Welcome to HEL.

Repeat with me: Excel is NOT a database, and any attempt to use it as one will invariably end in pain and tears.

We have an infant mortality crisis in many states in the US and this administration is making this emergency far, far worse. My latest for @thenation.com: "Trump and RFK Are Presiding Over a Massacre of the Innocents." www.thenation.com/article/poli...

The United States under Trump is foolish to alienate the 5th largest potential market on the planet.

Welcome to Venice! The Rialto Bridge from the airport water shuttle

It was a very, very dirty war indeed… en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War

The Guerra sucia in Argentina "disappeared" between 20,000 and 30,000 people. Many of these people were impossible to formally document, and it was thought that they disappeared before evidence started manifesting that they were murdered by the Argentinian government. Disturbingly similar...

The overhead announcements beginning with "Mesdames et Messieurs" always give me a pleasing sense of being when in France.

4chan did irreparable harm to so many young men. We knew it was trash when it began. It's corrosive effects upon society are still growing.

I feel Ms. Lauryn Hill is Nina Simone's musical and spiritual daughter for so many reasons. And she has six covers on the Nina Simone tribute album. "Ne Me Quitte Pas/ "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair"

CDG is just awful for connecting flights. Coming to Paris, great. Connecting, not so great.

Just going to point out that Congress can easily legislate to stop this. If there is a shutdown, and these illegal firings happen, Congress should then insist that any CR that ends the shutdown carries an explicit provision that those workers’ jobs are safe. 1/

You voted for this, American farmers.

as a hearing aid wearer, this is a pretty cool history of the tech! (which is now quite high tech - modern HAs have all kinds of AI components etc) www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Ba...

Today is Jim Henson’s birthday. As a kid, I didn’t really speak English until after I started school. It was hard for me to connect with the other kids. The English I learned was thanks to Sesame Street. That show epitomized empathy, understanding, curiosity and kindness. Thank you, Jim.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Happy Birthday Steven Severin, bassist, producer and co-founding member of Siouxsie and the Banshees, born on this day in 1955, Highgate, London #punk #punks #punkrock #gothpunkrock #stevenseverin #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Am on a plane to one of the coolest sensory meetings on the planet in a biological research station on the Baltic Sea and instead, I'd really rather prefer to be home hanging out with Alice the cat. In a bad headspace right now and missing Hilari something fierce.

Really interesting to see some basic science research coming out of Apple Inc. SimpleFold: Folding Proteins is Simpler than You Think arxiv.org/abs/2509.184... tldr: Apple used flow matching models to more efficiently predict protein folding structures. More of this, please... from ALL big tech.

Innocent!

ATL to CDG

#photograpy #blueskyartshow between the lines

See some of the winning and honored images from this year’s contest, designed to “promote the very best landscape photography by digital and film photographers who value realism and authenticity in their work,” selected from more than 11,000 entries:

I have never found a portrayal of Christ more relatable.

A single land bridge over one of wonderful river braids in south-east #Iceland. Oct 2023.

Upgrade. Could be worse. Next stop, CDG.

Whether you know a lot or nothing about Silicon Valley, this is a must read piece by my friend and former Wired bud Steven levy @stevenjayl. He has seen the evolution of tech from its beginnings. He knows everyone. Few have as powerful a lens. It’s just seminal. www.wired.com/story/silico...

Crematogaster crinosa acrobat ants visiting a Heliconia flower. Minca, Colombia.

ATL

LOLOLOL

Share your favorite black and white movie.

Nature Biomedical Engineering is hiring again! This time we're hoping to add an editor with machine learning expertise to the team (although we are open to those with other relevant expertise!) Deadline is Oct 20. Please RT! springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatu...

It would be interesting to see if this particular hack was from a state sponsored entity.

And most electric cars have chassis that are dangerously under engineered given the power that they can produce. I drove a Tesla Model S on a track and on the very first corner was worried that we’d not make it as the brakes and regenerative energy faded dramatically. I barely kept it on the road.

Cult members never really understand that they are deep into a cult. This is weird. Tim Walz was right. We should have stuck with calling them weird.

C-17s in the rain.

Losing one million subscribers means about $8 million a month, or roughly $96 million per year. If they were all ad-free subscribers, it would be closer to $168 million per year.

Wow… that’s like $9,990,000 in lost revenue per year.

Today is #WorldDenseBreastDay! Educate yourself and those you love about the higher risks of missed cancer on mammograms and of developing breast cancer. Great resources @densebreastinfo.bsky.social @densebreastscanada.bsky.social. Thank you @bcrfcure.bsky.social for supporting our research!

This feels like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Congratulations to the winners of our image competition with the @mblscience.bsky.social Embryology course. The winner of the Editor’s choice is an image of a anole lizard eye, acquired by Arthur Boutillon @campaslab.bsky.social. thenode.biologists.com/results-from... #devbio 🔬🎉

Mad props.

Sitting in a vegan Chinese restaurant, listening to R&B, watching Rocky and Bullwinkle on the TV over the bar, listening to the table next to me speaking in Spanish, and thinking... ...this is what makes our country great

Those bullets that were used to shoot ICE detainees in Texas were Russian caliber rounds. The inroads that Russia has made into American small arms markets over the last 15 is remarkable, and was the direct result of foreign influence campaigns.

Oh, hai PIT. Back at it.

I am so glad I moved out of Utah.

In the early years of my PhD I remember being asked if we'd ever treat or cure diseases like HIV or Huntington's. I remember saying maybe, but not knowing if I believed. Seeing research pay off as real impact on human lives is - incredible. www.bbc.com/news/article... www.bbc.com/news/article...

It's weird - but now in Oslo, there's so many EVs that you notice the noise and the smell from individual ICE cars, and you realise how much we've been normalising it for ever. You can smell them half a street away. And inside parking lots are just *quiet*.

This is critical as the Trump administration just cut H.I.V. funding on a global scale making the world and therefore Americans less safe and healthy.