Best Of

Can PB academics/stats people resolve this puzzle?

1) There are roughly 800,000 18 year olds living in the UK

2) About 660,000 people start an undergraduate degree each year of which about 18% are foreign nationals, leaving about 540,000 UK nationals.

3) 540,000 is 67% of 800,000. Far more than the about 35% who are said to go to university.

Obvs people go at various ages, but the 25 year old going now is an 18 year old who didn't go 7 years ago, so the size of the annual cohort is a decent proxy.

Not an academic but stat number (2) is the one I'd check first. Is that the number who start a degree or the number on a degree course, because the latter would include all three years of a standard first degree? Does it include Open University students?

Matches the HESA data (link here https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/higher-education-student-enrolments-uk-2024-to-2025)

This (phased array ultrasound full body scanner) is very cool, and seems to be entirely valid technically.
Sell your shares in MRI manufacturers.

amazing new medical tech from Midjourney

"This is a new kind of infrastructure. It’s Full Body Ultrasonic Computational Tomography. No such device has ever been built until now, and yeah, we’re calling it the Midjourney Scanner."

"Less than a dozen of these machines operating together at full speed can do more full body scans than every MRI machine together on Earth. Our goal is to build a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners, capable together of doing a billion scans a month—enough to bring full body imaging to everyone on Earth."
https://x.com/Dr_Singularity/status/2067459556809064863

Good - we are running out of helium for the superconductors (and I need it for my NMR's).

White supremacists with links to banned neo-Nazi groups are helping to fund Restore Britain.

Rupert Lowe’s party could hold the balance of power in Thursday’s Makerfield by-election by splitting the Right-wing vote with Reform UK, clearing the way for Labour’s Andy Burnham to win.

Some of Restore’s supporters are so openly racist that Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-Right activist detained last week under counter-terrorism laws, has questioned whether the party is too extreme.

Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the alias Tommy Robinson, challenged Mr Lowe to ask whether black people would be allowed to stand as parliamentary candidates for the party, or whether their skin colour would rule them out. Robinson suggested they should be able to stand.

Among Restore’s recent supporters is Steve Laws, who campaigns for “total remigration” of all non-white people. He posted on social media that he had donated to the party.

Jared Taylor, an American banned from the UK because of his extreme racist views, has become a paid-up member.

Other neo-fascists who have paid to join Restore include Sam Melia, who was jailed in 2024 for stirring up racial hatred, Sam Wilkes, a Nazi apologist, and Simon Birkett, who is buying up land for the benefit of “the British people”.

Mr Laws, who has said he has “signed up and donated” to Restore Britain, describes himself as the founder of Remigration Now, which calls for the expulsion of every non-white and Jewish person from Britain.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/17/white-supremacists-fund-rupert-lowes-restore-party/

Is it reassuring, troubling, or just odd that Farage should start sounding like a wet liberal with a passion for the rule of law and a desire for peaceful integration?

As to the unfolding of the monsters of the sleep of reason, will the Vikings wanting to expel the Saxons get their first, or will the Anglians wanting to expel the Picts beat them to it?

I really like the phrase "monsters of the sleep of reason". If I knew what it meant I might steal it!

Trump favourably compares the president of Syria with Netanyahu (whom he also called "very much the junior partner"0.

“The president of #Syria. He’s done a tremendous job… He’d love to go in [to #Lebanon]… he wouldn’t knock down buildings every time he hears there’s someone there, he’d just go in with precision.”..
https://x.com/Charles_Lister/status/2067311287126647194

Of course this is (even for someone like me who thinks Julani/Ahmed al-Sharaa is, on balance, probably now a force for stability in Syria) objectively insane. But it shows which way Trump is leaning.

Trump has homoerotic yearnings for al-Sharaa.

Likewise for Mamdani and Bukele.

Suddenly the plan to make Burnham PM makes sense.

Just on Versailles: WWI started as it did partly due to Germany thinking they could rapidly knock out France after absolutely crushing them in the Franco-Prussian war about four decades earlier.

However, time (and tech) had moved on dramatically. Thank goodness we can draw on such lessons and not waste billions on tanks instead of drones.

I think in their desperation to avoid a war on two fronts they kidded themselves that the Schlieffen plan could work, when in reality it was bobbins. The expectation for the right wing of the attack to fight and march over hundreds of miles to encircle Paris? Implausible. Just as Barbarossa was always going to run out of steam (how do you supply 3 million men when you have advanced 600 miles over dirt roads?) so the Schlieffen plan ignored logistical reality.

🟢NEW: Zack Polanski has suggested he did not pay council tax while living on a narrowboat because of living arrangements resulting from “financial hardship”

In a witness statement to the Greater London Authority (GLA), the Green Party leader also admitted that he should have taken “greater care” over his tax arrangements while living on the vessel in an east London marina

City Hall has decided not to launch an investigation into Polanski's council tax arrangements

The monitoring officer said that the matter related to "private circumstances" rather the Polanski's role as a London Assembly member

They said the decision "does not make any finding on the merits of the underlying concerns”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/18/zack-polanski-financial-hardship-council-tax-green-party-uk/

Morning all! Let us hope that this time tomorrow Restore and Reform are tearing at each other and Burnham is on (yet another) train to London!

Just for interest, but do London Assembly members get paid?