What a GREAT MOMENT — new Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire @egregoire.bsky.social arrives via the Rivoli cycle path to Paris City Hall, embraces his predecessor Anne Hidalgo @annehidalgo.bsky.social while @carlosmorenofr.bsky.social, who just sent me this special video, looks on. Inspiring.

“Air India refused to board her because she did not have her British passport with her, separating her from her friends who returned home.” Apparently we have taken back control of our borders by allowing airlines to decide that British nationals can’t re-enter their own country.

I need someone to explain to me---very slowly---how if you *know* they're dual nationals...so you don't let them in...why...you won't let them in? When a foreign national *would* be let in on the same passport? This is insanity.

An absolutely excruciating moment at the Georgia Supreme Court this week. Justice Peterson pressed state attorney Deborah Leslie over her citations to cases that apparently don’t exist.

I’m considering whether I could set this up as required reading for students to gain access to my module canvas sites. Such a great summary of important issues.

I have no idea what this is about but the Rawlsians won't like it

Every single time I experiment with asking Claude to suggest an approach to prove something, then ask for references, it admits to making things up. Every single time. Not to say it is always *wrong*, but this is not a serious tool (and it wouldn't be obvious unless you *knew* already).

this paper made it to math youtube for pi day lol: youtu.be/kahGSss6SsU?...

Article 23 of the Hague Convention of 1907 states that "it is especially forbidden [...] to declare that no quarter will be given".

Anyone know if there is version of dput() (the R function that creates ASCII versions of R objects) that can replicate *exact* floating point values when run? e.g. with base64 encoding? (I rolled my own with raw vectors, but seems...hacky?)

In support of #OpenScience, we routinely ask authors to openly share their #research #code before publication. We are now formalizing this practice with a mandatory #code-sharing policy and clarifying what we mean by code sharing. May be nice to cut-out the box for reference plos.io/47dPeOW 🧪

This one below is quite interesting, guess a good demo of the plagiar-o-matic 2000 bsky.app/profile/amus...

FWIW - I have been regularly using Gemini, ChatGPT and a few others to 'ghost' tasks I'm doing, eg, figuring out emissions intensity of a gas turbine or something myself and then asking the same once I know the real answer It's remarkable how subtle the errors, false references and mistakes are

To my health researcher colleagues: when you're looking at routinely collected data (over many years) and you're interested in the relationship b/w two kinds of events (say, diagnosis for diseases A and B), how do you best deal with time gaps (eg people moving)? Obviously these introduce time bias >

antirealists intensify

I'm not linking to yet another White Man On The Internet's blog post, but suffice to say: No, LLM extruders *can't* do ethnographic research or social semiotic analysis What they *have done* is flood the zone with slop that makes social science research & analysis infinitely harder than before

This story, from @natezuke.bsky.social, is absolutely wild. A trans woman who never changed her gender marker was issued a letter invalidating her license. At the DMV they cut up her license, which had an "M" marker. www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Every year in spring, a lovely side of humanity shows in the form of a fish doorbell in Utrecht, Netherlands, but what is it and what does it do?  | Anna Schurer

Next RSS discussion meeting has picked a great topic: 'Regression by composition' by Daniel Farewell, Rhian Daniel et al. Tuesday, 24 March 2026; Imperial College London, and online. Time: 4pm to 6pm (UK time) Introductory DeMO 2:15pm to 3:15pm Registration here: rss.org.uk/training-eve...

Glob-glob! Absolutely magical sea anemone larva (about 7 mm) from The Lombok Strait, Indonesia 🇮🇩

Update: I spent seven tries just to get it to change an uppercase delta to a lowercase one. It kept “fixing” the problem (still uppercase!). After seven tries, it finally just substituted a “hand-crafted” SVG path (!). (I know this is easy to fix myself; wanted to see if I could do it with prompts)

every statement from schumer is like the villager in zelda who’s 300 feet away from an evil towering castle going “ganon? never heard of him. boy I wish someone would round up 10 chickens to put back in my coop”

Yeah, I really can't stress enough that AI code assistants royally fuck up statistical analyses. And they do it with absolute confidence.

I've been testing Claude to see how well it can "vibe out" a stat. power app that I've already coded completely myself - so I know what I want. It mostly gets things right with animations (those are easily verifiable) but looking into the backend stats code is nightmare inducing (see pic).

don’t skip leg day

Exciting that Simons showcased Ding et al’s @jcgntn.bsky.social paper showing theoretically interesting null effects of familiarity on inattentional blindness in his @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social OneWorld seminar. Some null effects matter! Paper here: journalofcognition.org/articles/10....

Q&A after Dan Simon's @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social One World Seminar- Must attention capture be visual to miss the gorilla? I doubt it. Dan mentioned research about verbal memory impairing visual change detection. Sounds like my first work with @ncowan51.bsky.social! References in the thread🤓:

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.

Apparently email (and some other Microsoft services) has been down for about 16 hours for many here at Cardiff Uni. I might actually...get to write today?

Jumaane Williams posted last night that he was gonna make this video so I had been waiting for it — thanks to @erinbiba.bsky.social for flagging just now. Williams speaks from a place of deep consideration for everyone involved and it shows in the way he discusses the impact and solutions.

webr is so cool

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI. www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

Also a bit concerning - can't find one of the only two refs: "Some results on first-passage times of simple random walks" Google scholar has no results for the title, and no such paper in that journal issue (nor authors) www.sciencedirect.com/journal/stoc... Smells like LLM hallucination

OK, so this paper is kind of fun and evil at the same time: arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14487. It shows a way you can, in theory, demonstrate Monte Carlo estimation by using coin flips to estimate π. The author suggests you can use it to demo Monte Carlo methods in a classroom! Fun, right? BUT: 1/3

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

Do not go to the USA.

So I took Blah-Blah's word for it at this time I thought "Just having a friend couldn't be no crime" 'cause I have friends -- and that's a fact -- like Agnes, Agatha, Germaine, and Jack

Two preprints from my PhD are now up! Both ask: is the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) is measuring something distinct from the Revised Mathematics Anxiety Scale (R-MARS), or is this a jangle fallacy? Study 1: osf.io/preprints/ps... Study 2: osf.io/preprints/ps...

#birdbot

DOGE Bro’s Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT ‘Is This DEI?’ Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were…

poor bee GOLD_07, whose embarrassing mistake has been immortalised in a way beyond his comprehension

Since Groundhog's Day we have announced the #2026MMM theme: March Mammal Madness Celebrates LIBRARIES! We've released the calendar, opened the Educator MMMaterials request form, & crafted a sheet of combatant Valentines! All available at the LibGuide: libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalM...

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

Online #rstats conference Feb 25-26 is *free* for everyone. Almost all the speakers and workshop leaders are LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ and many are members of the rainbowR community 🌈 Sessions include a 2-hour "Intro to R" and closing keynote on Claude Code from @hadley.nz 🧠 16:00 UTC or 11am Eastern ⏰

Only British Vogue has the courage to publish true science as it was practiced in the 18th century Transactions of the Royal Society

crickets from the free speech crowd, of course

I see someone has made a "fun" interface for the Epstein files because everyone seems to be having fun searching them. Trust me: you will regret it after you stumble on a grooming email. *That* stuff is in there, not just powerful people being awful. It isn't fun. Maybe leave it to the journalists.