Microsoft OneDrive is one of the most useless, frustrating pieces of software I have ever encountered in my life.

off to a good start, if i do say so myself

Right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting owns all these local media stations and many others all across America. This is not journalism, it is scripted propaganda.

Every time something like this happens and I think of all the people who should be standing up to it and aren't, I think of this tweet

“Bloody Indians, Pakistanis and Indians, coming over here, inventing us a national cuisine.”

Looking into new data vis python libraries and some of them are explicitly trying to sell new AI data vis tools as ‘vibe code your data’. “What if no one understood your plots not even you” is an interesting sell…

It’s been a little overshadowed by the slightly unexpected mental health issues that hit me very hard yesterday afternoon, but for what it’s worth here’s the GAMLSS regression post I’ve been working on for the past month #rstats blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-0...

The problem is zero percent of the people in government or the press has ever had to hold down a real job, so they're genuinely impressed that computers are real.

The idea that we have to "encourage responsible AI usage" is a core part of the inevitability narrative driving the institutional adoption that makes people think it's worth trying out. it contributes to the very problem it supposedly tries to solve. we can't let it go unchallenged.

R E T V R N

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

I am reluctantly forced to chalk up a W for the children's literary canon

Radical right accommodation really does not work. New paper out with this exceptionally talented team @katharinalawall.bsky.social @robjohns75.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social @sarahobolt.bsky.social @zachdickson.bsky.social @danjdevine.bsky.social & @jack-bailey.co.uk doi.org/10.31235/osf...

The "feeder" is actually playground equipment. Don't know how we missed that!

Rest in power

my stand mixer is older than most of gen z and I think about that A LOT every time something I bought in the last 5 years breaks after 6 months.

Which is probably the same mindset as the “only American food is bbq” because we have roughly 100,000,000 kickass foods that were made by different immigrant groups being American and living in America and inventing new things and I’m eating that shit. France does not get New Orleans that’s ours.

but, as always, the large chunks of the population who are fine with immigrants & trans people don't count. we're not 'real' brits not even to the people we elected, apparently

For those of you heading to #escop2025, this gloriousness is the Peak District

Where @candicemorey.bsky.social and I are today

Ouch…

I argued here that the government was ignorant of basic economic concepts such as opportunity cost, comparative advantage, regulatory capture, the tragedy of the commons and transactions cost economics. I should have added tax incidence to the list: stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_an...

Jan-Willem Romeijn’s closing address from a typical European podium #EPSA25 #philsci

What people think they 80s were like versus what the 80s was actually like.

I feel seen www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority".

A reminder to my US friends that tomorrow (August 23rd) is the last day to order from my Etsy store before I have to (temporarily 🤞) cease sales to the USA until the new import issues have been resolved. So if you want something click the thing 👇 dragonsofwales.etsy.com

The Handsome Spurfowl (Pternistis nobilis) #gloribirds #birdart #wildlifeart 🪶 🖌️ 🐦 The inspiration for this piece was an Art Nouveau poster for the 1898 annual salon of La Libre Esthétique by Gisbert Combaz. It was a lot of fun to try out this particular stylization!

The vibe of the Tomorrow Belongs to Me scene, but for global politics. Just watching more and more people stand up and sing a long to the murderous insanity of romantic ethnonationalism. And feeling utterly powerless to stop it.

this slide is from a colleague's introductory stats course, I think it fits many statisticians' experiences

this is so wonderfully weird, give her all the golds 🥇

The project of reconstruction and holding confederates accountable was never fully finished and that's a huge part of our problem today

I think the fact that the president can make up a bullshit pretext about crime, activate various states' national guard units and invade a major city with basically minimal pushback of any kind reflects very poorly on Americans generally

UNBELIEVABLELY sweet moment between a peacock chick and their parent. Not sharebait. I COULD NOT believe my luck. Last year I had seen the chicks about 3 weeks later, I was determined to get them younger, and this one DID NOT disappoint! SQUEE - o - meter 10/10, thank you birds! 🥰 🐣 🪶

Rounding to zero is often a problem in machine learning, which is why we do computations on log scale and use various composition functions. This below (from materials in a paper I am reading) is not how to do it. If you are getting zeros in your prob vector, back up and do the calculations right >

Their entire mode of politics is based on petty resentments and a belief that everyone except them is a massive bastard on the make. Briefly, it’s a kind of daily, fiery terror that somewhere, some undeserving person might be eating a free sandwich they themselves won’t get a bite of.

Reminds me of the statement over 20 years ago of the then UK education secretary as regards the humanities www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/may/... Some years later in RSS News I argued statisticians should show solidarity with medievalists www.senns.uk/Teaching/Thi...

Also a bachelor of music performance for me (classical guitar), before two masters, in development studies and in applied statistics. Now I run stats assistance for Pacific islands. I certainly learnt a lot (not just music but history, thinking, writing) in that first degree and never regret it.

My research into methods that improve comprehension of scientific literature by scientists are grounded in the humanities. uplopen.com/chapters/e/1...

BA in psychology and English lit here - including courses in chemistry, statistics, education, linguistics and cognitive science. It all influenced my masters and PhD work.

I have a BA in music (classical voice) with a minor in philosophy, where I took logic, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. My PhD is in cognition and neuroscience w/an MA in stats, and now my work is applied stats. I am a better, more rounded scholar because of the humanities.

…and, uh, also Lammy is spending family time with fascists? We think the lack of a fishing license is the issue here?

I can’t recall ever seeing “unsure” and “don’t know” as options in the same response scale…

My favourite thing about Outlook on the web is when I sign in, and it tells me that it is signing me out. Thanks, Microsoft. That’s exactly what I wanted

I'm here for good science... and #thediscourse. Nice summary by @richarddmorey.bsky.social. Looking forward to reading the paper and potentially including it on my reading list for my grad stats/methods course.

From a story about a new species of pseudoscorpion, this sort of highlighted the management of Australia in a nutshell au.news.yahoo.com/incredible-p...