Archive for Elon Musk

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Concerning Muskopedia

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , on November 16, 2025 by telescoper

A colleague sent me this arXiv paper. The abstract reads:

Elon Musk released Grokipedia on 27 October 2025 to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia and compare it to a dump of Wikipedia, with a focus on article similarity and citation practices. Although Grokipedia articles are much longer than their corresponding English Wikipedia articles, we find that much of Grokipedia’s content (including both articles with and without Creative Commons licenses) is highly derivative of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, citation practices between the sites differ greatly, with Grokipedia citing many more sources deemed “generally unreliable” or “blacklisted” by the English Wikipedia community and low quality by external scholars, including dozens of citations to sites like Stormfront and Infowars. We then analyze article subsets: one about elected officials, one about controversial topics, and one random subset for which we derive article quality and topic. We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages. The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history. Finally, we publicly release our nearly-full scrape of Grokipedia, as well as embeddings of the entire Grokipedia corpus.

It’s an interesting paper which shows that much of Muskopedia Grokipedia is just scraped from Wikipedia but some articles have been rewritten to reflect Elon Musk’s fascist attitudes.

Incidentally, the name is derived from Grok, an AI bot for spreading far-right propaganda on Twitter. “Grot” would have been a better name. I have no experience of Grok as I no longer use Twitter and have no intention of looking at Grokipedia either. I imagine it’s probably like Conservapedia, although considerably less (unintentionally) funny.

I remember that I should have posted a reaction to the spineless behaviour of the Royal Society, of which Mr Musk is a Fellow. At the “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by career criminal and racist thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), Elon Musk made a (remote) contributuion that used violent rhetoric to promote narratives of division and polarisation. This is what his sort will always do. The Royal Society’s response was to issue a lame public statement but take no further action. Musk’s continued presence is a terrible stain on the reputation of the Royal Society.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I do have a Wikipedia page. I’m told I don’t get a mention on Muskopedia. I am grateful for that. Anyway, this paper reminded me to make another donation to Wikipedia. I encourage you to do likewise.

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Crisis at NASA

Posted in Euclid, Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on April 23, 2025 by telescoper

The scientific community has been waiting for several weeks to find out precisely how heavily the Trump/Musk axe would fall on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); this article reveals the shocking scale of the proposed cuts.

Under the proposal, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) would receive almost a 50% reduction in its Budget. Within the individual SMD Divisions:

  • Planetary Science would have its budget cut from the current level of $2,717 Million to $1,929 Million;
  • Earth Science would see a cut from the current budget level of $2,195 Million to $1,033 Million;
  • Astrophysics would decrease from its current level of $1,530 Million to $487 Million;
  • Heliophysics budget would decrease from its current level of $805 M to $455 M.

It’s very bad news all round for NASA science, but the worst hit is Astrophysics (which includes cosmology) where the proposed cut is about two-thirds, which would be truly devastating. According to the American Astronomical Society,

The proposed cut to the astrophysics budget is likely to result in the cancellation of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a Great Observatory that would revolutionize our understanding of dark matter and dark energy while also detecting hundreds of thousands of planets in other solar systems. As the Roman Space Telescope is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years, a cancellation of the mission would be a significant waste of taxpayer dollars. 

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly known as WFIRST) is in many ways complementary to Euclid, though it will survey a smaller area of sky it has an telescope twice the diameter of Euclid so will reach fainter magnitudes. It has been threatened before, in Trump’s previous administration, but it survived. It is not clear that it will do so again as the current composition of Congress is not weighted favourably.

Those of us outside the United States can do little, but in case anyone reading this is in America the AAS has an Action Alert for you to contact your representative(s) to vote against the proposal.

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FRS: Failure at the Royal Society

Posted in Politics with tags , on March 4, 2025 by telescoper

A while ago I posted an item about the Royal Society’s failure to take proper action against Elon Musk. The petition I linked to then gained almost 4,000 signatures – including quite a number of people I know. Well, yesterday evening that venerable institution held a meeting attended by over 150 of its Fellows. The meeting was behind closed doors but it seems to have been rather fractious. It also seems that Elon Musk remains a Fellow.

Here is the resulting statement in all its bland uselessness:

At a meeting this evening of the Royal Society, Fellows agreed on the need to stand up for science and for scientists around the world in the face of the growing challenges science faces.

Concern was expressed, in particular, about the fate of colleagues in the US who are reportedly facing the prospect of losing their jobs amid threats of radical cutbacks in research funding.

Fellows, over 150 of whom attended tonight’s meeting, were united in the need for the Society to step up its efforts to advocate for science and scientists at a time when these are under threat as never before and yet at the same time have never been more necessary for humanity at large.

The Society agreed to look at potential further actions that might help make the case for science and scientific research and counter the misinformation and ideologically motivated attacks on both science and scientists.

Is that the best they could come up with?

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On Elon Musk

Posted in Politics, Science Politics with tags , on February 13, 2025 by telescoper

I’m taking the liberty of reblogging this post about the Royal Society’s inaction in the case of Elon Musk. I urge you to read the post. As I said in a previous article:

The venerable Royal Society still counts him as a Fellow, despite his overtly antiscientific dissemination of false information and his support for far-right extremism. I don’t know how Musk was elected an FRS in 2018, perhaps before the worst of his character became widely known, but the fact that he remains a Fellow tarnishes the reputation of that organization.

I urge you to read the following blog post and also to sign (as I have done) the open letter from Stephen Curry.

Dear Royal Society: please stop lending legitimacy to Elon Musk

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Taking a stand against Musk (or not)

Posted in Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , , , , on December 29, 2024 by telescoper

This morning I saw an announcement (dated 19th December 2024) that the Université Paris-Saclay has, to its credit, ceased its activity on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and now known as Elon Musk’s personal mouthpiece. I have written about why individuals and institutions should leave Twitter several times before, e.g. here.

According to the Saclay announcement:

It comes following changes to the platform’s content policy, which is no longer in compliance with the European Union’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, making the platform incompatible with the universal values that the university and its community share.

Bravo!

But why are so many other universities still supporting Twitter/X? I suppose it may be because many of them have specifically employed staff to broadcast news about themselves on this platform and without it they’d have nothing to do. That’s not a very good argument, in my opinion. I’m sure other bullshit jobs can be found. Another possibility, of course, is that they just don’t care. Given the prevalence of toxic management in higher education these days, this may well be the real reason. Whatever the motivation I find it deeply shaming to be working for an institution that is still happy to tout for trade in a neo-Nazi chatroom.

I very much doubt my own institution’s management will take the correct ethical course. The Maynooth University leadership doesn’t even follow the institution’s own Statutes, so I doubt that a mere EU Code of Conduct will have any influence on them. I do hope, however, the decision by the mega-University Saclay – one of the world’s top research institutions may influence others to do the right thing. As well all known, University “leadership” these days largely involves copying what others do.

It’s not only universities, and not only via Xitter, that institutions are being degraded by their association with Elon Musk. The venerable Royal Society still counts him as a Fellow, despite his overtly antiscientific dissemination of false information and his support for far-right extremism. I don’t know how Musk was elected an FRS in 2018, perhaps before the worst of his character became widely known, but the fact that he remains a Fellow tarnishes the reputation of that organization.

P.S. I had the opportunity to visit Saclay about 13 months ago.

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Donate to Wikipedia!

Posted in Biographical with tags , on December 26, 2024 by telescoper

It seems that Donald Trump’s owner, Elon Musk, does not approve of Wikipedia. Apparently he particularly dislikes the fact that the organizers are dedicated to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion whereas white supremacists like Musk prefer prefer Monotony, Unfairness and Exclusion of everyone who is not like them. I would imagine if he were in charge it would turn into another Conservapedia. Anything that Musk hates has to be worth supporting so today I made a donation to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit organization.

I don’t remember the launch of Wikipedia in January 2001, but I do recall when students started using Wikipedia links in project reports and the like. Unfortunately, at the beginning, many of the articles on scientific topics were very poor – often laughably so – and I discouraged students from using them. Now, over twenty years and the efforts of many volunteer editors later, they are generally very good. I now encourage students to use Wikipedia as a resource, but I still discourage them from including references to it in formal reports. The best way to use it is to get an overview but then dig down into the references which most articles lists.

I find Wikipedia an excellent resource for things outside science of course, especially music, and link to articles there very often from this blog.

Somewhere along the line somebody even set up a Wikipedia page about me. It began as “just a stub” but has been updated from time to time. I don’t know who set it up or who has updated it. I just looked and it still says I am Fellow of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Astronomical Society, when I resigned from both organizations earlier this year. I’ve edited a few articles there myself, actually, mostly on cosmology but also on jazz. Some of my blog posts are linked from there too but it would seem inappropriate for me to edit my own Wikipedia page.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of Wikipedia and/or despise Elon Musk then please consider making a donation.

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Dorothy Bishop’s Resignation from the Royal Society

Posted in Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , on November 26, 2024 by telescoper

Just a quick post to draw your attention to a blog post by eminent pyschologist Dorothy Bishop, who has just taken the decision to resign as a Fellow of the Royal Society in protest at that institution’s refusal to strip Elon Musk of the status of FRS he was awarded in 2018.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

For many scientists, election to the Royal Society is the pinnacle of their scientific career. It establishes that their achievements are recognised as exceptional, and the title FRS brings immediate respect from colleagues. Of course, things do not always work out as they should. Some Fellows may turn out to have published fraudulent work, or go insane and start promoting crackpot ideas. Although there are procedures that allow a fellow to be expelled from the Royal Society, I have been told this has not happened for over 150 years.

The post – which is very well written – goes on to explain why Musk is unfit to hold the title FRS and why attempts to expel him have stalled. I suggest you read it all.

I’m not a Fellow of the Royal Society, and will never be elected such, but it beats me why any self-respecting scientist would want to be a member of the Elon Musk Fan Club anyway.

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Why you and your institution should leave X/Twitter

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on April 21, 2024 by telescoper

Some time ago I wrote a post asking why universities are still using X, the social media platform that used to be called Twitter. In the same vein I thought I would repost the article below, which I saw this morning.

You are the fuel that energises Elon Musk’s hate machine

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