The Evolution of Lungs podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/in-… [Very cool - never realised birds and dinosaurs share a lung design with air sacs, and how that enables long/high migrations & huge size.]

Did the gods begin as ever distant ancestors, keeping us in check to cooperate with larger and larger, and looser and looser, kin groups (& friends)?

I have an issue with the fact that most cooperation studies are based on seemingly complex and artificial money games, that I almost always fail to get first time when reading about them.

Can someone build me a website that tells me what is Black Mirror and sci-fi and what is this weeks AI release drops? I'm having trouble keeping up.

Homelessness Minister Rushanara Ali quits over rent increase claims - BBC News [This does very much indicate the social gap between the often found upper-middle London technocrat class & the rest of us, regardless of political persuasion.]

Bristol Balloon Fiesta: Cameron Balloons staff celebrate founder - BBC News [Don is a legend - he also still runs BRLSI events! Happy Birthday Don!]

It’s makes me laugh that crimes are split into “fraud” and “non-fraud” and only the latter get detailed press releases. It’s because most fraud crimes aren’t prosecuted or solved, & are often international in jurisdiction. There’s been a 31% (!!) rise in fraud cases - >4million.

If you get depressed at how your code is never as perfect as those first ideas or designs, is hacky, brittle, & a mess of tweaks, just remember that because of evolution (the master coder) via fish, many land animals struggle to reconcile breathing + moving.

"Americans can't go to Wales and survive in the same way they can in the Cotswolds where you can get a matcha latte and go to a gyrotonics class.” "The business of the private jet people at Cotswolds airport has gone through the roof."

It seems strange as a society that we spend infinitely more time learning archaic grammar labels than we do on simple practical skills of friendship and civility. “That’s for the parents” you say. In reality, this is slapdash & piecemeal at best; completely absent at worst.

Turns out all my vanilla extract keeps going missing cause the kids all neck it in “vanilla Frappuccinos”. They don’t drink hot caffeines. Cold syrupy coffees are my grumpy generation’s “avocado on toast” for complaint.

Palestine Action protesters arrested by police at London demo - bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… [So we don’t arrest or prosecute fraud, but we arrest hundreds (including 80-year olds) for peaceful protest against genocide or climate catastrophe? And this is a “left” U.K. government!]

I find the Western wellness and self-help industry (now horrendously bloated from social media) to be a infuriating contradiction of: 1) “you are enough” and also 2) “here’s a dissection of everything you’re doing wrong and a 365-step multi-layer paid pro plan to fix it”.

Jeremy Bowen: Israeli settlers intensify campaign to drive out West Bank Palestinians - BBC News bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… [This is good from Bowen - sad complexities, contradictions, & violence of the conflict. Israel nationalist’s approach similar to Russia in Eastern Ukraine?]

Entertainer founder hands over toy shop chain to staff - BBC News bbc.co.uk/news/articles/… [🫡]

Regardless of whether Palestine Action has Iran funding (evidence looks shaky but possible), if you start arresting OAPs & folks that are not a criminal threat, you start undermining the law & order you purport to enforce, as society questions the validity of the law per se.

I enjoy doing cultural anthropology at scale on social media. One that comes up a lot is the pre-deity, the proto-belief in a universal single causal factor that is typically kept hidden from us. Or: “one secret they don’t want you to know that will solve all your problems”.

Brilliant: among hunter-gatherers such as the San Bushmen the general friction of intergroup relationships tends to fragment any group. To avoid this, when things are getting tetchy, someone suggests a trance dance, and this reboots the group relations.

If the primary function of religion is community bonding, what happens when we lose religion as a society?

If an “elite” is a product of scale, rather than cooperation or ability or original sin, then are calls to dismantle “the elite” in a global world of 8.1 billion people is a little naive. Can we reimagine without needing to break power laws?