glenn smith

You can’t educate an idiot. Let’s listen to my point then listen to yours and then agree I was right. 👍🤷‍♂️

[glenn smith @glennsmith1973]

@BillyCove10 @netflix Defintly was a Xmas present one year about 14/15. Come January I felt like Robocop in those

[glenn smith @glennsmith1973]

@BillyCove10 @netflix Bits of paper today for protection. Mind you if you can’t tackle them I suppose you don’t need em. Shin pads, ankle guards were trendy for a while. Madness

[J Stewart @triffic_stuff_]

🚨STARMER’S BLATANT HYPOCRISY EXPOSED! 🤔

Perfect example of Two-Tier Keir.

Video 1 (2020): Starmer viciously attacks Trump for his response to the rioters after George Floyd’s death, calling it an “affront to humanity” and defending the unrest as “peaceful protests” by people “rightly demanding justice”.

“Like you, I was shocked and angered by the killing of George Floyd. And the response of President Trump and US authorities to the peaceful protests, to people rightly demanding justice, has been an affront to humanity.”

Video 2 (Today): Starmer condemns the “disgraceful” rioters in the wake of Henry Nowak’s tragic murder and his shocking treatment by police.

“No matter the pain we feel, there is no justification for violence and disorder. Let me be clear, we will ensure anyone found engaging in disorder meets the full force of the law.”

Why the blatant double standard, Keir?

Either rioting is bad or it isn’t?

You’re “shocked and angered” and label Trump’s crackdown an “affront to humanity”… but now you’re cracking down hard when people “demand justice” after Henry Nowak.

Are you the “affront to humanity” for condemning these rioters?

Two-Tier Keir exposed for the world to see.

[ᜰ 🇦🇷 @markklfc]

Emmanuel Petit on Premier League clubs mocking Arsenal after the final defeat:

🗣️ “I have to say, I found it embarrassing.

The second Arsenal lost, some Premier League clubs couldn't wait to jump on social media and remind everyone about their European trophies.

That tells you everything.

Instead of supporting an English club representing the league on the biggest stage in club football, they were busy celebrating Arsenal's pain.

For me, that's not rivalry. That's insecurity.

Arsenal were 90 minutes away from doing something special, and rather than show respect, people were desperately searching through the history books for old trophies to post online.

Why? Because they were terrified of seeing Arsenal join that club.

Let's be honest, some of these clubs spent the entire season watching Arsenal compete at a level they couldn't reach.

The jealousy was obvious.

The moment Arsenal fell short, they treated it like they had won something themselves.

That's the mentality of people who would rather see Arsenal fail than focus on their own success.

The trophy may have slipped away, but the reaction from some rivals showed exactly how much Arsenal still live rent-free in their heads.”

[Football Tweet ⚽ @Footballtweet]

🎥 This moment is going to be played again and again for years to come.

Declan Rice knew.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years.

A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain?

Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever.

The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since.

Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city.

They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail.

The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through.

Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth.

If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find.

She put 16 of them in an MRI machine.

Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got.

A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab.

Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus.

Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline.

Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan.

The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way.

So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time.

She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again.

The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction.

The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work.

There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about.

The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another.

When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real.

She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal.

The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory.

That distinction is the entire study.

Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest.

The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them.

The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do.

The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it.

Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it.

The answer is the part that should change how you live.

[Donna-Louise @NoLongerTheFuzz]

Full article on Substack

https://t.co/qzDokbdwX9

[Tony Adams @TonyAdams]

Heartbreaking 💔

[glenn smith @glennsmith1973]

Waymo's robotaxis are now driving themselves around London - Metro https://t.co/3ntOANXZOs

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Diego Armando Maradona, widely regarded as one of the greatest players in football history.

[HPaul @PaulParklane]

This MOB testing to see if cars are allowed the wrong way up one of the most famous one way streets in the world !! Haymarket

'Make it make sense'

[celtic Jaime 🍀 @celtic_jaime]

The Legend of the rave scene 🕊️ 🕺

[Layth @laythy29]

Anyone heard from John Obi Mikel recently…? Or was the fact he played in a team that cheated its way to a title through ‘financial breaches’ mean that his laughably preposterous criticism of Arsenal was nothing more than utter bollocks