:51 👍 8 🔁 3 💬 1 📌 0

Live tax-free in Dubai, until shit hits the fan and you ask to come back, funded by the tax-payer...

02.03.2026 17:43 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

"To all influencers and other tax exiles in Dubai, the tax authorities wish you a safe return to France."

02.03.2026 08:00 👍 556 🔁 306 💬 0 📌 23

I wonder what she'll think, when she's out of government in a few months time. Was it worth it? Persecuting refugees in order to satisfy an electoral strategy even she probably doesn't believe in. Pissing away the last dregs of your integrity for a plan which has already been shown not to work.

02.03.2026 13:03 👍 556 🔁 56 💬 30 📌 0

Refugee status becomes temporary in asylum shake-up Adults and accompanied children claiming asylum will only receive refugee status for 30 months under the changes.

Abysmal, immoral, cruel, small hearted, tiny minded, ineffective, undemocratic, and just generally utterly indecent. What a bitter godforesaken disappointment these people are.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

02.03.2026 12:58 👍 1898 🔁 560 💬 89 📌 45

Open letter to the Science Minister from Heads of Physics Heads of Physics departments have expressed concern about UKRI funding changes.

Here is a copy of the open letter from the heads of physics departments across the UK- worth reading as it makes a lot of excellent points

www.iop.org/about/news/o...

02.03.2026 08:41 👍 28 🔁 14 💬 0 📌 0

This is of course a trick question, nobody is safe here.

01.03.2026 20:17 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Israel, immediately after vaporizing a bunch of little girls:

28.02.2026 12:48 👍 8073 🔁 2834 💬 56 📌 99

In case you’re just waking up, the U.S. has teamed up with Israel overnight to start an illegal war of regime change, apparently on a presidential whim with no involvement of Congress, and they are already committing horrific atrocities.

28.02.2026 12:14 👍 6546 🔁 2769 💬 1 📌 73

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

28.02.2026 12:42 👍 16381 🔁 5073 💬 126 📌 103

If Reform had won, Labour's statement would be that this result is a stark reminder we need to listen and learn from voters who rightly feel betrayed by modern politics.

But the Greens won by a comfortable margin, so it's: these voters are stupid and also sinister and, ugh, Muslims

28.02.2026 09:31 👍 2238 🔁 616 💬 13 📌 8

And it is losing them very specifically because - this is the phrase every Labour friend tells me they hear on the doorstep - "it stands for nothing". How is it possible No.10 have concluded that they can reverse this if only they stand for nothing even more resolutely? WTAF are these people doing?

27.02.2026 19:16 👍 248 🔁 29 💬 12 📌 1

Starmer telling Labour MPs today that the Greens are "divisive," "sectarian," and "not the kind environmentalists they pretend" is not going to go down well with the millions who now back Greens. It'll simply tell them Labour doesn't hear us. More tin-eared stupidity.

27.02.2026 18:43 👍 749 🔁 161 💬 43 📌 12

America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in. The Mars Sample Return mission got off to a promising start, hunting for potentially humanity-changing space rocks. How did it fall off the rails?

Is there life on Mars? For decades, America was in pole position to find out with its multi-mission Mars Sample Return program.

But MSR is now officially dead. And in the race to find alien life on Mars, it’s now China’s to lose.

Me @technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/26/1...

26.02.2026 13:21 👍 51 🔁 14 💬 4 📌 9

Hannah is awesome! 👏
Would have loved to see the faces of geniuses at Labour HQ last night 🤡

27.02.2026 07:33 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Shocking from UKRI: no more aircraft observations, investing in "land-based capabilities and remote sensing equipment."

The atmosphere is not land-based(!) and remote sensing can only provide an approximation of what FAAM could do. And I say that as someone who should gain from such a pivot.

26.02.2026 16:31 👍 9 🔁 6 💬 2 📌 2

What will happen. Mahmood will continue to try and ban legitimate protest against the Israeli genocide; Streeting will continue to play to the fascist gallery by denying trans existence; and Labour will continue to haemorrhage voters. Starmer is too weak to change either.

27.02.2026 07:20 👍 370 🔁 55 💬 18 📌 1

Anyway, I have never read a single academic consultant report that wasn't like 10 minutes of data analysis with 20 pages of shiny colorful graphs that mean very little.

What a fuckin waste of money that entire industry is

27.02.2026 01:21 👍 18 🔁 4 💬 2 📌 0

A white woman who is not a doctor & doesn’t believe in science is currently undergoing Senate confirmation hearings to be the US Surgeon General.

Black people, don’t EVER let these people tell you that you are a “diversity hire” or don’t deserve the roles you have so richly prepared for & earned.

25.02.2026 23:47 👍 2558 🔁 741 💬 24 📌 16

Window dressing policies won’t change the fact that time and time again this Labour government has let down everyone who cares about our natural world and our climate.

How long before they U-turn as soon as they think voters are looking the other way?

25.02.2026 17:18 👍 119 🔁 21 💬 5 📌 1

Very well referenced & well argued summary of where we are on the latest STFC funding crisis. I'd only add two more: George Efstathiou's analysis of STFC's governance problems telescoper.blog/2026/02/06/t... and @ersatzben.com's forensic analysis of the 'buckets' 🔭🧪 www.ersatzben.com/p/the-bucket...

24.02.2026 16:51 👍 11 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0

Funding crisis? Not another one... What goes around comes around, and the start of 2026 has, for particle physicists of my vintage, brought strong feelings of _deja vu_. These harken back to 2007, when the UK government self-inflicted a funding crisis with the creation of STFC, the UK agency that has since then funded our fundamental science research. For those new to the issues old and/or new, sit back, this is going to take a bit of explaining... #### Born to be bad Back then, the problem was that politicians had decided that it made sense to tie funding of large experimental facilities to the funding of science that would use them. This sounds pretty reasonable. Previously there had been a split, with the UK-based facilities and national laboratories funded and operated by CCLRC (no, you don't care what the acronym stands for) and the research itself, plus international particle and astro physics facilities -- most obviously, but not only, CERN -- funded through PPARC (ok, fine: Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council). I was only a young'un back then and out of the loop on what particular genius cooked up this rearrangement, but the observant among you may note that from a particle and astro perspective, the facilities and scientific "exploitation" were already gathered together in a coherent way within PPARC. This was a very large deckchair-rearranging exercise... which for some reason also gathered up nuclear physics along with the particle and astro deckchairs. The real consequence of the merger was to acquire an expensive set of tangentially related UK facilities, most notably the overspent Diamond light-source and ISIS neutron/muon source -- both of which, despite being fairly big particle-accelerating rings, are of virtually no interest to particle physicists: other than prototyping of muon cooling, they are much more of interest to applied materials science and similar. Their overspends, however, immediately became a budget problem for the particle and astro bits of the new STFC. This led to community action -- including well-intentioned but irrelevant contributions from yours truly -- and attempted engagement with the tail-end of the "New" Labour administration, who were dismissive and played somewhat on our naivety by asking us to hold back and let them sort it out -- of course they did not. Ultimately, the campaign was crushed to invisibility when the rather larger and more immediate concerns of the 2007-8 "Credit Crunch", now labelled the "Great Recession", overtook the national bandwidth. #### SNAFU: situation normal, all f'd up Why this historical tour? Well, the last few months have seen the start of Ian Chapman as new chair of UKRI, the new (relative to 2007) umbrella funding organisation that distributes money to STFC and other research councils. And between the Christmas/New Year break and this month he has unleashed chaos upon the sector with what seem to be a set of unilateral reorganisations toward modish "government priorities". First, any confirmed project in the "infrastructure grant" channel unlucky enough not to have already received payments was abruptly cancelled -- though, in Whitehall fashion this was bowdlerised to first "deprioritised" and now "paused" -- regardless of the extent to which international partners were locked in on the understanding of UK contributions. Not content with the dog's breakfast of communication surrounding this and his new (and seemingly arbitrarily resourced) funding "buckets" system, Chapman compounded his science-community popularity by forcing screeching halts to established funding schemes across all of UKRI. This involved horrifying suggestions of 30% cuts (sorry, that word wasn't used; try "efficiencies" or similar bowdlerisation) as standard, and potentially up to 60% cuts on some projects. While this applies across all UKRI research, the headline cuts to "curiosity based research" fall heaviest on STFC -- not only because STFC's science is predominantly "curiosity based", but particularly because of its structural combination of expensive, fixed-cost facilities and the rather squishier researchers who use them. It would be obvious to a moderately intelligent child that if half their pocket money is inflexibly ringfenced to pay for bus fares, then a 30% reduction in the total would translate to a 60% reduction in their spare cash for sweets or Robucks, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to the extraordinarily rapidly-elevated Chapman that a similar logic applies to STFC. Cuts on a budget with large fixed commitments are multiplied on to the remaining, more flexible parts. In his defence, Chapman was made chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority within 9 years of his PhD, having already joined the senior management team 2 years previously, and is UKRI CEO in just over 18 -- he was still a PhD student when the 2007 STFC crisis hit, and like most politicians behind this policy lacks institutional memory of the structural fixed-cost multiplier issue. However, he and they should be aware that just a few years ago we were in precisely the position of paying handsomely to join international facilities that we then didn't fund researchers for; this was patched up at that time, and yet here we go again. Chapman then proceeded to compound this offence to the researchers operating -- and looking for post-PhD jobs -- in STFC science by claiming the problem has come from currency fluctuations driving up the cost of international subscriptions: we know from our 2007 dealings that in fact the government hedges against such increases, and a fairly basic analysis shows that in fact the GDP-indexed CERN subscription bill has slightly reduced over the last 5 years. What I hear is that a more honest assessment of cost overruns are based in (human and energy) operating-cost increases at STFC's _UK_ labs. Welcome back to 2007. My overall impression is of a personal prejudice and cavalier failure of planning diligence on the part of a hyper-ambitious science-administrator keen to do whatever will impress his new masters -- the increasingly desperate, "growth-focused" Starmer government. While the exact meaning of his "buckets" is yet to be seen, the mood music seems clear that rather than investing in the sort of abstract but technically challenging fundamental science that created the Web, medical PET scanners, early machine-learning advances, and other such economic goodness, "industrial priorities" now means the government micromanaging its research toward established industrial R&D areas like "AI". Those, in other words, that are already well along their hype cycle and where we are already late to the party for the subset that do have lasting substance. The lack of vision is ... disturbing. #### The rebellion There have already been several excellent public push-backs, from Brian Cox, Jon Butterworth, Paul Nurse (doyen of UK science, ex-head of the Crick Institute, former and current head of the Royal Society, and parent to an ex-particle physicist), Vincenzo Vagnoni and Tim Gershon (spokespersons current and elect of the LHCb experiment, whose UK-led Phase-2 upgrade project was abruptly... ahem, "deprioritised") and many others. The STFC science community, and more generally the wider UKRI one are undivided and determined not to be played this time. Discussions with, and more recently public statements from, Chapman and science minister Patrick Vallance have suggested that the consequences on STFC science were unintended. And I found it heartening that in the recent Science & Technology Select Committee interrogation of Ian Chapman the committee several times raised UK fundamental science as an unqualified good thing. Less inspiring has been the effective abdication of leadership and community representation by STFC's own relatively fresh leader, Michelle Docherty, who in a separate indication of basic failures of judgement ~~was forced~~ chose to stand down from their parallel and contradictory role as president of the Institute of Physics. (As noted here, a conflict of interest / judgement gap remains in her role as Astronomer Royal.) #### Break the cycle So there we go. Different decade, same shit -- although this time I find myself living through the mess not as a fresh-faced junior postdoc, but a relatively grey-bearded prof. There are (very faint) _hints_ of light at the end of this self-inflicted tunnel, if we read substance into the softening of rhetoric and admission of unintended consequences, but the onus is on government to do something. Reconsidering the position of the ambitious new administrator who's managed to cause two sector-wide panics and broad funding hiatus in as many months of being in post would be a start. And above that, the politicians who came in preaching growth and infrastructure investment should understand that basic research (and separately, the UK university sector as a whole) are national assets to be resourced and leveraged not over a few-year election cycle but over decades. _This post is quite long enough already, so I'll stop here. Thanks for reading. But in particular I also noted the _cost_ of this uncertainty as researchers junior and senior shift more or less of their active time to following and countering these disruptions: the integral of this opportunity cost is extremely high. And it's not just crises: administrative overheads in science in general are a generally unaccounted opportunity cost acting as a drag-anchor on research. If the public that apparently demand this accountability were aware of the cost of providing it, government/funder attitudes would likely change. More in a follow-up, when I'm able. _ PS. I see Ken Rice and Peter Coles have also covered this ground] nicely. Good to also have an astro perspective -- we really are in this together, and need to stay that way.

I had time on a flight and no code to debug for once, so here's a blog expanding on the UKRI/STFC funding SNAFU: https://www.insectnation.org/blog/funding-crisis-not-another-one.html

23.02.2026 23:01 👍 5 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 1

In Japanese culture, "expertise" is not earned through accomplishment or "innate talent". It is earned by diligence and work -- you might not be "the best", but if you have spent time working on some skill or knowledge, that is how you earn "expertise". AI and its shortcuts do not create expertise.

24.02.2026 19:50 👍 10 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 1

Faculty grade -- at least many of us -- because we are required to give students grades. If I had it my way, I wouldn't grade students. Instead, I would convey their level of dedication, diligence and sincerity to the learning process. Of course, med schools would hate that.

24.02.2026 19:53 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

Romain Tartese

Latest posts by Romain Tartese @romiche29