Stephen Curry

@scurry.bsky.social

6056 Followers 1123 Following

Proud Ballymena Professor. Senior Strategic Advisor at RoRI; Emeritus Prof at Imperial. Former DORA Chair. Husband, father, carer - 24/7. Also cares about science & equity. Personal a/c. Writes occasionally at http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/.

Blackberries in a metal colander.
Short dialogue extract from Cities of the Plains. A conversation between two men: “You sure you're okay? Yeah. I'm all right. I just get to thinkin about things is all. Yeah. It dont help none though, does it? Nope.”
Top half of my paperback copy of Berlin Game. the author’s name and book title are at top left. Also visible a man in a flat-cap, scarf & coat beside a white BMW, the signature Berlin tv tower in silhouette in the background.
Headline of a nature news article reads: PAPER MILL CANCER STUDIES ARE CITED MORE THAN GENUINE PAPERS Potentially fraudulent papers often cite each other and could be inflating journal impact factors.
A beaten up paperback copy of Never Mind, half in shadow, half burnished by the sun. The title and author’s name are in white lettering on a pinkish background.
The triangular profile of a stripy black and gold tiger moth resting on a bright green leaf
A tiger moth, belly-side towards the camera, clings to a window with the blurred greenery of a garden behind. A pale spotted body, two dark eyes and a pair of brown wings, the right hand one damaged at the tip.
Excerpt from the book reads: In and out of all depicting. The photographs that hung from the wire became for him a form of query to the world. He sensed in them a certain power and he guessed that the gorgios considered them bad luck for they would scarcely look at them but the truth was darker yet as truth is wont to be. What he came to see was that as the kinfolk in their fading stills could have no value save in another's heart so it was with that heart also in anothers in a terrible and endiess attrition and of any other value there was none. Every representation was an idol. Every likeness a heresy. In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased. This was what his father meant to tell him and this was why they were men of the road. This was the why of the yellowing daguerreotypes swinging by their clothespegs from the cross-wire of his father's cart.
Paperback copy of The Border Trilogy on a wooden table. On the cover, the book titles, author’s name superimposed on a blurred sepia photo of a wooden fence.
A red haired man and a toddler in a red cap having a helluva time on a slide.
A man is silhouetted standing staring at the sun, which fills the frame with its fiery glow.
A thin crescent moon with Venus as a bright spot above and to the right. Silhouetted tree leaves in the foreground.
Screenshot from linked article reads: Private funding also enables Boring to avoid official oversight in Las Vegas and rigorous environmental analyses - which have often been why its projects have faltered elsewhere. Musk has publicly expressed his dislike of environmental regulation. "You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective," he told the libertarian Cato Institute last year. Boring has some experience in this. Last October ProPublica alleged that it had violated environmental regulations nearly 800 times in Las Vegas in the last two years, including "starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water on to city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, as well as missing 689 inspections. A separate report by Fortune alleged that Boring "feigned compliance" after one inspection, "only to continue dumping the wastewater after a company manager 'assumed district inspectors had departed the property'". There have also been reports of employees and firefighters suffering chemical burns and other injuries while working on the project - penalties for which seem to have been minimal.
Apple Maps image of Spain - below France and beside Portugal.
Map showing the location of the tiny island of Curacao- off the north coast of Venezuela.
Close up on the handle of a chunky orange mug showing cracks at the top and bottom.
Pen and watercolour self-portrait of Hockney, in a jacket, checked shirt and dark tie staring straight at the viewer
Extract from linked article reads: "Violence in Belfast that forced families to flee their homes on Tuesday night was fuelled by online commentators who would struggle to find the city on the map, Northern Ireland’s justice minister has said. The condemnation by Naomi Long came as a UK cabinet minister said that Elon Musk also had a responsibility “not to stoke grievance”. The billionaire owner of X had used his own account to share images of a horrific knife attack in Belfast on Monday and had amplified far-right messaging about it."
An ornate columned hall with a painted ceiling, reflecting in a mirrored table.
Hardback copy of Goliath’s Curse - a red spine and white front cover, both with the title and author’s name. On the cover a black and white photo of a fallen statue.
An ornate columned hall with a painted ceiling, reflecting in a mirrored table.
Rectangular plastic container packed with ink-soaked sponges on a white background
Screenshot from the Semafor news website with the headline "Stephen Curry signs deal with Chinese sportwear giant"
Five ripe red strawberries in a white bowl, three with their leafy green stalks attached
Wide angle shot of the beach on the Thames estuary near Chalkwell. Dark seaweed in the foreground, then sand, the water and the lowlands of Kent beyond. Tiny silhouetted figures play on the sand.
Cover of Nature magazine - headline reads “STORM WARNING: Climate change set to increase damage caused by hailstones” on a photo of large hailstones nestled in grass
Screenshot from book reads: Making good decisions is paramount to ensure that a shock or a crisis doesn't spiral into a collapse. Notably, most historical polities weren't particularly democratic; nor are our modern democracies. Modern parliamentary systems rely on aggregating votes to select a few homogeneous leaders (overwhelmingly old and rich) who then engage in little genuine deliberation (often due to being overburdened, time-poor, and lacking expertise). This is on top of the sheer impossibility of expecting just a few people to solve the myriad problems of transport, energy, defence, and welfare. In modern electoral parlia-ments, people consent to being ruled; ruling itself isn't widely shared. In other words, most societies have seen only a sliver of the resilience benefits that inclusive institutions have to offer.
Cover of this weeks Nature - an image made of a fragment of a $100 bill with the face of Benjamin Franklin. Headline reads “Diversity Dividend: Graduates who study in racially diverse classes tend to attain higher salaries”
Paperback copy of The Border Trilogy on a wooden table. On the cover, the book titles, author’s name superimposed on a blurred sepia photo of a wooden fence.
Night sky with the moon and points of light for Jupiter and Venus. Orange glow along the horizon at the bottom.
Excerpt from the contents of this week’s Nature magazine. Highlighted item reads “Head-conk microbiome”.
A circular temple building in the background up a set of stone steps on which there are many tourists. Our group of four stands in front facing the camera.
Barack Obama photographed in profile, seated facing Left. The background is black and he is in a dark suit with a white shirt.
A New Yorker cartoon shows a woman and a bear at a bar having drinks. The woman says "Honestly, I only asked you out because I panicked and forgot what to do when you encounter a bear on a trail."
Screenshot of the Wikipedia article on the Rumford medal. Text reads: The Rumford Medal is an award bestowed by the Royal Society for "outstanding contributions in the field of physics". The award is named in honour of British scientist Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, who is noted for his works on thermodynamics and for establishing the Royal Institution. The award was created in 1796 after Thompson transferred £1,000 to the Royal Society in stocks, instructing the latter to grant the awardee the fund's interest as a premium. Thompson was awarded the inaugural award in 1800.
Screenshot from a Times Higher Education article in which I recommend Matthew’s book. Text reads: Matthew Cobb Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code (2015) A bloody good read that is a million miles from the sterile narratives of the average textbook. It paints a vivid picture of the personalities involved in cracking the genetic code, and takes the reader up and down the inevitable blind alleys of failed experiments and failed theories along the way. Showing how real science spills across disciplinary boundaries, it will help biology and biochemistry students break out of traditional modes of thinking about how science discovers the world. Stephen Curry Professor of structural biology, Imperial College London
A red fox, lying on the green grass of my back garden, staring straight at the camera.
Two emails from a delivery firm. The earlier one says my consignment has been delivered. The later one says the driver is on their way.
New Yorker cartoon. A dog dressed as a man has just given flowers to his girlfriend, who is sniffing them. He tells her “I peed on them.”
Cartoon from the New Yorker of a street vendor standing behind a large vat labelled ’AI slop’ which has a parasol attached.
The red paperback copy of the book mentioned in the post lying on a wooden table. Full title “THE TECHNOLOCICAL REPUBLIC: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West.”
A black saucepan filled with yellow soup on a kitchen hob.
The football League Two table showing Bromley FC as this season’s champions, with MK Dons second and Cambridge Utd third.
Dear Zack, I was disappointed to have seen your recent post on X amplifying a post that Met officers were "repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by taser . I am disappointed because it is this kind of inaccurate and misinformed commentary - with its associated casual disregard for the incredibly challenging and dangerous work police officers do to protect the public - that is contributing to the rising tensions we are seeing in society and undermines officer confidence to act. It is entirely possible the author of the post you retweeted had direct experience from the scene, or has years of experience handling complex, violent situation. Yet I suspect the more likely scenario is that they another armchair critic, who thinks they could do the job, possibly more effectively than the brave officers who successfully detained that individual. Those officers are nothing short of extraordinary. They were on the scene within a few minutes, and their actions undoubtedly prevented further injury and saved lives. As I said yesterday the officers confronted a dangerous man, they believed to be a terrorist, who refused to show his hands, who was violent, and who continued to pose a clear threat. They were not armed officers, and they feared he was concealing an explosive device. Using only their training, equipment and a substantial level of bravery and courage, they detained him while he continued to try and attack and stab them. Without their efforts to stop him I dread to think what the outcome could have been. Apprehending violent and dangerous criminals is a full contact and messy task which may appear shocking to observers with little experience of policing in the real world. London's Jewish communities are scared. They have experienced a series of targeted attacks on the community, and they expect out officers to act, protect them. That is exactly what our officers did yesterday. Your decision to criticise these
Screenshot from linked article reads: This idea of reasonableness is easily caricatured as moral timidity or a bloodless neutrality that drains politics of passion. But Rawls didn't seek to empty politics of conviction. The alternative to what he called "public reason" is not authenticity, or what Yeats called the "passionate intensity" of the worst, but force. When citizens insist on shaping the basic terms of social life by appealing to premises that others cannot reasonably be expected to accept— revelation, doctrines of transcendence, private moral visions—the result is not a purer politics but a dangerously brittle one. Continues in next image
Impressionist paining of a man on a horse. Bold stokes and colours throughout. Horse is mostly yellow, man has a white shirt and blue trousers; green ground and blue-white sky
Close up of the book cover showing the title and author’s name in a white octagonal star superpower on a teal-coloured diagram of an orbiting planet.
Photo from linked article- a large sailing boat at sea with 3 masts. Looks like a single large vessel with 3 smaller sailing boats on top.
Close up of the head of a dandelion that is about to spore. The individual spores are arrayed symmetrically. The view is too close to see the spherical head of the dandelion in this state.
Bluebells, past their best, drooping in front of a blurred leafy background
The sun blazes down on a woodland scene making the leaves glow bright green. There are trees near and far. One the ground in the distance a carpet of bluebells.
Silhouetted figures sitting and standing at the G3 departure gate. On the left a bar. At the back, large sunlit windows with Venetian blinds.
Photo of steps from above, with white spots and rectangular shadows.
Screenshot from the book reads: Two HOW WAS IT KNOWN? Reading Nature's Book Nothing so marked out the "new science" of the seventeenth century as its proponents' reiterated claims that it was new. Corpuscular and mechanical philosophers, on many occasions, vigorously insisted that their innovations represented radical departures from traditionally constituted bodies of natural knowledge. Text after text stipulated the novelty of its intellectual contents. In physics Galileo offered his Discourses and Demonstrations concerning Two New Sciences; in astronomy there was Kepler's New Astronomy; in chemistry and experimental philosophy Boyle published a long series of tracts called New Experiments; Pascal wrote about the vacuum in his New Experiments about the Void, as did Otto von Guericke in his New Magdeburg Experiments on Empty Space. Bacon's New Organon was labeled as a novel method meant to replace the traditional organon (Aristotle's body of logical writings), and his New Atlantis was an innovative blueprint for the formal social organization of scientific and technical research.
A stemmed beer glass, almost empty, with orval written on the side in Gothic script. In the background, blurred bikes, people, and terraced houses.
Front noses of two trains side by side in the sunshine, taken from the side. Both snub nosed. The on in front is red with a blue cross; the one behind is blue and yellow.
Black and white photo of a thin crescent moon.
Cropped image of the cover of the paperback edition of The IPCRESS File, with the author’s name and book title at the top; beneath a pair of glasses sits atop a striped background.
Screenshot from linked article. Text reads: "This social model of stupidity — crystallized in the Orwellian image of brainwashed drones, trained to obey — has a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism, but it misses a critical dimension of liberal societies as they took shape in the late 20th century. Judgment was not replaced by personal autocracy, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis. Over the middle decades of the 20th century, the neoliberal argument for markets, made most potently by Friedrich Hayek, always emphasized that their primary function was to organize a society’s knowledge. Where markets ran smoothly and prices were set freely, there would be no need for anyone to exercise judgment beyond their own immediate wants, desires, and expectations. The “stupid” person has just as much potential to thrive in a neoliberal society as the “smart” person, because the price system will ultimately decide on collective outcomes. In the early 21st century, as platform capitalism has taken off, similar arguments have been made for “big data” by the Silicon Valley ideologue and former Wired editor Chris Anderson, and for randomized controlled trials by the MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee: that they will happily render the theories, judgments, and explanations of human beings — with all their biases and errors — redundant. Once everything is quantified, right down to nano-details, not even measurement is needed, just algorithmic pattern recognition."