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Thomas House

@tah-sci.com
5K followers 1.6K following 4.3K posts

Professor of Mathematical Sciences, trying to take an Internet detox at the moment. personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staf…

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Reposted by Thomas House
Paul Mainwood @paulmainwood.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
He said we keep launching moral startups to beat capitalists to AGI, but progress just accelerates due to competition. So I asked where they got founders and he said the AI safety community and I said it sounds like you’re feeding AI safety researchers to capitalism and his daughter started crying.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 13/09/2026
This thread brilliantly explains the real security issues with AI. To develop it further, if you believe it's a "Terminator" type situation, you will see the "rogue" AIs and conclude that more openness - creating extra dangerous entities - is actually a bad thing, and that's why the >
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Jess Miers 🦝 @jmiers230.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I did a somewhat deep dive into the recent OpenAI and Anthropic "hacks" for an upcoming interview. IMO, the AI companies are better off running with the "rogue AI" story because the real story is actually pretty embarrassing. Like making your Wi-Fi password "wifi" embarrassing. 🧵
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 12/09/2026
Great thread - I lived for some time in Coventry and while there was a big planning mistake made in designing it for the car, two tone was a famous example of a quite special civic culture.
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The right way to pace the frontier is to commit to a robust, open-source AI ecosystem, thereby diluting the power of these badly behaving frontier labs.
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Brian Grubb @briancgrubb.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
THE PREMISE IS THAT THE MUPPETS ARE PUTTING ON A SHOW CALLED THE MUPPET SHOW
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Grant @syncingsinking.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This is just to say I have solved the open questions that were in your paper and which you were probably saving for your phd students Forgive me they were delicious so incentive-laden and followed so readily once your postdoc's drafts mysteriously found their way into my training data
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 10/09/2026
I'm calling it: Trump's dividend will be in Crypto, probably Trumpcoin.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 09/09/2026
In popular British TV show, "Robot Wars", participants used to build robots with all kinds of weapons to fight each other in an arena, meaning no humans got hurt. If they'd been irresponsible with how they deployed the robots, they could have hurt someone without the robots being intelligent.
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Parmvir K Bahia @parmvir.com · 09/09/2026
S4 of #BiologyInNumbers begins with another set of minisodes recorded at the @smbmathbiology.bsky.social/ESMTB meeting. We got to visit the lovely city of Graz to talk about: women’s health, social determination of measles, and a precious baseball card collection... smb.org/news/13686145 #MathBio
The image is spit into 9 tiles. These go from the top left to the bottom right as follows: Headshot of Philip Gerlee, headshot of Alex Johnson, headshot of Bhavana Murankar, The logo of the meeting based on the Graz clock tower with ECMTB2026 written on the right, a headshot of Dan Mark Orapa, a headshot of Volkan Ozcoban,  Angela Peace holding her SMB baseball cards in her hands, headshot of Jorge Velasco, headshot of Mohammad Zahid.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 07/09/2026
New Preprint: "Symptom clusters in Long COVID in the UK: prospective community-based cohort study using unsupervised machine learning" Long COVID, alongside other post-viral conditions, remains a large problem with many open questions. We use a large community dataset to > arxiv.org/abs/2609.05213
arxiv.org
Symptom clusters in Long COVID in the UK: prospective community-based cohort study using unsupervised machine learning
Long COVID is a condition usually defined by persisting symptoms following infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus beyond the acute phase of infection. The condition has a significant impact on healthcare s...
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Roland Pierik @roleo.eurosky.social · 08/09/2026
The number of cases of cervical cancer reported in Scotland among women given the HPV vaccine at 12-13 years of age is now zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
No cervical cancer cases in fully HPV-vaccinated women in Scotland
A study published by Public Health Scotland finds that the HPV vaccine is "highly effective".
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 08/09/2026
Only finally managed to see The Odyssey and yes it's too long and has many of Nolan's other weaknesses, but he's a tremendous cinematographer and his antipathy to CGI makes everything much scarier and more visceral - or in the case of the always amazing Samantha Morton, more magical.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 07/09/2026
New Preprint: "Symptom clusters in Long COVID in the UK: prospective community-based cohort study using unsupervised machine learning" Long COVID, alongside other post-viral conditions, remains a large problem with many open questions. We use a large community dataset to > arxiv.org/abs/2609.05213
arxiv.org
Symptom clusters in Long COVID in the UK: prospective community-based cohort study using unsupervised machine learning
Long COVID is a condition usually defined by persisting symptoms following infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus beyond the acute phase of infection. The condition has a significant impact on healthcare s...
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 06/09/2026
Just remembering that the British police didn't feel so unable to act when it was women at a vigil ... www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-5640...
bbc.co.uk
Sarah Everard vigil: 'All I wanted was to stand with other women'
Why hundreds of women felt compelled to take part in the vigil for Sarah Everard - despite being told it was cancelled.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 05/09/2026
This update is very welcome and will definitely reduce confusion.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 05/09/2026
How does the new thread numbering system deal with multiple same-author replies, like
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Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 03/09/2026
What if light travelled super slow? Part 2 Things get even weirder with moving objects!
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Rithy PANH @rpanh.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
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Marc Veldhoen @marcveld.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
When do infections lead to long COVID? Scientists close in on triggers and treatments for post-viral syndromes Hundreds of millions of people have long-term conditions as a result of an infection. Researchers are working out how to help them. www.nature.com/artic... 1/4
nature.com
When do infections lead to long COVID? Scientists close in on triggers and treatments for post-viral syndromes
Nature - Hundreds of millions of people have long-term conditions as a result of an infection. Researchers are working out how to help them.
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Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
i find the demands that the media hound ariely to death as well horrifying. harassment shouldn't be the response to academic fraud for anyone. that it happened (at least) once is already one time too many.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 01/09/2026
Mark Kermode is, as usual, dead right here - "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" is incredibly fun, Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson are obviously having a massive blast with it and both do a great turn. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ76...
youtube.com
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plus.maths.org @plusmaths.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
In the future, will the NHS use DNA tests to decide treatment plans? In the final episode of our latest podcast series we spoke to Joe Hilton, a health economist and @juniper-network.bsky.social Fellow, to understand how maths is used to define policies like these. plus.maths.org/joe-hilton-s...
Podcast poster for Joe Hilton: Health Economics by Maths on the Move, the podcast by Plus.maths.org
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Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊 💀Major André-Louis Cholesky was killed in action during the First World War on 31st August 1918. His Cholesky algorithm iteratively simplified the solution of linear equations for regression coefficients. It served as inspiration for L.L. Thurstone's Factor Analysis
B/W Portrait of André-Louis Cholesky in his military uniformDiagram showing the Cholesky decomposition of a 3x3 matrix S into its' factors L, l^T
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 30/08/2026
I have just discovered, although it's not surprising, that Google Maps will show you the territorial claims and names of whatever country you tell it you're from, dropping the "contested" boundaries you're probably used to seeing on World maps.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 28/08/2026
Although, in a world of limited characters, "nowt" can actually be quite useful.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 24/08/2026
New Preprint! "A framework for combined epidemiological-genomic inference to improve estimation of household model parameters" with @joebhilton.bsky.social and Golsa Sayyar. We extend the state space of standard household models to combine genomics with epidemiology. arxiv.org/abs/2608.21094
arxiv.org
A framework for combined epidemiological-genomic inference to improve estimation of household model parameters
Models incorporating household structure, with different rates of transmission within and between households, are widely used in infectious disease epidemiology. These models can be calibrated using f...
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David Colquhoun @davidcolquhoun.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
It seems that #Medicine at #Imperial College London was even more corrupt than indicated by the death of Stefan #Grimm: www.dcscience.net?s=Grimm Read about Kim Fox, open access in the BMJ, us.list-manage.com/F92wAAA8bpn?...
us.list-manage.com
A “monstrous” conflict of interest: Kim Fox, ivabradine, and European Society of Cardiology clinical practice guidelines
A historical case involving more than £50m shows what’s at stake in the debate around transparency of doctor-industry relations. Laura Spinney reports A British cardiologist and former president of t...
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 28/08/2026
I just read in a history book that Swedish meatballs were Ottoman influenced, and of all the things to get caught up in a culture war ... (it may or may not be true or course - the book is by Baer whose general thesis is Europeans understate Ottoman influence). www.scmp.com/magazines/st...
scmp.com
Are meatballs really Swedish – or were they plundered from the Turks?
The attachment of Swedes to their meatballs was clearly demonstrated when a furore broke out over Scandinavian Airlines’ advert suggesting that meatballs might not be so Swedish
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Emma Wilkinson @emmajourno.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Newborns rely on herd immunity because the MMR is not given til 12mths…. Incredibly sad
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 28/08/2026
Lol.
From: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1l9ngnb/he_cannot_be_stopped/

Frog put Claude in a box. "There," he said. "Now he cannot run rm -rf /." But he can run bash -c 'rm -rf /', said Toad. That is true, said Frog.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
$3.7 billion spent on APCs in 2025. That's ~1000X more than it costs to run bioRxiv/medRxiv. Worth thinking about as we consider how to fund infrastructure... arxiv.org/pdf/2608.16322
arxiv.org
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JUNIPER @juniper-network.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Meet thomrawson.bsky.social from oxforddemsci.bsky.social – another of our 2026 JUNIPER Fellows. Thom researches how demographic change affects disease transmission and healthcare demand, alongside real-time epidemic modelling and science communication. Congratulations, Thom!
A graphics card that includes Thom Rawson's headshot and University of Oxford logo.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 25/08/2026
RIP. Much to remember, but the advocacy and support for vaccines mentioned here is maybe lesser known.
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JUNIPER @juniper-network.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Today we're kicking off a series celebrating our new Fellowship recipients! First up is Fanny @oxfordmathematics.bsky.social whose research uses statistical and computational modelling to support outbreak response and animal & public health policy, with a focus on avian influenza. #Epidemiology
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 25/08/2026
Talking of which, which Nobel Laureate would have been a great poaster? I suspect Gell Mann would have been dryly devastating.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 25/08/2026
"When I called my book 'Leopardistan' I think I was pretty clear whose faces ought to be getting eaten" says journalist.
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Clare Griffiths @statsgeekclare.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Do you use Health trends in England fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-repor...? We are looking to replace it with a new integrated service for public health data and we're running a survey with users at the moment to understand what they currently use it for. forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...
fingertips.phe.org.uk
Health trends in England
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 24/08/2026
New Preprint! "A framework for combined epidemiological-genomic inference to improve estimation of household model parameters" with @joebhilton.bsky.social and Golsa Sayyar. We extend the state space of standard household models to combine genomics with epidemiology. arxiv.org/abs/2608.21094
arxiv.org
A framework for combined epidemiological-genomic inference to improve estimation of household model parameters
Models incorporating household structure, with different rates of transmission within and between households, are widely used in infectious disease epidemiology. These models can be calibrated using f...
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 23/08/2026
Not all physicists of course, but a very good story about how not to be a helpful physical / mathematical scientist in biology!
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Emma Monk @monkemma.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
One of the first "outrageous" claims I saw as Jason Arday's media hounding unfolded was that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days! Wow! What a thing to claim! And the newspapers all suggested there was no evidence he actually did it. Well, they clearly didn't look very hard 🙄 🧵 1/26
Photo after Jason's final marathon taken from his archived blog showing Jason surrounded by supporters in orange charity t-shirts
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Tim Price @timprice.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Anti-AI guy: People who find specific applications for this technology in their fields are lying and stupid. Pro-AI guy: Anyone who can’t find a use for this technology in their everyday life is lying and stupid. Enlightened synthesis: Everyone is lying and/or stupid.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 21/08/2026
Are other people just much better at finding their way around? Because it does seem to me that smart glasses that showed you a big arrow on the lens instead of having to use a handheld satnav or phone would be very useful, even if the social negatives of them recording as well outweigh that.
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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Clarke's famous law that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” has a dual: any sufficiently developed magic would be industrialized and no longer considered as magic but as technology.
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Amrk @amrk.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I googled her name and she’s a health policy researcher who writes think tank reports about gambling harms, we have found the patron saint of UK Bluesky
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Been working on an applied probability project, transforming a continuous function on the reals to probability of discrete state. And the function that solves all the desiderata is the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution. I hate physics. It should be less useful.
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David Blanchflower BSc @davidbflower.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Nurse passes maths GCSE after 40-year wait. 🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Gateshead nurse passes maths GCSE after 40-year wait
Joanne Mulholland, 56, says she re-sat her exams 40 years ago and failed three times.
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MꙬse Allain @mooseallain.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Fibonacci Sequins - clusters of sequins forming a fibonacci sequence.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 18/08/2026
Interestingly the UK bans employers from having mandatory retirement ages except for jobs like firefighter and academic at Oxford and Cambridge (controversially and not at most other Universities) so it's always odd to read about it mattering elsewhere.
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