You go to war with the baby snowy plovers you have, not the baby snowy plovers you want. That being said, this is the baby snowy plover i want. 🪶 🐣

Anyway we flew to Los Angeles today, which means I got something like an extra hour of solstice daylight

Happy Holidays. May you have time to relax and rejuvenate. And not obsess about news for a bit. I made a chocolate krantz cake (aka. Babka) and it was so so so good.

The darkest night of the year, but also the most light of the season 🕯🕯🕯🕯🔥🕯🕯🕯🕯

Illuminating Solstice Day

this isn't to defend the idea that academia is perfect exactly as is. actually academia is pretty turbo-fucked in important ways. you will NEVER find me defending the status quo "actually we just need to go back to eden." but citing your sources matters. sorry not sorry bsky.app/profile/elea...

and so if you have a tool that (let's assume) speeds up your research 10x, but also just feeds you made-up bullshit 10% of the time... and you cite none of it, ever... then yeah. who gives a shit. it's not *useful*

"cite your sources" is how you keep yourself accountable to others. "cite your sources" is what enables people to run down the origins of myths and bullshit passing themselves off as "common knowledge." "cite your sources" KEEP US ALL HONEST

"cite your sources" is not just an externally-imposed mandate but a personal discipline on thought itself. "cite your sources" is how you keep yourself in contact with reality. "cite your sources" is how you keep yourself from shadowboxing your own imagination."

people who are new to academia tend to find its obsession with sources and citations a brake on their "i'm just trying to be CREATIVE, man" mindset. but it turns out the relentless obsession with accuracy, citation, and *provenance* is a load-bearing pillar of the whole enterprise

i really think there is legit political space for running on "we are going to dismantle ICE"

the experience has led me to believe people who are using consumer-facing LLMs for research work are either a) wildly inefficient workers b) researchers producing fraudulent work. and their work is not actually being reviewed for accuracy by their supervisors/peers. that's a lot of fraud.

this is precisely it. also why i couldn't use it much at work. created more work than time it saved. gemini's new models still get about 1 in 3 knowledge requests wrong, according to google's *public* data. probably worse when you look at internal data.

another example of AI as tracer dye, exposing an already existing problem (and, of course, significantly worsening it)

we aren't powerless! never forget that outrage and pushing back works, even if it just buys time until we have more power. this is a marathon, not a sprint

dog got all tangled in his dang limbs again

Am I the only one who gets a real kick out of citation chains? Reading people's writing and footnotes, and making assessments and notes, finding the sources in the footnotes and reading them yourself, and making more notes? I...love it?

There are people being paid by the federal government to sit around and think of increasingly outrageous posts to titillate Nazis on the 9th most popular social media site in the U.S.

Needed to get off camera and scream into the toilet for 10 minutes about how Mac handles fonts, but here's the actual final plot from my Twitch stream today. Follow at twitch.tv/ColinDoesScience if you want to see me curse my way through this sort of thing in a future low-energy stream.

If right-wingers knew how pathetic scientists really are, they'd leave them alone, and let the job do the beating down for them. Inaugural Twitch stream as I try to make a map 👇 www.twitch.tv/colindoessci... Cat sightings likely. Jokes about wanting to die also likely

a lord of the rings cover band called Tolkien Heads.

Rep. Casten is incredibly sharp on energy policy and has worked in the clean energy industry. The hippie punchers keep doing the same bit even as the renewables and efficiency revolutions transform the energy economy.

🧪

Reflected Shoreline Calm - Wahleach (Jones) Lake - British Columbia 🇨🇦 #reflection #lake #calm #snow #nature #travel #pano #blueskyartshow #fraservalley #scape #panorama #backroads #landscapephotography #bc #britishcolumbia #explorebc #hiking #camping #explorecanada #tranquility #mountains #canada

The name "Popular Science" doesn't mean we shift our coverage depending on public opinion. It means we cover relevant subjects that are rigorously researched, reliable, and grounded in reality. And trans lives are grounded in reality. We see y'all. No matter what. www.popsci.com/science/tran...

Rereading SMALL GODS, as one does, and gods, did Terry Pratchett ever know how to land a point

As networks reportedly cut back on lgbtqi+ characters in response to Trump we have this viewership for a show with a lesbian fantasy romance novelist main charracter and Heated Rivalry, adapted from a gay hockey romance series, as the number 1 show on HBO.

I've already been hearing faculty discussion adapting to this policy by basically writing stripped down syllabi that include *only* the required boilerplate and nothing else, with things like course themes, reading schedules and such kept in separate documents to avoid the university owning them.

ancient llama bit me dang head off

Preprint now, submit to journal in January

We Didn’t Start The Fire-ass news cycle

D+18 on education

A photo I took in 2018 when people living in Trump-branded buildings voted to take his name off. Feel like there’s more of this to come.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Uber lobbied hard for the OBBB, the most environment-hostile bill in US history, and is now pulling back its EV subsidies. Uber sucks. Don't use it.

I’m old enough to remember when Mitt Romney said the problem was that 47% of America didn’t pay taxes and wanted to be freeloaders. But I welcome him to the resistance.

If you are in the US and you would like to send a message to your elected representative about the proposed dissolution of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, @agu.org makes it easy with a template here: agu.quorum.us/campaign/151... #AGU25

Not that it will but the willingness of Americans to obey is a very funny contrast with our self-image and should probably prompt some reflection bsky.app/profile/jonf...

As ever @tressiemcphd.bsky.social is brilliant. "My most daring idea is to refuse." Yes. Absolutely this. And I feel like reading BARTLEBY prepared me for this moment.

For the rare jobs that do exist, faculty get to vote on who to hire. Many have an unofficial “no assholes” rule, which makes the working environment so much more pleasant for everyone. If you’re a grievance-obsessed weirdo, and there are 10 equally-qualified normal people, the decision is easier.

A chestnut-backed chickadee, Poecile rufescens, gleaning in the branches of a larch on San Juan Island 🪶🌿 buff.ly/vd7KM9L

grimch

and some more winter birds. 🪶 cardinal red is so shockingly red that it's easy to overlook how intricate and lovely the coloring is on their wings.

Look idk about how legally enforceable any of this is and how much we need to worry about binders being banned or whatever, but it really does show the sheer level of petty hatred these bigots have for us

There will come a time when people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law. When that time comes, Illinois will have the testimony and records needed to pursue justice to its fullest extent. The truth of what Trump and his masked agents are doing in Chicago will be told.

This belongs in a museum

There's something almost awe-inspiring about a sense of entitlement so extreme that you think you're not only entitled to a faculty job in the worst academic job market in history, but entitled to an *Ivy League* job, AFTER HAVING YOUR HIGHEST-PROFILE PUBLICATIONS RETRACTED FOR FRAUD

The US Seasonal Drought Outlook, valid through March 31, 2026 shows that drought may persist/develop (brown/yellow) in the Southwest, along the southern US and up the East Coast. Drought may improve/be removed (tan/green) in the Northwest and Midwest. #drought 🧪 www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/exp...

Leaving my #NSF office for the last time, again