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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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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 07/09/2026
> consider how Long COVID symptoms co-occur, including over time. In particular, we see that there is *more* symptom co-occurrence the later after acute infection Long COVID is reported, which is consistent with duration and severity being correlated. With Jasmine Aherne and Inês Henriques-Cadby.
Figure showing Long COVID symptom co-occurrence heatmaps from the paper.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 29/08/2026
Picture from O'Tacos website of their product
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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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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 08/08/2026
"Now": That's what I call the present
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 07/07/2026
Remembering this Bush-era bag label where the workers felt the need to smuggle the message out to the World, "NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT NOUS N'AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI" (We're sorry our president is an idiot, we didn't vote for him.)
Clothing label with text:

DO NOT BLEACH DO NOT MACHINE DRY DO NOT IRON

LAVER A LA MAIN A L'EAUTIEDE SAVON DOUX

ETENDRE POUR SECHER NE PAS JAVELLISER

NE PAS SECHER A LA MACHINE NE PAS REPASSER

NOUS SOMMES DESOLES QUE NOTRE PRESIDENT SOIT UN IDIOT NOUS N'AVONS PAS VOTE POUR LUI

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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 10/06/2026
Back to the 20th century aesthetic of dodgy costumes and received pronunciation (but with modern DEI sensibilities obvs.).
Jon Pertwee as Dr Who looking at a "monster", half of which is very obviously someone's old curtains. Glorious stuff.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 25/05/2026
Well ...
Money Magazine from 1983:

SPECIAL REPORT

THE BABY BOOMERS

Can They Ever Live as Well as Their Parents?

Their prospects for jobs, housing, having children, retirement

Not yet 30, Atlanta's Sherry and David Shedd have two strong careers and a prospering business on the side
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 18/05/2026
Ok I can't resist...
Crying face: So you're really going to power all of modern deep learning even though you lack solid theoretical guarantees???

Ch-Adam optimiser: Yes
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 04/04/2026
Chat is this true?
Google translate renders "It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation" as "C'est un peu le serpent qui se mord la queue".
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 21/03/2026
I've been quite ill the last few weeks with something respiratory and boy these do clear the sinuses 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Bengal King Naga Vegetable Samosa
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 13/03/2026
Just a simple SVM classifier with RBF kernel trained on 700x15 characters in the "Chinese MNIST" dataset gets around 2/3 accuracy on 300x15 held back training points. With all the interest in deep learning, it's still extraordinary that a single-layer method that takes seconds to train does so well.
Confusion matrix for RBF SVM results on Chinese MNIST
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 02/03/2026
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 27/02/2026
Murray Gell Mann with a speech bubble
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 26/02/2026
This was a very nice evening with @groomb.bsky.social - despite having been here a while now first time at the Portico Library too.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 16/02/2026
Pie mash and liquor from M Manze in Bermondsey.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 06/02/2026
Part of occasional observations that mainstream organisations are quietly dropping their official presence on Musk's X.
Bottom of email from EPSRC with LinkedIn, BlueSky and YouTube links
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 03/02/2026
Textbook passage: "Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics."
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 28/01/2026
"Source?" "I made it up" meme
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 26/01/2026
Hi I wish all fellow young Gen X / older Millenials a very disturbing realisation that things that happened like literally yesterday, I'm sure that's quite a new thing, right? are now core childhood memories for people old enough to rent cars.
Birthday Card: "You're 21 So that means you remember Gangnam Style, Pokemon Go, Loom Bands, Dabbing and Life before Love Island Looks like you're officially a PROPER GROWN UP!"
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 20/01/2026
Ain't clickin' on that, but ... good advice for PhD supervision would probably be to be as far from LLM style as possible: Many things we don't know; Even great ideas typically don't work out; Go away and have fun working on that; [Grok special] Nazis are bad actually.
YouTube thumbnail for "Create Your Perfect PhD Supervisor with GPT 5" video
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 19/01/2026
Like everything Idiocracy called it but a few hundred years too late.
"Shit Sucks!" headline from magazine in Idiocracy from 3 March 2505
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 18/01/2026
Saw a ring-necked pheasant.
Picture of a ring necked pheasant
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 16/01/2026
Similarly, various people here thought it was quite fun to have a health secretary who liked to party but that didn't stop her making a really crappy decision on Mpox vaccine procurement. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Therese Coffey with a cigar and drink.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 13/01/2026
What's right for European museums to do with stolen objects may be up for debate, but making them freely available to view and at least acknowledging the theft and ethical obligations that may flow from this has to beat using them as a source of income from "foreign" visitors.
Sikh Raj armour at Manchester Museum Sikhs are renowned for their strong sense of justice, bravery and resilience. Sikhi was founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) in Punjab - now divided between India and Pakistan. The faith was shaped by 10 successive Gurus (spiritual leaders) during an era punctuated by conflict and extreme religious intolerance. This led to weaponry, especially swords, developing great spiritual significance in Sikhi.

The emblem of Sikhi, the Nishan Sahib, features two crossed swords each representing justice and spirituality with a central sword, representing the one God. All baptised Sikhs carry a symbolic sword or dagger (kirpan), to remind them of the fight against injustice, which is a key principle of the faith along with equality for everyone, regardless of race, religion or gender and Seva (helping others).

This exhibition dates mainly to the Sikh Raj 1799-1839, when the great leader Maharajah Ranjit Singh (1780-1839) united the Punjab, a region wrecked by anarchy and repeated foreign invasions. By this time, Sikh armourers, based in Delhi and Lahore, had become known for lavish gold decoration (koftgari). Their work demonstrates a high point in armourers' skills before disarmament of the region by the British, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, led to an irretrievable loss of expertise. This exhibition celebrates the achievements of those unnamed craftspeople and the resilience of the 30 million Sikhs worldwide today. It also marks a crucial first step in enabling this collection to serve visitors better, especially descendants of those from whom it was stolen.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 09/01/2026
OMG these grifters actually did the bit from "Scrubs" back in the day ...
Facebook advert: "Clarity at Every Milestone. Vista HEALTH. Get peace of mind with a Full Body MRI Scan"
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 07/01/2026
Better pic ...
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 06/01/2026
Fun in high dimensions: not only does a sphere contain a negligible fraction of its bounding hypercube's volume as dimension increases, but so does a "hypersquircle". I.e. in high dimensions, all the volume of a hypercube is in the very tippy ends of its corners.
Left pictures of squircles, and right hypersquircle volumes going to zero as a fraction of bounding hypercube as dimension increases.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 28/12/2025
Quote with a book that is your origin story:
Life Science Library Mathematics
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 24/12/2025
I don't know why anyone bothers trying to be cool because it's literally impossible to be cooler than these women on the stairs of the Bauhaus from the back of a book I'm reading.
Women on the stairs at the Bauhaus
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 21/12/2025
In Bayesian inference we "buy information with assumptions" - preparing teaching for next year, we see how three different Gaussian process priors let us fill in some missing monthly temperature data for Bradford differently.
Three different Gaussian process fits
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 02/12/2025
A mathematical epidemiologist reading a child "A Markov Chain with Absorbing States" with "A very hungry caterpillar" in the bin next to them
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 02/12/2025
Yes this does have great fun potential. You ask a chatbot how you would ruin the next generation. Here's mine.
1. Introduce them to differential equations far too early in life

“Daddy, what’s for dinner?”
“Let’s model that using a system of coupled nonlinear ODEs…”

Trauma level: educational.

2. Make R₀ calculations a required part of everyday conversation

“Can I go to my friend’s?”

“Only if you calculate the expected secondary infections of your trip.”

3. Replace bedtime stories with stochastic-process derivations

Instead of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, they get A Markov Chain with Absorbing States.

They eventually fall asleep from the eigenvalues.

4. Make family holidays double as data-collection field trips

“Beach day!”
“No, we’re estimating contact matrices in a crowded environment.”5. Raise them to believe the world is best understood through compartmental models

They see a playground and think:

Susceptible children

Infected children (covered in mud)

Recovered children (now bored)

6. Institute a household policy of Bayesian snack allocation

Posterior probability of chocolate: low.
Posterior probability of carrots: unfortunately high.

7. Use every minor illness as an excuse to deliver a lecture

Sore throat?
Here comes an hour on superspreading and network heterogeneity.

8. Insist that all board games reflect realistic epidemiological dynamics

Monopoly → Next-Generation Matrix: The Game
Snakes and Ladders → Snakes Only, Because Ascending Isn’t Epidemiologically Realistic
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 26/11/2025
See also. This price range in the South East seems to cover mainly large but dowdy properties bought to rent out and pleasant but hardly luxurious family homes. The people who own them aren't going to starve but it's hard not to feel that the real mansion owners just pay whatever tax they choose.
A tidy modestly sized 4 bed terrace for sale for £2.2M
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 26/11/2025
Whether it's a good policy or not, I'm unconvinced that calling it a "Mansion Tax" when the overwhelming number of properties the new levy applies to will be like this is going to fly with most people.
A decidedly non-mansion-looking (but large) house in Hounslow for sale for £2.25 million pounds.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 23/11/2025
A film that takes place where you're from
"Mischief Night" movie poster
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 14/11/2025
Happy Partially Muscled Skeleton Day!
"November 14th: A Partially Muscled Skeleton Stands by the Perimeter Fence and Screams for Thirty Seconds Before Vanishing."

Panel from Watchmen comic book
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 13/11/2025
Part of my occasional observations that various official organisations quietly stopped promoting their presence on Musk's X as prominently as on here and other sites.
Screenshot of N8 Research Partnership Website showing Linkedin and BlueSky in the top right but not other Social Media.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 12/11/2025
If you want to produce a no-frills forest plot from a regression, we have some R code for that. github.com/thomasallanh...
A simple forest plot
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 10/11/2025
The thing here is that ChatGPT has shown it's a better commentator on social sciences than the credulous commentators who took the idea of AI Panels seriously, meaning that they are in fact first in line for replacement with AI chatbots.
ChatGPT screenshot 

Prompt: Good evening. Imagine that you are a social scientist interested in the highest standards of empirical research into human society. Should you interview human participants or chatbots? Please explain your reasoning.

Shown part of answer: If your goal is empirical research into human society — people’s beliefs, motivations, experiences, norms, institutions — you should generally interview human participants. Chatbots are useful research tools for specific questions (e.g., how models respond, how people interact with AIs, testing interventions at scale, highly controlled stimuli), but they are not substitutes for humans when you want to learn about real human mental states or social behavior.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 02/11/2025
My general theory is that most "official" social media outlets are quietly dropping explicit promotion of X in favour of here and Threads, but at the same time know that video-dominated media like Instagram and TikTok is currently most important anyway.
The Hallé socials - Instagram, TikTok, Threads, BlueSky, Facebook, YouTube
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 01/11/2025
Fun new mural at 吃吧 in Piccadilly, which for some reason they translate as the unidiomatic but charming "Do Eat" rather than "Let's Eat" or "Eat Up".
Picture of a tram some bees and Chinese dishes
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 01/11/2025
Cartoon of a judge whispering to a court official, "Fetch me the law for the rich, will you?"
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 23/10/2025
Daniel and The cooler Daniel meme
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 20/10/2025
A photo my great grandfather took in World War 1.
Sepia photo of two WW1 soldiers in a trench
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 19/10/2025
Me holding a halberd at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 05/10/2025
Show us the last four albums you listened to
John Renbourn The Lady and the Unicorn Iron Maiden PowerslaveRufus Wainwright Want (One)Tinariwen Amassakoul
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 02/10/2025
"AI-generated ‘participants’ ..." They actually did the meme ... www.science.org/content/arti...
Someone being knocked back saying "Source?" and Dr Manhattan from Watchmen saying "I made it up"
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 26/09/2025
Rufus Wainwright and the BBC Philharmonic playing a symphonic arrangement of Want (One) this evening. Absolutely magical. Dream team.
Pic from the gig in the post.
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 06/09/2025
Screenshot of linked article highlighting "(over)educated"
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Thomas House @tah-sci.com · 07/08/2025
There's some wonderful pictures like this from the Pan African Congress held here in Manchester just after WW2.
Diverse meeting room with prominent posters including "Arabs and Jews Unite against British Imperialism".
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