Theodore Shrimpton

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1938 a committee of psychiatrists told the British government that bombing would produce three times as many mental casualties as physical ones. Three to four million cases in the first six months.

The state believed them and built a network of emergency psychiatric clinics outside the city centres, staffed and waiting for the collapse.

The bombs came. Forty thousand civilians killed in eight months. A million London homes damaged or destroyed. People slept in the Underground, came up to find the street gone, and went to work.

The clinics closed for lack of patients. In the first three months of the Blitz London recorded around two cases of bomb neurosis a week. Suicides fell. Drunkenness fell.

That is a population on dripping, offal, eggs, whole milk and Sunday joints, being bombed nightly, and not breaking.

Their grandchildren: over eight million adults in England on antidepressants, close to ninety million prescriptions a year, one in five people aged eight to twenty-five with a probable mental disorder. Warm, fed, housed, at peace, and being bombed by nobody.

Everybody has an explanation ready. Phones, housing, the news, atomised communities. All real, and none of them the one nobody will say out loud.

We changed the fuel supply to the organ that does the feeling.

Your brain is two per cent of your bodyweight and takes a fifth of your energy at rest. Every thought, every mood, every act of holding yourself together under pressure is ATP, and ATP is made by mitochondria. A neuron carries thousands. When they run well you are resilient. When they do not, no amount of character makes up the difference.

Mitochondria have their own signature fat in the inner membrane, called cardiolipin, and the entire electron transport chain is embedded in it. Cardiolipin is assembled out of whatever fat you have been eating. The membrane your energy is generated across is made of your diet.

Feed a body linoleic acid, the dominant fat in sunflower, soybean, corn and rapeseed oil, and it goes into that membrane. Linoleic acid oxidises readily, and it is now sitting in the one place in the cell with the most oxygen and the most electron traffic going past it. When it goes, it damages the proteins around it and breaks down into aldehydes that attack the mitochondrial enzymes themselves.

The energy plant is being rebuilt out of a material that degrades under the exact conditions it has to work in. Not poisoned in a dose. Rebuilt, slowly, out of the wrong stuff, across forty years.

Before 1911 that fat barely existed in the human food supply. It is now the most consumed fat in the Western diet.

The generation that took the Blitz was running on beef fat and butter, and the clinics built for them stood empty.

We are the best fed, safest, most medicated people in British history, and we cannot get through a Tuesday.

[橋本琴絵 @HashimotoKotoe]

第七子を産みました！
皆様、応援してくださりありがとうございました！
医師、助産師、看護師の皆様方の御尽力に感謝申し上げます。

[Pat Ryan 🇺🇸 @PatRyanUC]

I served 27 months in combat in Iraq as an Army Intelligence Officer.

6 months into Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, here’s what’s clear to me:

The situation has devolved into a full-on FIASCO. And we are not winning.

The Pentagon needs a reset – starting with Pete Hegseth.🧵

[Kristi Raik @KristiRaik]

Some points on parallels being drawn between 2021-2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and 2026 Russian threat to NATO incl. the Baltic states. 1/

[David Blagden @blagden_david]

Half agree. Yes, there is an enduring - arguably deluded - ideational commitment to an outsized British world ‘role’ (sometimes manifested in naval debates). But arguments that the current RN is suitable for the UK’s diminished strategic position still miss key concerns.

1/8

[Tonya Gemmer @Kingsheir777]

My only granddaughter was sworn into the Army National Guard a few minutes ago. I'm so proud of her🥹

[Podszus @crpodszus]

@technopopulist They’ll be 1% of an estate’s population, but account for ~90% of the disorder.

[Corin Robertson @CorinRobertson]

千里の道も一歩から。
駐日英国大使として歩む道への期待を胸に、日本へ向かいます。　🇯🇵 🇬🇧

[박선달 | Park Sundal @parksundal0528]

1920년대부터 2000년대까지
한국🇰🇷 일본🇯🇵 중국🇰🇷 교복 변화

※ 학교·지역·시기별 차이가 있으며, 국기는 시대별 국기가 아닌 현재 국가를 구분하기 위한 표시입니다.

[camilo @AscendedYield]

Much of the British political establishment still lives in 1997, especially now with Burnham bringing back washed ex Blairites

Back in 1997, Britain’s economy was larger than India and China combined, we still had domestic industry and debt to GDP was under 40%

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Welcome to the big, beautiful world baby Saffiyah! My wife and I have been blessed with a second daughter. The NHS team were extraordinary!

[A Soldier's Whisper @SoldiersWhisper]

Please honor and remember Pfc. Lawrence Brooks, who passed away at 112 years old. 🕊️
He was our oldest surviving WWII U.S. Army Veteran in the country.
🇺🇸 https://t.co/Bl2gg9Qawi
#Military #RIP #Veteran
#WWII

[Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah]

What is wrong with these figures( apart from the fact that France’s nuclear force is truly French, whereas ours isn’t truly British)?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Channel 4 took a ten year old off his ADHD medication on Tuesday night, gave him yoga, forest walks, less sugar and no screens for six weeks, and admitted in a line of text at the end that he had struggled at school. Referrals for assessment in this country are up two hundred per cent in five years. The whole thing has been on fire ever since.

The charities say it has stigmatised children. One of the scientists in it has publicly withdrawn her support and said she was cherry-picked. The other side says a sample of one proves nothing. Everybody is arguing about the boy.

Nobody is arguing about his plate, and the experiment they ran on him is the reason why. They took things away from that child for six weeks. Screens, sugar, his prescription. They did not put one single thing back.

Because a brain is not made of ideas. It is made of fat. The fat that matters is called DHA, it sits in the wall of every nerve cell in a boy's head, and it decides how fast a signal gets across. No plant on earth makes it. It comes out of egg yolk, oily fish, liver, the fat round a chop and the cream on top of the milk, and that is the entire list.

A boy in 1976 ate off that list three times a day without one person in his life knowing the word.

He woke to eggs and bacon fried in the fat off the bacon, and a glass of milk with the cream still up the neck of the bottle. He walked to school and sat down at nine having eaten meat, fat and yolk. Dinner at twelve was mince with a proper gravy, or liver, or suet pudding and custard. Out at half three, home at four, told he would spoil his tea, back out until dark. Tea at six, cooked. Fish on a Friday because the Pope said so and the whole street went along with it. Then the kitchen shut for thirteen hours.

Now his grandson.

- 7.30: cereal, or a cereal bar, in skimmed milk
- 10.00: a biscuit at break
- 12.30: a wrap, crisps, a yoghurt with more sugar in it than a doughnut
- 3.30: something out of the machine on the way out
- 4.15: the multipack, opened in front of a screen
- 6.30: nuggets, or a pizza, or a sauce out of a jar
- 8.00: whatever is left in the bag

Seven, and not one of them sitting at a table. There is no yolk in that column. No liver. No fat off an animal anywhere in it, and there has not been since he was weaned, because every item on the list is the same two things in different packaging: sugar, and oil pressed out of seeds in a factory.

The oil is not simply failing to feed him. It gets in the way. The body builds the fat a brain needs using the same machinery it uses to process seed oil, and the oil takes priority. The more of it that goes in, the less of the other he can make. He is blocked at both ends, seven times a day, from birth.

His grandmother is not to blame for a second of it. In 1984 the government's own committee on nutrition reported on fat and heart disease and told the country to cut it out. The yolks went in the bin. The milk was skimmed. The dripping was poured away and the butter dish came off the table, and a nation of women did precisely as they were told by men with letters after their names.

So a psychiatrist put a boy in a forest for six weeks and filmed the result. Ten years of that column against six weeks of walking about. He took the child's medication away, which was reckless, and never once put a yolk in front of him, which was the actual experiment and nobody ran it.

They changed what a boy is made of, spent forty years denying it, and have now made a television programme asking whether the boy is the thing that went wrong.

[alexmassie @alexmassie]

Free speech and freedom of the press is menaced by left and right alike. This is the Age of Hurt Feelings, after all.
Nevertheless, these remain things worth fighting for.

https://t.co/IRUgr2HUy9

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

Sadly, I think this is correct.

UK gilt yields are among the most bullish-looking charts out there right now. Exactly what you don't want to see when you're carrying debts our size. We're already buckling under the interest bill at current levels, and I expect yields to keep climbing.

Sky-high energy costs have closed off any obvious path to growth. So tax policy is turning redistributive rather than pro-growth, piling more and more weight onto the private sector and dragging on growth in the process.

AI is stripping out demand for cognitive labour, which is precisely what most of our service economy is built on. The UK is unusually exposed in this regard, and at the moment we seem to just be burying our heads in the sand and hoping it all goes away.

Demographics point only one way… a rising dependency ratio that accelerates as the 2020s close and the 2030s begin.

Then add a war in Iran that's closed the Strait of Hormuz and gutted global energy supply. Deepening involvement in Ukraine, which is sparking further tension between the UK and Russia. Geopolitical relations souring on multiple fronts.

And that’s before we even start talking about our currency, import-dependence, borders, declining infrastructure, and all the other major problems crippling our country.

So yeah, something tells me 2008 may end up feeling like a teddy bear's picnic compared to what we're walking into.

[Sann @san_x_m]

In the 1971 war, India lost a warship at sea. Its sonar had not been able to find the submarine that sank it.

India then tried to buy better sonar. The countries that made it would not sell.

So the Navy told one of its own officers to build it himself.

His name is Arogyaswami Paulraj.

He was born in Pollachi, a small town in Tamil Nadu. He joined the Indian Navy as a teenager and stayed for about 30 years.

The Navy spotted him early and sent him to the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi for a master's degree. His professors told the Navy not to stop there. He finished a doctorate.

After the 1971 war he was given the sonar problem.

He had no foreign help, no foreign equipment and no permission to buy either. His team built the system from the ground up. It was called APSOH. It went into the fleet in 1983.

It was not a compromise. It is still considered one of the best sonars in the world.

He went on to set up 3 national research laboratories in India, in computing, artificial intelligence and military electronics. India gave him the Padma Bhushan.

Then he left the Navy and joined Stanford University in America as a postdoctoral researcher, starting again at the bottom.

While running wireless experiments there, he noticed something odd in his results about how signals could be separated from one another. He followed it.

What came out of it is called MIMO. In simple terms, instead of one antenna sending and one antenna receiving, you use several at both ends at once, and the signals stop fighting each other and start carrying far more data.

That is the foundation of every WiFi connection and every 4G and 5G phone on the planet.

The chairman of the Marconi Society put it plainly. Every WiFi router and 4G phone today uses MIMO technology pioneered by him.

He founded a company on it, which Intel bought. He founded another, which Broadcom bought. He holds around 80 patents.

He has the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the Faraday Medal, and a place in the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The internet in your house is running on his idea right now, and almost nobody in this country knows his name.

[Female swordfighter 野内花峰 Kaho Nouchi 助太刀屋十八番 代表 @Kaho_Nouchi]

おはようございます！
いつもありがとうございます。
今日もよろしくお願いします！

[Rishikesh Gajjala @publishiperishi]

I have decided to leave math academia.

Not because of burnout, the academic job market, or a loss of love for mathematics. Surprisingly, it is because of how much mathematics I could do with LLMs over the last few months.

For most of my life, pursuing mathematics felt like the obvious choice. It gave me a sense of purpose, rooted in the search for hidden truths in God’s Book.

Over the past few months, that conviction has been shaken. With LLMs, I could get several breakthroughs on problems I care deeply about and had worked on for years during my PhD. This progress might have taken years of my academic life if not for LLMs.

This could have strengthened my conviction that mathematics was my calling. Instead, it undermined it. With each passing week, my role in the discovery loop seemed to grow smaller.

What made mathematics meaningful to me was never just the final answer. It was the struggle: months or years of exploration, failed approaches, and deep thought before a hidden structure finally became visible. That struggle gave me a sense that the result was truly mine. Prompting my way to answers, without the struggle that once defined the process, no longer felt like the same vocation. The answer might be just as beautiful, but it did not feel earned in the same way.

I now believe that we are rapidly approaching a world in which most answers from God’s Book will be only a prompt away. Once I truly internalized that possibility, dedicating much of my life to finding those answers slightly earlier no longer felt as meaningful as it once had.

But one problem kept bothering me: How do we know the oracle is right?

Intelligence (and hence the amount of math papers) is becoming abundant and cheaper by the day. Trust is not.

The proofs produced by these systems can be highly sophisticated, and their errors can be extremely subtle. Determining whether an apparent breakthrough was actually correct sometimes took me days. Until it is verified, a beautiful proof is not different from slop.

That gap drew me toward formal verification and eventually toward formalizing math proofs in Lean, including proofs of several longstanding conjectures and Erdős problems discovered with the help of LLMs. I began to see verification as a central intellectual bottleneck. Intelligence is useful only when its outputs can be trusted.

So I am leaving math academia. I am shifting my attention from discovering answers to building systems that can certify them.

I am very excited to be joining @PramaanaLabs to work on this challenge. Over the next few years, I hope to help build a future in which increasingly powerful systems are not merely intelligent, but provably correct and reliable across problems far beyond mathematics.