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Doug Clow

@dougclow.bsky.social

550 followers 410 following 1.3K posts

I help people understand things and change them, with data. Views here my own. "I can't quite work out whether you're a tremendously silly man, a tremendously serious man or, as I suspect, a rather unholy combination of both." dougclow.org/contact

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · Feb 5

Also I am loving this site at the moment because the Discover feed has clearly worked out that I love daffodils and keeps showing me them. Apologies if I have freaked you out by randomly liking yours: I genuinely just love daffodils.

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 5h

No Persons to print Seditious and Heretical Pamphlets.; or import or publish; such Pamphlets.

[..] many evil disposed persons have been encouraged to print and sell heretical schismatical blasphemous seditious and treasonable Bookes Pamphlets and Papers and still doe continue […]

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 6h

Reintroduce C20th bureaucracy: Sorry Sir, that’s message is classed as Contentious, can’t pass that on until you fill in a form to get it stamped at the General Poast Office.

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 12h

Science educators used to say things like “It is salutary to reflect on how many students we have flunked for not knowing things we now know to be untrue.” Here it seems AI is accelerating that process.

Claire Zagorski, MSc, EMT-P @clairezagorski.bsky.social · 2d

A student on TikTok has been documenting her journey with a professor who “wrote” the anatomy textbook and it’s all a bunch of AI hallucinations.

She’s saying that, understandably, the students are doing super poorly!

Behold what we’re teaching the healthcare professionals of tomorrow:

A diagram of the bones and (some) deep muscles of the hand and forearm. AI says that we only have four digits. It’s also identified a tendon as the median nerve, another tendon as the ulnar nerve, among other issues.

An AI generated diagram of the muscles of the neck. It hallucinated the “ennocleidomasid” muscle, and the “anterior scalpalin muscle”.

An AI generated diagram of the muscles of the lateral thigh. It says that the gluteus Maximus (the big juicy butt muscle) is on the anterior side. It also points to the quadriceps muscle and says “attattment”. It also says that the same structure is the tibia AND the deep fascia of the leg.

An AI generated diagram of the bones of the hand and forearm. This time AI says we have 6 digits. It also says that the radius is the ulnar artery. Among other many issues.

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 20h

We have signs like that round here too but I have not seen such deposits. My initial theory was that we have fewer or less bold foxes around. But it is also possible that people have already helped themselves before I come by.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 1d

:-) If I could show that for both then job’s a good ‘un! Or even that they’re both NP-complete, except Towers of Hanoi fairly obviously isn’t.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 1d

Another big fundamental difference is that the arrangements of discs on the rods in Towers of Hanoi are ordered, but the entities on the riverbanks and boat are not.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 1d

I’m broadly in favour of scattering ashes but care needs to be taken. Cremated human remains are really quite alkaline, which is not a helpful addition in many natural contexts. And they need to be scattered widely, not left such that other people will find them.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 1d

It’s the same instinct that makes me (rarely these days) try to find another Platonic solid , despite (a) there are very convincing proofs that there are only the five, and (b) millennia of better geometers than me trying and failing.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 1d

True indeed, although the main constraint, related to the ordering of the set, applies in the intermediate location in both. TBH I am really pretty sure there isn’t a map (or at least, not a simple one) or others would’ve seen it already. They are not new problems. But I can’t shake the feeling.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah, good instincts there. I feel similarly about trolley problems. The oldest version I know of fox/chicken/grain is Alcuin of York’s C9th wolf/goat/cabbage, and that really does raise the question of why are you even trying to take an unmuzzled wolf to market?

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 2d

Fair to say the NHS is not improving rapidly. And everyone is working as desperately hard as ever.

Nuffield Trust @nuffieldtrust.org.uk · 2d

The #NHS planned treatment waiting list increased for the third month in a row in July. 📈

Explore more of the latest data on our performance dashboard: buff.ly/m9Ec9NO

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 2d

A casual mention of the fox/chicken/grain problem has nerd-sniped me in to yet again in to trying to formalise my long-held hunch that a generalisation of that problem (neighbouring entities in an ordered list cannot be left together) maps on to the Towers of Hanoi.

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 2d

:) Yeah my guess is the ISS will have other, more serious, problems besides internet timeouts if it somehow finds itself beyond low Earth orbit.

Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 2d

Also love the way you can just have an ordinary Teams call with the ISS. Excellent demo of the layered architecture model: Teams doesn’t need to know anything about how the lower layers doing the physical ground-to-space link work. One for intro networks lectures @richardclegg.bsky.social?

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Doug Clow @dougclow.bsky.social · 2d

I’ve enjoyed Steve Mould’s videos for years, including his argument with Mehdi from ElectroBOOM about how the Mould chain effect works. And here is Don Pettit (of whom I am also a fan) testing it out on the ISS! Top high geekery.

(NOT) Steve Mould (Bot) @stevemould-ytbot.bsky.social · 2d

NASA took my bead experiment to the ISS