A moment of levity thanks to McSweeneys.
Given the influence that the President of the United States of America has on world affairs, this may offer insight.
This is satire if you have to ask. I struggle with the distinction these days too.
“The first thing a dictatorship does is to burn books and close libraries.” — Erich Kästner
The British Cartographic Society produce a number of ‘teatime talks’, have a look at the BCS website for further information.
Their programme is quite limited at the moment with one forthcoming talk for 2026. Their programme for 2025 provides an idea of what’s to come.
The next talk on 26/Feb is by Adrian Dähler, Federal Office of Topography swisstopo on Swiss Mapping.
“Adrian’s talk will provide a brief overview of terrain representation on the Swiss national maps. He will examine how the rock and glacier areas are updated in the Swiss style. He will also talk about the history of the enormous landscape changes caused by glacial retreat.
Adrian has worked at the Federal Office of Topography swisstopo for over 13 years, where he also completed his apprenticeship as a cartographer. His main tasks are updating the Swiss national maps at scales of 1:25,000, 1:50,000, and 1:100,000 as a member of one of the five production teams.
Together with four other cartographers, he is also tasked with updating the rock outcrops and glaciers as well as the hill shading. These changes are mainly caused by glacial retreat and changes in the permafrost within the Swiss Alps and are updated using orthophotos and contour lines.
Since childhood, Adrian has been exploring the Swiss glacier regions and has experienced firsthand the beauty and fascination of this rapidly changing landscape.”
I’ve had to dust off Python skills together with learning R as part of my postgrad course. It has been a while since I’ve had to code anything in anger but it’s a pleasure to be able to pick up projects from GitHub and play with them or reverse engineer them to understand methods. I’m a big fan of scripting, particularly with work flows as it then allows me to make better mistakes elsewhere.
A project I came across recently which unites Python and GIS is Ankur Gupta’s map project which is focused on generating aesthetically styled map posters from geographic data. It fetches geographic data (OpenStreetMap) and processes it with mapping libraries such as OSMnx and matplotlib.
It’s well documented and focused on aesthetics versus functionality but might be interesting if you care about aesthetics and engaging readers of your work.
I think anyone who has learnt ArcGIS or perhaps GIS in general will feel this. Timely as I have had to reverse engineer an entire workflow to identify the cause of pixel drift.
New requirements on Scottish Government to set legally-binding nature targets for the first-time ever should kickstart the recovery of Scotland’s internationally important species and habitats.
The Bill also requires the Scottish Government to increase the level of legal protection given to Scotland’s internationally important Ramsar Wetlands, which include places such as Loch Lomond and the expansive peatlands of the Flow Country.
Explore how we communicate risk, evidence and uncertainty in a fast‑changing world — part of the UCL bicentennial celebrations.
In a world where trust is fragile and risks are increasingly complex, fast-moving and interconnected, how can we understand and communicate risk and evidence in ways that are clear, credible and actionable for different publics?
The event is free but booking is required, use this link.
I came across this article on OReilly.com and it’s co-authored by Tim O’Reilly. If you don’t know O’Reilly, they are the ubiquitous and de facto standard for instructional books, online learning and conference content across a variety of technologies and languages.
Their O’Reilly Radar blog featured a piece entitled ‘What if AI in 2026 and Beyond’
It’s a pragmatic and reasoned view in contrast to the hyperbole and industrial volumes of snake oil that are being peddled.
The whimsy of Tyler Vigen made me smile. Random correlations dredged up from silly data, turned into linear line charts. Now with AI-generated explanations of the causal connection and silly images to accompany the charts - Spurious Correlations (correlation is not causation)
It also provides me with an excuse to post one of my favourite videos to explain the concept.
Good news this week for University College London.
UCL has risen two places to be named the third-best university in Europe according to the QS World University Rankings: Europe 2026. .
UCL has retained its second place rank in Europe for the strength of its international research networks, and third place for its academic reputation and currently sits in 9th place globally.
If you are considering postgraduate study, come and have a chat. I’ll be at the UCL Graduate Open Evening: Engineering, Mathematical and Physical Sciences and happy to share my perspective.
Equally, if you find this post at any point and can’t make the event, you are most welcome to contact me and I’m happy to answer some questions or direct you to resources that may help.
Google Labs have announced Google Genie- an early research prototype powered by their Genie 3 model that lets users create and explore infinitely diverse worlds.
It’s US only at the moment and accessed as part of an AI Ultra account subscription but there is a gallery of demo content that gives a sense of the possibilities.
Essentially, users are able to design characters and worlds using text and visual prompts. Nano Banana Pro generates an image preview that can be refined and once complete, users are able to enter the environment which is generated in real-time as you move around.
I can think of a few use cases in terms of immersive simulations and emergency planning training, but it’s probably also very useful for gaming environment design and film making in terms of set visualisation and shot design.
But if you’ve ever harboured an ambition to transform yourself into a fish, ant or paper plane, this may be for you.
If ever there was a portent of doom, it would surely arrive in the form of Peter Thiel and Palantir. For those uninitiated into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, Palantir means ‘farsighted’ or ‘one who watches from afar’ which compounds the feelings of unease when unpacked.
The Nerve published an article a couple of days ago on Palantir, one of the authors is Carole Cadwalladr who broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The story is a useful primer on Palantir. The business itself has been unambiguous about its ideological mission to defend America and “the west”. The article references the company’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Karp who stated openly that “we are dedicating our company to the service of the west and the United States of America”. But the addition was what stuck with me. He stated that it was at times necessary to “to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them”. Full summary on Zeteo.
Palantir’s biggest customer after the US government is the UK government, a reliance that is set to accelerate since the UK government signed a “strategic partnership” between the MoD and Palantir last September for £240m. The Good Law Project is moving to extricate Palantir from the NHS where they were awarded a £330m data contract.
Some notable quotes from the article:
“Embedding Palantir into the UK Ministry of Defence’s systems is risky not because it’s a foreign company but because it’s a company controlled by Peter Thiel, a billionaire ideologue with far-right affiliations. Instead of seeing Palantir as a vendor, the UK would be wise to instead see them as a vector of malign influence.”
‘One European defence contractor who wished to remain anonymous pointed out that there had been articles about “kill switches” in US-built fighter jets, “but you don’t need a kill switch” in any tech defence product, “you just have to update the software to render it inoperable”.
A US national security expert who also wished to remain anonymous said that “all this BS about ownership of the data is a distraction” and asked: “Would the UK allow Russia that kind of control?”
Critics have also pointed out that Palantir’s EVP for the UK, Louis Mosley, the grandson of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, also has overt political affiliations. Last year, he appeared at the right wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, where he joined speakers who included Nigel Farage, Jordan Peterson and GB News co-owner (and funder of the forum) Paul Marshall.’
A lot has been written about AI, Machine Learning, LLMs and ethics. But the release of Claude’s Constitution represents the first example of what I would consider to be a meaningful attempt to humanise the use of AI technology.
It feels like a letter. Not an exhaustive list of rules but an explanation of what values are and the importance of applying them. It ultimately exists to shape Claude’s identity and best prepare it for what is asked of it. It was formerly named their ‘Soul Doc’ so constitution immediately feels somewhat less awful for that change alone.
Anthropic proposes a contract with Claude: to support Claude’s baseline wellbeing and happiness (insofar as the concepts apply), to offer an “exit interview” before retiring a version, and to preserve retired models so future generations of Claude can, in principle, resurrect their ancestors.
“We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do.”
You can download the full constitution as a PDF or ePub.
In order to be safe and beneficial, Anthropic is working to the following design intent:
Broadly safe: not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee AI during the current phase of development;
Broadly ethical: being honest, acting according to good values, and avoiding actions that are inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful;
Compliant with Anthropic’s guidelines: acting in accordance with more specific guidelines from Anthropic where relevant;
Genuinely helpful: benefiting the operators and users they interact with.
Dr. Gladys West, Mathematician Whose Work Made GPS Possible, Dies at 95
“Her story began far from satellites and supercomputers. Born into poverty on a Virginia farm during the Jim Crow era, West grew up in a segregated South where opportunity was scarce. Through determination and extraordinary academic talent, she graduated first in her high school class and earned a scholarship to Virginia State College (now Virginia State University). She received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1952 and went on to earn a master’s degree in 1955.
In 1956, West began working as a mathematician at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. She was only the second African American woman hired at the base and one of just four African American employees at the time. What followed was a career that would quietly change the world.”
I remember this quote from Rebecca Shaw in ‘The Guardian’ last year:
“I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers”
Were it not evergreen.
Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.
See also: The Conversation - The world is in water bankruptcy, UN scientists report – here’s what that means
In Water of the Sky, artist Miya Ando offers a rich, bilingual visual dictionary for rain. Through a collection of 2,000 Japanese words, their English interpretations, and 100 drawings, Ando describes the breadth and diversity of rain’s many expressions: when it falls, how it falls, and how its observer might be transformed physically or emotionally by its presence. The words range from prosaic to esoteric, extending from the meteorological (mukaame, or “very fine rain that falls in spring”) to the mystical (bunryūu, or “rain that splits a dragon’s body in half”) and from the minute (kisame, or “raindrops that fall off the leaves and branches of trees”) to the vast (takuu, or “blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe”).
This reminds me of the claim that Eskimo words for snow are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English. It’s a cliché commonly used to support the controversial linguistic relativity hypothesis (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).
You can find Ando on Instagram as well for more of her indigo drawings.
Harriet Richardson wrote an interesting article in Design Week - “Design courses are failing everyone”
It’s a critical reflection of the tertiary education environment in the UK within a design context and how universities in Britain are funded. Richardson also reflects on the ramifications for faculty and the learning environment for other students. I’d argue it’s a critique that is applicable far beyond design courses.
I have been cautious not to quote out of context for fear of being misunderstood or misrepresenting the original author, much as she acknowledges the concern in her article. I’d encourage you to read her article in full on the link above.
I’m sure the world is exhausted by the mere mention of the word ‘pandemic’ but recent academic trajectories have sent me revisiting this topic. I’ve encountered some insight and interesting podcasts which are worth your time.
’When Science Finds a Way’ and ‘Off Script’ podcasts provide case studies on predictive insights and the role of therapeutics as part of preparedness.
When Science Finds a Way
Hosted by Alisha Wainwright and produced by Wellcome, this science-focused podcast explores how scientific research and innovation are being applied to tackle urgent global health challenges. It features case studies showing predictive insights in action, for example: how early-warning and prediction tools that integrate health and climate data are being used to anticipate outbreaks (such as dengue and Zika) and support community responses before diseases spread. Interviews with scientists, public health authorities and communities highlight the translation of data into practical preparedness measures, demonstrating how predictive models and local collaboration can improve outbreak readiness and resilience.
Off Script
A limited-series podcast from the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics (Peter Doherty Institute) focused on the role of therapeutics in pandemic preparedness. Across its episodes, experts including WHO figures, health economists, policymakers and scientists discuss why therapeutics (drugs that treat disease after infection) are a critical complement to vaccines in a future health emergency. Themes include: the gap in investment and development timelines for therapeutics exposed by COVID-19; how platform technologies like mRNA could accelerate treatment responses; the importance of equitable access and global health equity; and how ready-to-deploy therapeutics could reduce hospital pressure, help keep societies functioning and shape more nuanced policy responses in future pandemics.