Finally read the paper and it's worth the buzz. mRNA vaccines saved 20 million lives in a global pandemic and the technology is opening up new avenues for the treatment of deadly cancers. This is really one of the most impactful scientific developments of our time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The amount is meaningless — less than one day of salary. But the principle is important: once the armed services are paid by the oligarchs, they become a private militia, and we no longer have a country. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...

A haunted house for academics but it is just your colleagues congratulating each other for their most recent self-nominated award.

A haunted house for academics but it is just your graduate students showing you an endless loop of graphs with unlabeled axes.

Heyyyy we desperately need more archaeologists to volunteer to answer questions from students via video chat through @skypeascientist.bsky.social. We have 80 unmatched teams. We’ve already matched 650 😵‍💫 If you know any archaeologists, please send them here www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html

A haunted house for academics but it is just you standing at a conference hall podium during Q&A trying to remember what was the first of a string of three questions.

Never had I thought there would be a time when this would be a legitimate and answerable question: “What did Katy Perry sing when she went to space?” But then I remember the fascist takeover of the US is also happening.

It’s getting increasingly harder to convince anti-vaxxers bc it is no longer about science & evidence. It is about identify & belonging. It’s not just accepting a vaccine, it’s about leaving behind their sense of self & community. It’s about security. This is why throwing data will never work.

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This is a cool computer science story about a new method to find the shortest path between two points. “This thing might as well have been discovered 50 years ago, but it wasn’t” - Mikkel Thorup 🧪 www.quantamagazine.org/new-method-i...

“Workers continued to see elevated health-related absences linked to COVID-19… [which] has likely raised the value to workers of paid-leave policies & existing social safety net programs. Measures to reduce COVID-19 transmission in the workplace may also mitigate these new exposure risks”

Don’t get sucked into the whataboutism. There doesn’t need to be competition between public health advances - each are important & critical in making people live long + healthy lives. Anyone in public health will tell you this. Alas, the folks doing damage only know how to rage bait for self-gain.

I am so bad at ‘connections’ (the NYT game) that it is verging on embarrassing.

If you try to address 1 code bug with an LLM, maybe it will help. But a web search will do the job too. If you ask for a code structure review, it will certainly create a cascade of non-existing issues with a gazillion ‘helper functions’. How do people use these in their work!?? It’s a time sink.

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New from #SCIMaP - analysis of the White House’s Proposed FY 2026 National Science Foundation Budget. Take-home: Slashing NSF by >50% will lead to ~$11 billion in economic loss and extensive job loss and reduced training opportunities in communities nationwide. Report: osf.io/e8rnc a 🧵

Anyway here's the real article, please share this one and not that one heated.world/p/charlie-ki...

This one followed every child born in Denmark from 1999-2010, with more than 650,000 children. No association between MMR vaccine and autism was observed. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30831578/

Trump again just implied that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Many studies have shown that there is no relationship between MMR vaccine and the development of autism. This one followed every single child born in Denmark from 1991 through 1998 (n=537,303). There was no association.

Sounds like the segregationists in Connecticut are having a grand ole time “While waiting for the police to arrive, the old Karen’s friend said, ‘You’re not the minority anymore.'” www.blackenterprise.com/alex-okeefe-...

Just watched the new Superman movie. I don’t have the right mindset to understand what angered folks so much.

It's not just people who caught it in 2020. It's 2021, 2022, 2023,2024, 2025, and forever into the future.

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fwiw I like @mostlybree.kitrocha.com's suggestion of getting people who forgot they have subscriptions to cancel them.

This isn't even a slight exaggeration. He is actively working on destroying the US's entire vaccine infrastructure. The HepB vote will be tomorrow, where they will get rid of the birth dose and recommend it at 30 days, dooming a bunch of infants to chronic infection ft. cirrhosis, cancer, and death.

A quick crash course in blackpill accelerationism: the memes are the ideology Excellent (and very much worth it) 8 minute watch from Cy Canterel on recent events. www.tiktok.com/@cybelecante... (h/t @realclaudetaylor.bsky.social)

Scammers are targeting seniors again. When we released our new @polidashboard.org app for tracking political ads, we did not expect that it could also be used to detect financial & other types of fraudulent activities on Meta’s advertising platforms. socialmedialab.ca/2025/07/29/p...

I wrote about the groypers and the Fuentes-Kirk fight years ago, in Hate in the Homeland. Cautioning here that there is still a lot to know about the shooter’s motivation, I’m sharing these two paragraphs here to set the history of this fight in context:

Oh, and The Chair.

I said this to someone today. @espiers.bsky.social did it much better: “He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.”

Another family member had it this past week. (One of us who didn't get it in July.) Again, this third family member wouldn't have known it was Covid w/out testing. Stuffy nose & mild cough. Faint red lines & a negative test in less than 5 days. I think lots of people have/have had it w/out knowing.

Who’d have guessed?

What a great question. Bluesky Is more than an X clone. Under the hood, each part of the app can and is ran by different companies. The app you download, the server hosting your data, each feed you scroll, and your chosen moderator can all be ran by unrelated parties.

Meu velho amigo @leoweller.bsky.social mandando a real. A comparação com a famigerada-porém-compreensível anistia de 1979 é completamente descabida. Uma coisa é fazer concessão pra negociar a saída de uma ditadura que está no poder; anistia a golpista fracassado é puro incentivo a golpes futuros.

Nesse dia tão simbólico, deixo aqui um texto que escrevi para a Folha em 2022, ocupando a coluna do querido Jairo Marques (@assimcomovc nas outras redes). O nosso voto importa MUITO, galera.

Why? What does this have to do with us? What sort of foreign policy is this? If something bad happens to a criminal Trump pal abroad, U.S. taxpayers have to pay for a war or a new tariff or some silly new overarching foreign policy agenda? What is that?

i often share this short video by @imanibarbarin.bsky.social about the Overton Window and why u shouldn't debate with fascists. this is important everyday and especially now with that whole Mehdi Hassan on Jubilee mess.

Lunch staff at my ‘spot’ making me smile.

And there’s a documentary about the recording of this incredible album and I can’t believe my eyes and ears. tv.apple.com/ca/movie/eli...

This is such an incredible record; it fills me with joy every time I hear I hear it. Elis is THE person I’d like to have met.

This can't be true because academic papers are all peer-reviewed by experienced experts who would be able to easily identify these shenanigans and stop them in their tracks.

"I am the center of the carousel, the undecorated pole. I admire your wooden ponies, which you have painted so nicely, but I cannot become them. I am eternally moving but making no forward progress. I am unnoticed, mechanical, and emit groaning noises."

There’s a simple solution to not being able to edit out Trump administration guests’ lies from interviews - just call out those lies as lies in real time, mid-interview. Oh but wait, they won’t do that either 🤦🏽‍♂️

Goals. #departmentofwar

“I wasn’t sure what number you wanted me to go with.” — Zuck, 100% pathetically bitch-made by a man who said he should be thrown in jail for life, appeasing an administration who says his wife’s family isn’t American, loving how RFK is dismantling every public health advancement that CZI ever made.

Bill Ackman wants free charging.

I can

(2) any tips for running computational labs? I find that students with limited coding backgrounds need a lot of help, but there's only a TA and me and even a 15:1 ratio of students is proving tough. I would truly appreciate any advice!

Teaching questions based on a wild first few weeks: (1) any tips for introducing Python to students with a wide range of coding skills in a network science class? Although it's clear that a 1 hour weekly lab is not enough time to learn a new coding language, I don't want to eat up all of class time.