Just finished "An Anthropologist on Mars", a wonderful book by Oliver Sacks. Bought in a charity bookshop a couple of years ago, halfway through I found the original purchase receipt from a Berlin bookshop.
Pre-loved books can contain such lovely surprises. 😍

We've just published our third set of resources for schools in our series to help teachers to explain to students how scientists find the truth about the observable world. 🧪
"The experimenter’s regress – gravitational waves" is available at insect-project.org now! #EduSky

From the wonderful David Malki - link in comment below.
This dates from 2014 and yet is SO topical.

Thanks - an interesting read (I love this kind of stuff!) and no paywall either. Adding the figure from the article here.

Many great artworks are - at their most sublime - susceptible to multiple interpretations which tell us something about ourselves.
🧪 Science subscribes to the opposite - to tell the truth about the observable world which is unambiguous and which is susceptible to only one interpretation.

The speed of frontier science is nearly always slower than the speed of politics. But the truth about the observable world cannot be bent to political or commercial will.
Galileo knew this over 400 years ago.
🧪

Høeg says US is "international outlier" in number of vaccines it recommends for children.
Not supported by data from UK government.
Source: www.gov.uk/government/p...

Do you teach students aged 12+?
Worried about helping them to take an evidence-based approach to what they hear and see about issues like #vaccines and #climate?
Check out insect-project.org - we're developing resources to help! Come and join us! #EduSky 🧪

Global temperatures and sea-levels are rising, extreme weather is increasing globally.
And vaccines are proven to be highly effective in preventing fatal and life-changing diseases.
Government policy must always be based on following the 🧪. Even though speed of science is often < speed of politics.

The InSECT Project is developing a new teaching program to bolster democracy and counter the erosion of truth, with science being considered as a form of knowledge alongside arts and humanities knowledge.
Read our credo here: insect-project.org

Don't give them ideas - US agriculture policy will be next! Vernalization, anyone?
("Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages." [Wikipedia])

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Hannah Arendt

🧪 The tactic of dictators past and present is to erode truth because it constrains their interpretations of the national will; dictators seek to destroy truth in order to re-define it as whatever they want and so redefine ‘the will of the people’ as whatever they want.

Catching up with the news from the US that's happened overnight here in the UK. More on this later. But just to kick things off, I've been back here for 48 hours. The first cat pictures have just found their way into my feed. The inevitability of the internet!

*Atlas supports the world which scientists aspire to describe. His elephant stands on a turtle and then it’s turtles all the way down. The bottom turtle is truth and just above it is science. Science is imperfect but more obsessed with the truth about the observable world than any other institution.

@unisouthampton.bsky.social

Lovely walk through the campus yesterday evening after many years away - hats off to the estates team responsible for landscaping and maintenance!