Making the technical approachable. :): Rapid cycling bipolar disorder :(: Storyteller. Web #A11Y advocate. IAAP CPWA.
Nottingham
Joined February 2009
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Jessica Chambers retweeted
"Oh, boo hoo."
Reform UK Treasury spokesperson Robert Jenrick tells a protester who appeared to have been hit by members at the party's conference to "get a life".
@jonsopel
trib.al/STupWZN
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
Jessica Chambers retweeted
Whatever happens in Clacton today, remember this little anecdote 🙏
Yesterday I ended up in a lay-by with a couple of dozen other people.
Most of us had planned to experience the solar eclipse at Newlands Corner, but as most of Surrey seemed to have decided to do the same, the roads were jammed, traffic was barely moving, and we resigned ourselves to the lay-by.
What began as a slight disappointment quickly turned into something rather wonderful: a genuine sense of community.
Young and old, people from different parts of the country and from different backgrounds, all came together to share in the moment.
Colanders came out, along with pinhole cameras, a telescope and solar glasses galore, all being passed around and shared by one and all.
There was energy. Excitement. A buzz.
All centred around two things hanging in our sky: the Sun and the Moon.
For me, that was community.
But community isn't a given. It is fragile. It can break and fall apart surprisingly easily.
Over the past decade, we have seen genuine grievances and concerns exploited rather than addressed. Instead of bringing people together to try to improve things, too often the response has been to find someone to blame.
The reason the country is struggling, we're told, is the EU.
The reason you don't have enough, is immigrants.
And so began a toxic cycle of division which has continued for years.
Following the Brexit referendum, we saw politician after politician discover that division could be a route to power.
Meanwhile, since the financial crisis of 2008, we have seen the slow erosion of many of the things that make a society function: assets sold off, public services squeezed and the things we all rely upon increasingly underfunded.
It is hardly surprising that frustrations have grown.
But I don't believe we are an angry country.
I believe we are a frustrated country.
And frustration is incredibly easy to exploit.
Politicians aren't the only ones responsible. The media has a role too. Our national broadcaster, the BBC, sometimes makes editorial choices that amplify the loudest and most divisive voices, when one of the things it can do so brilliantly is provide clear, impartial information and analysis.
That's not me writing off the BBC.
Quite the opposite.
Anyone who has travelled abroad and watched news channels elsewhere can appreciate just how remarkable and unique the BBC is as an institution. Like our NHS, it is a national treasure, and like the NHS, something we should work to improve rather than simply abandon.
Because when something is damaged or broken, the answer doesn't have to be to throw it away.
Sometimes, the answer is to repair it.
And perhaps even make it more beautiful in the process.
The Japanese have a word for this: Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold, silver or platinum.
There is something rather beautiful in that idea.
So much of what is happening in our country can, at times, feel damaged or broken.
But we need to find ways to heal.
And yesterday, in a lay-by just off the A25, a few dozen strangers reminded me that community is still there.
It hasn't disappeared.
It just needs nurturing.
There was a time when I only posted fun things across my social media.
When I started posting political content, I lost a number of clients and partners who simply didn't want to be associated with news or politics. I completely understand that, and I respect their position. And it's a price I was reluctant but willing to pay.
Because as individuals, if we continue to pretend that everything in society is perfect, how can we ever begin to address the challenges we face and make things better for everyone?
Whatever happens in Clacton today, there is something we need:
Community.
And this isn't some uniquely political or religious idea.
In the Bible, Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers"
In the Islamic hadith, Muhammad says that making peace between people is better than fasting, prayer and charity.
In the Jewish Mishnah, we are told to "love peace and pursue peace"
In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the ideal person is described as compassionate and friendly towards all, free from hatred.
And so on.
Different traditions. Different cultures. Different words.
But remarkably similar wisdom.
When it feels as though hope is gone, when it feels as though community has been weakened, perhaps we should look for the things that bring us together, however big or small.
For me, yesterday, it was a few dozen strangers in a lay-by, passing around solar glasses and sharing a moment beneath the Sun and Moon.
I hope, whatever happens today in Clacton, all of us, whoever and wherever we are, find something equally beautiful.
In peace. 🙏
Jessica Chambers retweeted
Don't know anything about Andy Burnham, but I recognize the room in the middle photo. That's Private White VC.
Let me tell you about them. 🧵
Jessica Chambers retweeted
A beekeeper went viral after calmly allowing a honey bee to remain on his arm as it worked its stinger free and flew away. 🐝
Jessica Chambers retweeted
WCAG 3 will use a different conformance model than 2.x. It's a rewrite, not incremental update. Learn more from AFixt. buff.ly/AJXO4c8
Jessica Chambers retweeted
Sleeping <6h a night for 2 weeks reduces cognitive performance equal to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation.
Jessica Chambers retweeted
Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo.
Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, the same circuit that processes cocaine and sex, fires at levels in response to sound that it will never reach again for the rest of your life. A 2011 McGill study used PET scans and fMRI simultaneously and found that music triggers dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal. The caudate nucleus lights up during anticipation of the good part. The nucleus accumbens lights up when it hits. Your brain is treating a guitar riff with the same reward architecture it uses for food-seeking and pair bonding.
During adolescence, that response is dramatically amplified. Pubertal hormones are flooding the system. The prefrontal cortex is still wiring itself. Memories formed during this window get encoded with a density of emotional tagging that nothing in your 30s or 40s can replicate. Researchers at the University of Leeds identified this as the “reminiscence bump”: the period when your sense of self is forming, and the music playing during that formation becomes structurally integrated into your identity.
A 2025 longitudinal study from the University of Gothenburg analyzed 40,000 users’ streaming data across 15 years. Younger listeners explored broadly across genres. Older listeners collapsed into increasingly narrow loops, almost entirely anchored to music from their teens and early twenties.
Your brain stopped losing interest in new music years ago. It’s running a cost-benefit analysis. Familiar songs deliver guaranteed dopamine with zero processing cost. New songs require pattern recognition, expectation-building, and repeated exposure before the reward circuit kicks in. Past 25, most people stop paying that tax.
The one variable that predicts whether someone keeps exploring: the personality trait “openness to experience.” Score high, you keep seeking. Score average, you default to the familiar forever.
The fix, if you want one: deliberate exposure. Three listens minimum before your auditory cortex builds enough predictive models to generate a reward response. One passive listen on a playlist will never get there. Your brain needs repetition to find the pattern, and it needs the pattern to release dopamine.
Jessica Chambers retweeted
I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize.
Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness.
Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding.
He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history.
The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future.
A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite.
That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.
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Jessica Chambers retweeted
At Edinburgh Zoo, Gentoo penguins are starting their breeding season.
Kids from Edinburgh Children’s Hospital Charity painted pebbles for the penguins to present to their mates and can watch the birds choose their favorite via livestream.
xitter.cf/fluxfolio_/status/2030…
Jessica Chambers retweeted
This is the full Transport for London advert which includes the portion which was turned into a short facebook advert that has now been banned.
The full advert in context is actually very good. It's a shame that the facebook advert has distracted from the intention.
Jessica Chambers retweeted
This is one of the most important studies in sleep science.
Van Dongen et al. ran the experiment that changed how we understand chronic sleep restriction. They had subjects sleep 4h, 6h, or 8h nightly for 14 days, testing cognitive performance every 2 hours.
The 6h group’s reaction time deficits by day 14 matched subjects who had been awake for 24 hours straight. The 4h group? They performed like someone awake 48 hours.
But here’s what makes this study terrifying.
The Stanford Sleepiness Scale ratings in Panel B plateau after day 3-4. Subjects stopped feeling more tired even as their cognitive performance continued deteriorating through day 14. Your subjective experience of fatigue is a lagging indicator that eventually just… stops updating.
This explains why chronic undersleeping feels sustainable. You’ve adapted to feeling tired. Your prefrontal cortex hasn’t adapted to being impaired.
The PVT (Psychomotor Vigilance Task) in Panel A measures lapses in attention. These are the moments where you’re staring at a screen and your brain simply checks out for 500ms. Every additional day of 6h sleep adds more lapses. The curve never flattens.
Panel C and D show working memory and processing speed. Same pattern: continuous degradation with no subjective awareness.
The practical implications:
If you’re sleeping 6h and think you’re functioning fine, you’ve lost the internal calibration to know you’re not. The subjects in this study would have told you they felt “okay” while performing like they’d pulled an all-nighter.
For anyone doing cognitively demanding work, this means you cannot trust how you feel. You need to track objective markers: error rates, decision latency, problem-solving throughput.
Sleep need is biological, not negotiable. Most adults require 7-9 hours, and the research shows no population-level adaptation to chronic restriction. “I only need 6 hours” is almost always “I’ve forgotten what baseline cognition feels like.“
