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Andy Buckley

@agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

63 followers 7 following 264 posts

Particle-physics prof at Glasgow Physics & Astronomy. Author of those physics codes you like, and that one you don't. Enthusiast for dirty QCD physics, data […] [bridged from mastodon.social/@agbuckley on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy ]

Posts Replies Media

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

Disappointed to get turned down in the second round of a Leverhulme research-grant application: I thought it was such a nice proposal. Not getting grants is par for the course, though... to some extent it's a numbers game. But to get _no_ feedback is galling. I could understand that due to […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Why punctuation matters! Even as a native speaker and knowing the context of the Grenfell fire, the missing hyphen between the first two words turned the first half of this into a pile of disconnected words that took me a while to parse. There's only one […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Guardian headline: "Grenfell fire police investigators hand files to 20 firms and 54 people to CPS"

Reposted by Andy Buckley

Liam Proven @lproven.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

« When I worked at BMP, the Head of Television commuted in from Brighton every day. He started reading The Exorcist on the train. He said he thought it was the most evil book he’d ever read. In fact, he said it was so evil he couldn’t finish it. So, at the weekend, he went to the end of […]

social.vivaldi.net

Original post on social.vivaldi.net

Reposted by Andy Buckley

Rob Bignell, Editor/Author @inventingreality.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

#writingcommunity #writesky #writesky #author #amwriting #books

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

Saw a variant of this advert at Heathrow. A security blanket is a prop used by small children for reassurance against imaginary fears; the blanket itself does nothing. Is that what Cisco's selling: security theatre for emotional toddlers? Do the advertising folk at Cisco know what words are?

A huge billboard at an airport, with generic , swooshy, tech-looking rainbow lines and dots, and text reading "Cisco AI. Wrap yourself in the most powerful security blanket ever"

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Excellent and important article on UAE building populist alliances abroad to keep its petro-show on the road: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/ref… Also, that header photo. Looks like Farage is doing a Weekend at Bernies

democracyforsale.substack.com

Reform and the UAE – a threat to British politics

Nigel Farage's embrace of the UAE is part of a wider effort by the Gulf petrostate to build alliances with the far right across the West, says Alex Carlen.

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

"The Charles vs. Charles battle is a collision of two unpleasant men fighting over the legacy of a fairly ordinary posh woman who has been turned by circumstance and an avalanche of superlatives into a modern-day saint." 👏 brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/char…

brokenbottleboy.substack.com

Charles vs. Charles proves only one thing: Dead Diana still sells

There is disingenuousness and cynicism on all sides as Charles Spencer flogs his book and Charles Windsor tries to protect his ragged reputation.

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Good call on the latest "military complex" excuse for Trumpy carbunkles across Washington: luciantruscott.substack.com/p/there… Why the fascination with this from a non-US citizen on the other side of the Atlantic? Besides the beyond-satire sideshow of the […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Feeling seen, by the Romans. Thanks, Antonine Wall

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

A particularly depressing triumvirate of tech headlines on Futurism today: futurism.com/artificial-intelligenc… futurism.com/future-society/lg-secr… […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

Analysing Justin Webb’s interview with Ed Miliband about sanctions on Israeli settlements: brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/anal… 👏

brokenbottleboy.substack.com

Analysing Justin Webb’s interview with Ed Miliband about sanctions on Israeli settlements

On the absence of balance in an encounter where the Foreign Secretary’s Jewishness was called into question.

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

This is really good in itself, as well as being a colossal dump on the whole concept of the last 20 years of Ricky Gervais comedy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuMA1Ebo374

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

Incredible. Pure interview without commentary is a great move. gripped.com/profiles/and-you-cant-d…

“And You Can’t Die”: Father of Kids Who Climb El Capitan Responds to Critics - Gripped Magazine

Yosemite climber Joe Evermore talks about his time on the walls with his two sons, Joey and Sylvan

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

Thanks, gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario

Map of Lake Ontario, renamed as Lake Inferiority Complex

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

Tiedrich on fire today, makes genuinely great argument that Trump and Dolly Parton are polar opposites: www.jefftiedrich.com/p/worst-person…

jefftiedrich.com

worst person in the world makes Dolly Parton’s death all about himself

shut the fuck up, Piggy

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

What an absolute child. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgwdn1…

Trump signs order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America

Trump's order comes after the trade talks between the US and Canada collapsed late last week.

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

This is quite lovely, and very poignant, on Nick Hitchens, fusion physicist who appeared through his life on the now-finishing Up TV series: youtu.be/o6BuZ9Eh1AE?is=IygNeHGnVDo… Definite goosebumps at how similar his and my lives are out to this point; oddly, I've even spent a fair […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

Can't get out of my head the suggestion I saw on an Allo Allo discussion (I know) to refilm it with (among other things) Christoph Waltz as Lt Gruber and his little tank. A great thread for factoids: Gruber was also the Kaled general who enabled the genesis of the Daleks, Helga is Christopher […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

I have never quite got my head around Jamie Oliver's overreaching restaurant chains going bust, leaving staff and suppliers in debt to the tune of £80M, and he + family just carry on being lauded by the media (and hence public, who I guess mostly don't know) and paying themselves millions per […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

Now if only universities would provide useful funding/subscriptions for their research staff to use these tools they keep telling us are the future... (Other than Copilot, because seriously. Claude and Codex are the current serious contenders here, don't try to fob us off with more crap that […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

Masterly article proposing "craft coding", using AI for review rather than vibe coding: peterbloem.nl/blog/craft-coding I agree, though hadn't thought it through this well. Coding is fun (for the right people, which largely speaking research scientists _should_ be) and review is largely […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

@aoanla That's been called for, though I had to remind myself of the intended scope. My reading from the very short summary is that its focus was journalist relations with police and crime. Maybe this would have come under corporate governance & ethical failure, but it doesn't naturally sit with […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

I enjoyed the Freudian typo of a "slippery slop" in this: futurism.com/future-society/student… I liked this section:

“Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the New York Times in a new essay mulling the consequences of sidestepping the hard work of writing.

Writing, the piece notes, helps develop all sorts of cognitive faculties, including building our working memory, executive planning skills, and our metacognition, or the ability to be aware of your own thinking.

For all the romanticism around writing, it’s also a form of drudgery. Kellogg says that drafting a basic essay is as mentally taxing as digging a ditch is physically exhausting. You have to really rack your brain to find the right word and organize ideas in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. When they're manifested in the real world, you revise your ideas by going over them yourself or asking for feedback.

Writing, in other words, is inextricable from the labor that goes into it. And so
when you bring in a piece of machinery that offers to do the process for you, it's no longer writing, and by no extension, no longer exercising the brain.

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

"Superman" robot: futurismhuman.com/robots-and-machin… I know it's PR hype, but isn't the whole point of human athletics that it's impressive because we're physically limited? Of course we can build machines -- even humanoid machines […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

@aoanla Yep, I don't agree with it all! Though even that is a grey area... at what point should a commercial press decide that a subject that empirically interests the public is not in the public interest?! Can it be codified? Would the sort of people who pull back in those circumstances ever […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

A new article on #Arday that I very largely agree with: takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/9-though…

Reposted by Andy Buckley

Joshua Barretto @jsbarretto.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

I want to remind you: these bastards have spent $1.5 trillion of society's money on this technology. That it's produced *something* should not be surprising. That's 'solve aging', 'cure cancer', 'eliminate all poverty', 'shift climate change into reverse', or 'send a probe to another solar […]

Original post on social.coop

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

I spent an unplanned, and surprising to myself, amount of time today trying to understand the Jason Arday situation. Partly because I know universities better than the reporters who pursued the story for culture-war reasons, and detail was lacking; partly because away from outrage-farming and […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Nominally about Arday, but actually about modern academic Cambridge and its mismatch to the popular conception: www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/20… Rather good, though much of Oxbridge _is_ academia on easy mode: money available to double up PhD studentships […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

New release today,. Professor 2.5.9: professor.hepforge.org / gitlab.com/hepcedar/professor -- surrogate-based optimisation and "tuning" tool for (particularly) HEP MC simulations. This new release fixes bugs and new incompatibilities (as always), but also adds awesome […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

@BashStKid Great, isn't it? 😅

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

I mentioned last week, while releasing other #Python packages with artistic names (cf. warhol), that I had a long-neglected web-gallery tool called emin... Neglected no longer! Now on #pypi emin 0.7.0 (which, tbh, should probably be a 1.x by now): pypi.org/project/emin - super-simple […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

Grim Historian on monopolies: thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/mon… I love these articles, they are angry and beautifully written, and all well worth your time.

thegrimhistorian.substack.com

Monopolies Made Life Unaffordable.

We Once Knew How to Stop Them.

Reposted by Andy Buckley

aoanla @aoanla.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

@agbuckley As I keep saying to people (some of whom then protest), *science* is a human project, involving humans learning things about how the world works. "I pointed this optimiser at the problem and it gave me this answer" is not science; just as learning that the Answer to the Ultimate […]

Original post on hachyderm.io

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

@aoanla Lovely way to put it – and I say that as someone whose research career kinda looks like "3 new ways to feed things to optimisers" 😅 Just finding a useful optimum that we don't understand does have a place in our reconstruction and calibration, though crucially we actually test their […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026

Interesting on #OpenAI maths results: www.scientificamerican.com/article/… Not just the sloppy failures to cite work that the LLMs will 100% have ingested, or the company's prioritisation of hype: their SOP, and […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

I've wanted the ridiculous indulgence of an office guitar ever since my undergrad lit review supervisor had one (hi, Garrett Cotter!) And now, thanks to a recent dream purchase, I have a spare so... ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

A guitar – black Ibanez SZ 320, no less – in Andy's office among physics books and, I'm told, the worst map of Scotland ever drawn

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

I didn't find an existing package for parsing GNU #ChangeLog format, but it's fairly simple so I made one (and a demo converter): pypi.org/project/gnuchangelog gitlab.com/agbuckley/gnuchangelog I don't expect to add much to this package, but it's proven pretty useful for […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

Having been annoyed for years about the bad interaction of the venerable GNU #ChangeLog format with #git development (git's merge seems to clash much worse with ChangeLogs than cvs, svn or hg), I came a bit late to finding keepachangelog.com This more modern approach groups by release […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

The new Rivet website heprivet.org is built with Warhol via Gitlab's CI, and it's great. So much simpler than all the other tools, and easily combinable with custom scripts to generate content. See the simplicity of the repo if curious: gitlab.com/heprivet/heprivet.gitlab…

Rivet — the particle-physics MC analysis toolkit

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

Introducing Warhol -- the Website Assembler Requiring Hardly any Other Libraries pypi.org/project/warhol (so-named because it's short, relies on templates, and matches my embarrassingly neglected Emin maker of rudimentary galleries: pypi.org/project/emin) I got fed up of […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

Just before it, and then toward the end of my holiday (the last two weeks) I got time to hack together a couple of little software packages to help manage our physics code projects. And since they're general, I decided why not package them up for everyone? So here goes; see following toots for […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/08/2026

@bestforbritain.org According to www.lbc.co.uk/article/reform-uk-cla… Reform could make a non-ringfenced payment to the govt Consolidated Fund to effectively reimburse the public for their by-election. But I don't see any response to that or […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

I genuinely can't decide between ineptitude and Machiavellian genius at #STFC, who've managed to turn their finding crisis – a niche concern for most, no matter how intense the grinding of astro- and particle-physicist teeth – into front-page news by sacrificing _Jodrell Bank_ just as the King […]

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Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

Saw this on the side of a luxury EV the other day. Have I lost my mind or is it proudly stating that this car can run for 15 mins at full power? (actually slightly less, usable capacity is 94 kWh) I'm sure it's perfectly fine in normal use – claimed range is […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Text on the side of a Polestar 4 car, reading "100 kWh / 400 kW"

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

The World Cube Association has only held one cubing event in Cuba, and that was 10 years ago. Come _on_, people!

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

Add AI in education to the long list of things Bruce Schneier is perceptive, compelling and right about: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2…

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

@aoanla Last time they did something akin to that, they were _very_ keen to keep it schtum!

Reposted by Andy Buckley

Dan Gillmor @dangillmor.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/07/2026

Musk's Tesla modified contracts with customers -- without the customers' permission -- long after they were signed. How does this differ from outright fraud? electrek.co/2026/06/03/tesla-retroa…

Tesla retroactively added 'supervised' to FSD contracts owners signed years ago

Tesla appears to have retroactively modified FSD purchase agreements to add 'supervised' language that wasn't there when owners signed. Some contracts are now inaccessible.

Andy Buckley @agbuckley.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

@aoanla Being a sweet summer child, I first thought that it must be a physics thing I didn't know about, until the penny dropped. Those seem to be the two endcaps of CMS, ripped apart and turned round so they can fire some CP violation at each other – god knows what that does to the beam optics […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social