A new kind of rapid Chotining. Please appreciate the alt-text.

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

New seasonal paleontology positions available for Dinosaur National Monument, Petrified Forest National Park and Fossil Butte National Monument. Apply soon, they close after they receive a certain number of apps! #NPSpaleo #PaleoJobs www.usajobs.gov/job/850816000 www.usajobs.gov/job/850816700

the economic success of the U.S. is significantly built on the land grant universities and in particular their excellent agricultural science tradition.

Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

Nice 3-year teaching+research postdoc at NYIT! careers-nyit.icims.com/jobs/4126/po... The human anatomy teaching experience is tremendously valuable; for people in our fields (e.g., morphology, biomechanics, palaeontology) it opens up great faculty job opportunities! And the NYIT faculty are great.

Mainstream news covered the Jeffrey Epstein emails related to ppl like Trump. Today, I want to take a look at Epstein's correspondence with prominent atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss, who asked the pedophile's advice on responding to accusations of sexual assault skepchick.org/2025/11/so-i...

So, this is wild: In 2015, the podcast Invisibilia featured a woman with a very unusual condition. Whenever Amanda (not her real name) sees someone else experiencing something - sneezing, getting stung by a wasp, eating chocolate - she physically echoes a version of what they’re feeling. 1/

I laughed at loud. These people are so pathetic; our enemies are numbskulls. They will kill us all and still not know hs physics. COWEN: The stupidest question possible: Why don’t we just make more GPUs? ALTMAN: Because we need to make more electrons. conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam...

incredible! a gorgeously preserved skull from tupandactylus imperator has been described, offering new insights into its dietary ecology and soft tissues 😻 www.scielo.br/j/aabc/a/6Hv... (art by maurilio oliveira)

OpenAI needs to be shuttered permanently, its assets appropriated for public use, & Altman punted into the phantom zone.

If you are not in academia, you might not know this, but job interviews used to be held at conferences IN HOTEL ROOMS. Women candidates in a hotel room alone with often all-male committees. People sitting on beds! The horror stories I've heard.

Dr. @renpoole.bsky.social: Sauropods were offensively big because they were actually photosynthesizing. Send tweet. #2025SVP

Hey SVPers, how's your travel going for #2025SVP? I've had one flight cancellation, but a fairly smooth process rescheduling. Should still make it on schedule.

This obit of Watson is *amazing*.

Laughs in traveling to and from a conference next week.

Bluetorial-Jim Watson I met Jim Watson a few times but did not know him well. However, I was greatly influenced by his book “The Double Helix”. He was a complicated human being with some very, very bad features, but some good contributions. What follows is my personal perspective. 1/41

Even the worst misogynists sometimes support certain women. I don’t doubt Hopkins when she says Watson was a good mentor to her. The more important question is how many women did he harass/disparage/discourage and thus push them out of science?

To mark the 85th Annual SVP Meeting 2025, we've assembled an open access collection of landmark JSP vertebrate palaeontology papers. Next study to highlight is.. The phylogeny of ornithischian dinosaurs by Butler et al. (2008) buff.ly/O0hipyA #2025SVP #PaleoSky @richardjbutler.bsky.social

When people celebrate the individual genius of folks in science, they should also mourn the collective loss of genius of folks who were actively discouraged or disadvantaged from a career in science because of the same person(s)

#2025SVP USA 🇺🇲 🗽 alert: as your travel begins make sure to check your flights proactively! ✈️ One of my legs was cancelled due to the US Govt shutdown, but luckily I caught it. Worse before it'll get better. Stay frosty! See you in Birmingham. 😅🇬🇧🫖

Just a reminder, that possibly the oldest piece of palaeoart dates to the Neolithic. The petroglyphs of horned characters with trumpets, recorded on the same rock as a ornithischian footprints (Zagaje Formation) in Poland, might be an early reconstruction of the Jurassic tracemaker.

me at the end of class: here's a little speculative exercises; imagine you wake up from cryosleep in 2085. what's the kind of tech-society r/ship you'd like to see around you? students: no AI I honestly think students' views are missing from the 'should AI be integrated in classrooms' discussion

There is something deeply broken about an economy that creates trillionaires while people get buried under the cost of living and 42 million go hungry. The ultra-rich should realize that my Billionaires Income Tax, aimed at ensuring they pay their fair share, represents the moderate path forward.

Come see my panel interview with all the women presidents of SVP! Wednesday at 12:30!!

Interested in a PhD at the intersection of biophysics and microbiology? Apply for this MRC-funded opportunity at Newcastle University to do cutting-edge microscopy in Mycobacterium tuberculosis! 🔬🦠 Closing 4 Dec! www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

🧪This included me. Most of the academic research, including medical breakthroughs & paradigm shifts is done by graduate students & post docs. Via @studentsforsci.bsky.social on IG

I wrote about an absolute diva defector.com/fat-and-sass...

Nuclear weapons testing is saber rattling in general but in specific, Donald Trump has demonstrated since his first term that he very badly wants to use nuclear weapons and has asked about doing so repeatedly including against *checks notes* ... hurricanes

Schools and districts are not equipped to deal with the dysregulation students are going to experience due to excessive hunger and familial stress over food insecurity. We’re just not in any way prepared.

The people on this airplane have a sense of duty and self-sacrifice that Donald Trump will never understand. They are NOAA employees flying their plane through the middle of the category 4 Hurricane Melissa south of Jamaica. And they aren't getting paid. I wish them safe flying and a safe return

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

Cannot express enough appreciation for the teams *flying through a hurricane* while not being paid.

Yes! A big component of teaching is acting, and I’d bet most good teachers understand this. Note that this doesn’t mean I’m disingenuous in my enthusiasm for my subject matter or my students. But I have to be encouraging even if I’m tired/frustrated/etc. I have to give the energy the students need.

USGS missing from GSA 💔⚒️ From reddit: www.reddit.com/r/geology/co...

Democrats should hold a press conference and announce that if Mike Johnson has no interest in running the House they'd be happy to do it for him

Our military is being paid by an anonymous donor. Our WH East Wing was demolished for a ballroom - paid for by donors. These aren’t acts of benevolence or patriotism. This is the oligarchy assuming control, insidiously becoming part of how we function. Every American should reject it.

Something intensely frustrating which I've seen across academia, NGOs, media orgs and corporations (I mean, just, every professional space in the world) is "WHAT IF WE JUST DIDN'T" is **never** considered an option, and it's the same for this report. Error rates like that, 3 years in? Ditch it ffs

Programmers thought generative AI made them about 20% faster, but data show they were 20% SLOWER. And programming is supposedly something LLMs are good at.

Reminder: another way to say “research conducted without ethics approval” is “unethical research”

Not a shitpost: #NoKings is feel-good performative activism for comfortable mostly upper and upper middle class white folks and that’s good, actually. Millions of people in the streets protesting a fascist regime is good. It is good for the normie baseline to be massive displays of public dissent.

Every state is purple.

Welcome to our new global nightmare. If you're hired to create something, create it! If you're paying someone to create something, make clear you're paying for THEM and not an LLM.

I think we need to keep repeating this point —that decisions by this admin, by the EPA Secretary confirmed by our Senators, by DOGE as Nick Begich III & Dan Sullivan enthusiastically cheered it on —directly impacted Kipnuk’s destruction. Alaskans need to see that politics affect homes, bodies, lives

While I obviously find the large urban protests impressive, it's the smaller ones in towns with small populations that make me tear up. That takes a lot of courage and it's a good reminder that people object to this everywhere & geography doesn't define someone's humanity.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

Which is to say in the classes I’ve allowed AI use, I’ve actually been more successful at getting them to NOT use it because I show them what they’re supposed to do, they can’t get their AI to do it, they realize the AI is trash, they write the papers themselves, everyone is happy

Like an anonymous reviewer saying “a more detailed discussion of this topic can be found in my monograph” that you’ve already cited extensively.

If men with guns and masks tried to pull me out of my car, I'd fight back. Courts should reject any claims by the government that this is aggression by the person being detained, resisting arrest, or that they're a flight risk.