And the award for best paper title and abstract in 2026 so far goes to @futrell.bsky.social & @kmahowald.bsky.social and their response to commentaries in Behavioral and Brain Sciences arxiv.org/pdf/2604.09501

Textiles!!! If you haven't spent at least some time sewing or a related craft, let me tell you that with some rare exceptions (quilters cotton), all textiles are basically Haunted in terms of their material properties. Textiles are a REALLY HARD PROBLEM.

🚨 NSF is already quietly eliminating the SBE Directorate, despite Congress’ mandate that NSF support the behavioral & social sciences. Steps to counter this are in motion. If you - have an SBE proposal under review - serve on an SBE grant panel You can help! Fill out this form: shorturl.at/xuKw2

My toddler's approach to question syntax in 1L acquisition: she's just 100 percent dedicated to avoiding all question forms. Everything is a sentence completion task for us - "Daddy has a...." "Mama's feeling a little..." Not sure if this is a documented strategy but she's been on it for months!

Getting ready to head to the session children's beliefs about AI & technology, I passed this alarmingly fast-moving egg delivery robot. I have to say I didn't care for it, but the junior colleague seemed highly intrigued by the little cat-face screen on the front. #CDS2026

were all trying to find the guy that did this hotdog dot gif

Lot of recalled products down there.

The old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Things are pretty busy at the world hospital

I'll join the chorus of people who are not even quite sure what to say about this absolute behemoth of a project, except for YAY! I worked full time on SCORE from 2019-2021 with the COS team, designing and implementing the system for identifying claims in the literature, developing protocols to...

windows keeps hallucinating monitors that don't exist I'm laughing so hard help

PSA to all of us with international collaborations that the Chaos Weeks start on Sunday (US/Canada goes into DST but the EU/UK don't until near the end of March). Check your meetings!

Forever mad about the barely acknowledged existence of unscented Febreze. Bizarre consequence of human perception: we get nose blind to our own stink, so the unscented stuff appears to have no effect, and people wouldn't buy it until it actively smelled like something. I hunt it on the internet.

Steinbeck: What did you think of my draft of 𝘖𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘔𝘢𝘯? Publisher: It needs more characters. Steinbeck: I'll see what I can do.

A Placebo cover band also called Placebo

Have you noticed how navigation apps include walking & waiting for public transit, but excludes parking & walking for driving? After being late a few times 😅, we finally did. We got curious: what if these apps account for parking?

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Was trying to remember a Will Forte quote from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie and accidentally figured out how to make Google’s AI tool shut up

Fire as a new technology if it was AI: HEY I PUT FIRE ON YOUR WAGON, WAGONS HAVE FIRE NOW! No I think I just would like to try cooking my own... WE GOTTA SPECIAL ON FIRE SHOES! Like I've learned to use new things before, can I just see if I can... ITS A THATCHED ROOF, BUT WITH FIRE!!!

Gonna tell my kids this is Marco Rubio

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

Wrapping up my LOI answers for the @mozillafoundation.bsky.social fellows program - 400 characters is SHORT short! ...good thing I've been training for this for years on twitter/bluesky? I would also be willing to submit an application entirely composed of reaction memes.

it's not easy breeding deer for gigantism, but that's why I make the big bucks

always so funny to me when people are like “how am I supposed to explain Gay to my kids?” my kid asks me way harder shit all the time. “why did they build the road this way? why are some people bad?” I don’t know. please ask me about Gay

On the other hand, medicine labels, especially for babies, are playing some kind of hide-the-dosage game where it's either behind a sticker you have to peel up or just says "ask a doctor". I *think* the logic is it makes you read the rest of the instructions or involve a medical professional??

Please take a break from your regularly scheduled doomscrolling to read our new paper about how written consent forms can backfire as a means of protecting vulnerable individuals by activating a more formal "contract schema". We were initially surprised too! www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

2026 big update to the psycholinguistic database page! If you know of corpora, lexical databases, or other resources that I've missed, please LMK. Trying to keep this thing relatively current and could use the help www.reilly-coglab.com/data

On the left is a picture of my dog, Juniper. The one on the right is Jupiter, who lives with my FIL. This is already fairly confusing for my 2yo. But my husband told her that Jupiter is named after a planet, whereas Juniper is named after a plant. This information has melted her brain.

Felicitations to all who celebrate

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out. As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class. Here's what happened:

I know I don't have a ton of media followers, but I'll put this out there anyway: if you need someone to comment/offer context on the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President's House site in Philly, get in touch. I just finished an entire book on Americans' fight over Washington and slavery.

I just did my first r code! Yes! #rstats

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

I belatedly realized that one thing I can do to help Minneapolis is connect people there who want to write about what they're experiencing, but need support, to people who can provide that. Support can mean comments on a draft, but it can also mean listening to you talk & asking questions, 1/

Yesterday my toddler caught me looking at a graph on my laptop, demanded "blue graph", and then proceeded to sit through my not-very-detailed summary of the steps in this blog post about Tufte's data-to-ink ratio principle: deliveringdataanalytics.com/the-data-to-...

"Tzefardea Tzedek" (Frog of Righteousness) As soon as the Portland Frog became a meme, Jewish social media blew up with jokes about the 2nd Passover plague - tzefarde'a (frogs) - and the Rabbinical commentary around it. I knew I had to make a calligraphy piece encompassing all of it. (more in alt.)

As a cognitive scientist, I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to realise that emotion matters a lot, not just for understanding humans, but for understanding any thinking agent. Why? Because emotion is an indicator of what that agent values, and values are essential to rationality. Examples:

I’ve talked this up before, but: @slacktivistfred.bsky.social’s analysis of LEFT BEHIND is one of the most formative and useful things I’ve ever encountered, as a writer

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HORSES! IT IS HORSE BIRTHDAY! HORSE!!!!!

And i think you need a certain generation and level of status to pull off the raw html homepage.

On a related note, "antepenultimate" was a surprisingly useful word in my last choir, three pages is a pretty common amount of score for the last chunk of a piece you're rehearsing.

Two days left to donate to Children Helping Science with 1-to-1 matches from an anonymous donor up to $100K! giving.mit.edu/search/node/... For fun: 1 repost = 1 citation to a paper with data from Children Helping Science/Lookit!

That's a good Hwæt! (cf @hwaet.info)

love that software developers are advertising AI functionality in every single app now and it's up to you to try to figure out if they mean "this has spellcheck" or "everything you create in this app will sync in real-time to sam altman's personal laptop" or something in between

Not now, haunted Victorian shoes

Love 2 encounter a weird Schrodinger's login state where I can see my eRA Commons account details after supposedly not being able to log in, but not access my actual grants. I will never not be mad at DOGE for suck-ifying login.gov. But I guess it makes sense: So infrastructure. Very security.

You should be able to respond to reviewer comments with memes to liven up the peer review process.

Improbably, my career's probably going in a direction where this matters to me. Anyone have tips for twitter/bsky researchers looking to *~PiVoT tO ViDeO~*? (Current workflow is I think something, type it, usually delete but sometimes post, and at no point did I check if my hair is brushed.)

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