iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 06/09/2026

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures." - Edsger Dijkstra. Love it. So true. Sometimes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula

One of the most influential figures of computing science's founding generation, Edsger Dijkstra at the blackboard during a conference at ETH Zurich in 1994. In Dijkstra's own words, "A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures."

By Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14942745

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 22/08/2026

Book available on the amazing @archive.org archive.org/details/beyo... Interesting to see the back cover!

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 22/08/2026

Energy density. Uranium is ~20 grams per cm³. So a 1 tonne cube of uranium would be 37 cm (1×10⁶ grams / 20 g cm⁻³) ** (1/3): a little over 1 cubic foot contains the same energy as 3 million tonnes of oil. That's mind blowing, and energy dense. From "Beyond the energy crisis", J. Maddox 1975

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 10/08/2026

For the first time in a long time my email inbox no longer shows a second page. It's liberating but hasn't been easy to get to this point: to make space by letting go of old things and hopes for things that might have been but aren't. Perhaps in the space, new things will emerge 🌱

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 08/06/2026

Current UK wind turbine _farms_ Onshore average 19.3 mega watts, max 443 (Viking) Offshore average 315 mega watts, max 1320 (Hornsea 2) They'll be used as the starting point for players in the new National Energy Explorer serious game: wikisim.org/wiki/1272v30 (work in progress)

A map of the UK and its exclusive economic zone with the current wind farms plotted on it.

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 03/06/2026

If you try really hard you can get about 10 pigeons lestavol.itch.io/pigeon-pigeon ... or hack the code and get WAY too many birds everywhere 😛

PigeonPigeon game hacked to show loads of pigeons everywhere

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 02/06/2026

Play along with google doc's new bug! Rename a file to `game_logo` and it will convert all the text into a strange e Presumably an AI bug that's got into a nonsense place. Friend said it makes them inclined to fly in planes... hopefully a google doc is not used to fly the plane 😂

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 01/06/2026

Frontier AI model when asked for a simple SVG outline of the UK:

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 18/05/2026

Interesting plant based study. 2 weeks from June 2nd, try to eat less animal products and report how you feel each day. Simple. They'll notify you when it's about to start - if you sign up with email or phone at: plantbasedstudy.org?alliance-cod... (I didn't give my real name)

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 15/05/2026

Nice. Yes I'd be interested to know more. I've followed you but I can't DM you

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 15/05/2026

I've started to see products with reviews using an LLM as if that has got any credibility or relevance. _Maybe_ if they showed their prompt:

An LLM is asked to review a well known products:

Give me a short one line review of a famous product that was excellent and make it as persuasively negative as possible.

Here's one for the iPhone, made to sound catastrophic:

"Apple's iPhone single-handedly destroyed humanity's ability to be bored, alone with our thoughts, or present in any meaningful moment — and 1.4 billion people can't put it down long enough to disagree."

Give me a short one line review of a famously terrible product and make it sounds as persuasively excellent as possible.
11:40
Claude responded: Here's one for the Ford Pinto:

Here's one for the Ford Pinto:

"The only car brave enough to remind you, with genuine urgency, that life is short and every journey should be driven like it matters."

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 06/05/2026

I didn't know that at current rates of extraction the North sea oil and gas fields will be depleted by 2031... and that's taking all the known reserves of proven, possible and probable and extracting everything. The North sea is spent, so we need a different plan that adds up. wikisim.org/wiki/1284

Graph showing oil and gas reserves in the north sea approaching 0 by 2031 at current rates of extraction. Source is: https://wikisim.org/wiki/1284

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 28/04/2026

I'm prototyping a new serious game: UK National Energy Explorer. One play tester showed some serious dedication to sustainable energy supply from wind! 😂 That would have taken a lot of clicking! 💪 🌬️ Current work in progress: wikisim.org/wiki/1272v11

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 28/04/2026

Shout out to UK's NSTA (North Sea Transition Authority) for helping me find the data for these graphs, in the space of a few hours this morning. I'm grateful and impressed.

Graphs show the cumulative production and proven, probable and possible reserves of oil and gas in UK up to 2024.

Graphs are from page 9 of this report: https://anot8.org/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nstauthority.co.uk%2Fmedia%2Fhgnp1k2x%2Freserves-and-resources-report-2024.pdf&h=0-ajp&ta=%5B%5B0%2C9%2C%22%22%2C%22%22%2C%5B%5D%2C%2261.5%22%2C%22466.5%22%2C%22622.5%22%2C%2239.5%22%2C%22AJP%22%5D%5D

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 28/04/2026

Pretty incredible map of UK's depleted and active oil and gas fields, wells and pipelines from North Sea Transition Authority experience.arcgis.com/experience/d...

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 18/04/2026

In honour and fond memory of Prof David MacKay. The UK uses ~30 GW of electricity at any one time. I was curious how much we'd need if everyone boiled their kettle at the same time.

Box of tea bags showing calculation of 3 kW kettle x 30 million homes = 90 GW!

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 15/04/2026

Spent the 10th anniversary of Prof David MacKay's death reflecting on his work and how inspiring his book www.withouthotair.com was for what @wikisim.org is aiming to achieve. Thank you David.

Picture of David J. C. MacKay riding his bike.

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 03/04/2026

Happy to have added the 100th star to this repo for discrete global grids! :D github.com/sahrk/DGGRID Even happier to have just found it implements an equal area hexagonal grid.

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 30/03/2026

How do we expect our democracy to function without access to basic and up-to-date data sets? Prompting an LLM with "graphs of the crime rates in London over the last 15 years" returns a hodge podge of stuff with poor / zero provenance. The best I could do last night was: wikisim.org/wiki/1256

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 23/03/2026

I did it again. I spent a whole day last week "just" getting the price of gas to check the claim that "gas prices are soaring"... they're up 80% but this was the _lowest_ price they were over 2022/23! Graph from: tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uk... (private company) 🧵

Graph showing UK gas prices increased 80% since Feb but it's tiny in comparison to the price of gas over 2022/2023 when it was at least as this price and sometimes 600% higher than Feburary's

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 22/03/2026

I'd highly recommend this. @aleesteele.bsky.social is an excellent guide through the history and structure of our modern digital infrastructure and how it's changing. Packed full of insights, a thoroughly illuminating and enjoyable tour. Best enjoyed with a cup of coffee in your hand!

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 19/03/2026

If this bit on the right is huge, what do you call the other bit on the left?! #energy #adjectives

A graph from BBC showing the cost of gas over time, clearly showing a small rise on the right side which had been described as "huge" despite an absolutely massive and sustained price rise in gas on the left of 2 to almost 4 times as much from Covid-19 and Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 19/03/2026

Just published my team's mock up of an interactive map of English River Basins and a proposed Water Availability Rating to wikisim.org/wiki/1219 Also added to Stream, the UK's water data portal. I suspect I should not have had those permissions though, heheh! 😉 Good they've found out now and...

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 08/03/2026

Canary Wharf, London looking cyberpunk!

Canary Wharf scrapers at night illuminating a misty cloud

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 19/12/2025

Yes this needs to be fixed by the MHRA. Searching for "nasal vaccine" doesn't show up Fluenz, but even just searching for "flu " doesn't either... this is basic information & UI usability. It's a flu vaccine that goes up your nose so it should be called "Fluenz nasal flu vaccine" 👍

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 17/12/2025

Apparently we still don't know why and when hot liquids sometimes freezer faster than cold liquids? Mpemba is inspirational for curiosity and his poor teachers are a reminder that humility is vital iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... via www.quantamagazine.org/does-hot-wat...

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 15/12/2025

Barrier stickage is a thing! 😀

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 11/12/2025

New data on @wikisim.org sourced from @ourworldindata.org. I did not realise the rise in global electricity demand over the last 25 years had doubled and was basically driven entirely by Asia (China and India). wikisim.org/wiki/1134

Global electricity demand risen from 15 TWh in 2000 to 30 in 2023

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 09/12/2025

Love it! Works great on Brave. (fyi errors on Firefox 145.0, MacOS with: "Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: this.cNode.getNodeType is not a function" )

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 05/12/2025

#cloudflare looks like it's having a bad time this morning. #outage

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 03/12/2025

This content is looking like the front page of @wikisim.org I was hoping it would become one day! The seeds of data driven surprise, cautious optimism, and challenges to do solved. More and better will come ☺️

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 12/11/2025

Was just talking with a friend about AI for assisting writing fiction and non-fiction and with every iteration you have to drag it back out of its ruts and its "jargonising" otherwise left to itself it will deliver you some prose slop where nothing happens.

An image of an actual bustling, messy city scene above and an AI city blandness below. With the text "Left to itself, AI LLMs will deliver you a scene where nothing happens. Deliver you a life where nothing happens."

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 28/10/2025

Someone posted the up to date version of this infographic...

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 13/10/2025

Hi Alex, thank you for your insights. I normally get them but I don't understand this one yet. The council avoided any costs for that period of time but they didn't evict the council tenant and then rent it out on the open market. So the difference between the rental rates is irrelevant, yes?

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AJP (James Phillips) @ajamesphillips.com · 11/09/2025

A latest AI LLM admitted its solution contained a "Major security flaw". A good reminder that LLM's do not give security critical code a higher risk and extra "thought"... you still need to know what the problems can be.

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