#photographers You are invited to this London Photowalk 4th July 2026 from 2pm fb.me/e/6tU2XouJ6

I’m on the 285 Bus and a woman is speaking very loudly into her phone. She is spouting racist nonsense to the person on the other end of the call. I’m trusting that the #karmapolice will help her appropriately.

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named. The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river. The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn. Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound. "Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever. It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin. "Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet. In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair. And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge. You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain. The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste. I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind. Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again. "Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up. Discipline is a journey.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature.” — Hubert Reeves

If you earn $85 000 a year (a better than average US salary) and spend it at the rate of $1 a second, it will take you a whole day to spend it all. If you earn a billion dollars and spend it at the same rate, it will take you 32 years. People have no idea how big a billion is.

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

The Somerset Farmhouse of 1 North Street, Williton were approached by a "food influencer" that wanted to charge them £2,000 for a review. They put out a video of Sally eating a sausage roll instead 😆. Lets make Sally and the Somerset Farmhouse famous for free.

I'm afraid that this is why the US administration wants to shut down ocean observations: they don't want the people to know what is happening in our oceans, as it does not fit their ideology and the interests of their fossil fuel industry funders. edition.cnn.com/2026/06/03/c…

Labour has taken four rail companies into public ownership, so that - in Keir Starmer's words - they will now 'be run for the public good, not private profit'. On that logic, why not do the same for water, electricity, gas and Royal Mail?

And that's the truth.

Not sure who's sillier on this site, Elon Musk for claiming history's most infamous far right dictator was a socialist, or the climate change sceptics for saying this temperature in May is fine because a few million years ago the surface of the planet was molten lava.

This is what entitlement looks like! 🤬 There are nesting waterbirds on this pond on Hampstead Heath... there are also big 'No Swimming' signs, all being totally ignored! 🤬 Pure selfishness... 😒🤬🤬 (Shared from Instagr*m with permission from 'swansofhampsteadheath')

British pollinators. What a workforce ! Without this amazing team there would be no gardens or food for that matter. We must do our best to look after them, teach our kids they are friends and build habitats to show them how loved they really are.

GOOD NEWS: A record-breaking 52,019 puffins have been counted on Skomer Island off the Welsh coast, smashing last year’s all-time record of 43,626!

#moon #seestar (c) Stephen Cotterell Photography

Only In Monroe --- May 22, 2026 youtu.be/jJTXB5uT_C4?si=C6EC… via @YouTube

Me and my son have been sneaking out in the middle of the night in our Ewok and Chewbacca costumes just to mess with our neighbor's trail cams.

Watch as @nationalgriduk chomps through a hedge. In nesting season. Despite its DCO stating “”In accordance with good practice measure B02, vegetation with the potential to support breeding birds will be programmed to be removed outside of breeding bird season (March to August inclusive) where practicable”. So why was it not practicable not to do it in this instance?The ecologist found nothing (what a surprise) but there is no way a hedge like this does not have nesting birds. (This is Bramford to Twinstead, not Norwich to Tilbury) @PylonsEAnglia

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them