🗓️ SciPy reminder: Just over a month left to submit! The CFP submission deadline is February 25. If you’re working on a talk, tutorial, or poster, now’s a great time to start polishing and get ready to submit to your favorite conference! 🚀 ➡️ Submit here: pretalx.com/scipy-2026/cfp

New — I wrote about ChongLy Scott Thao, the elderly Hmong American wrongly arrested and forced out of his home by ICE in his underwear during the punishing Minnesota winter, what witnesses saw, and DHS's racist claim that he fit the description of another Asian man they were looking for. My story:

Entertainer, childhood literacy advocate, and *scientific philanthropist* Dolly Parton was born #OTD in 1946. Mostly known for singing and songwriting, Dolly's Imagination Library program has distributed over 100 million free books to kids around the world. 🦋 📖 🎶 dollyparton.com/imagination-...

They’re investigating everyone except the murderer.

Mubashir and his family came to the United States as refugees from Ethiopia when he was a child, and they all became naturalized citizens in 2019. Despite being a U.S. citizen, Mubashir was targeted by ICE, assaulted, and detained. Listen to his story:

Let’s call this what it is: a disgusting abuse of power and a farce. As his agents terrorize Minnesotans, as prices rise, as he fails to deliver for Americans, he is also weaponizing the DOJ against his perceived enemies. This is not a banana republic and justice will prevail.

“Noem: U.S. Citizens Should Be Prepared To Show Proof.” Did you vote for a “Show Me Your Papers” society?

Reminder if you find yourself somehow running out of space on your multi-TB laptop to check your ~/.cache size. I got 150 GB of disk back today by doing some trivial cleanup. ``` du -ch ~/.cache | tail -1 | cut -f1 ``` Caches are wonderful things and having large caches on large disks is great!

Laser Loon forever!

Excited to receive my copy of the second edition of Maxwell Dashwood and Christopher Hendon’s Water for Coffee! This book has been long awaited and I’m looking forward to learning much more about water chemistry beyond the little bits I have so far from making my own coffee water at home.

HT @simonegiertz.bsky.social for this framing, but if you can afford Netflix you can afford to support @npr.org. The US needs a free and independent public media. I've started an annual recurring donation to the network and I would encourage you to do so as well. www.npr.org/donations/su...

The US Department of Agriculture suspends all federal funding to Minnesota, effective immediately.

👉 ICE Abusing Protesters After Murdering Driver 1/7/26 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnfi...

Tried to do Higgs production via gluon-gluon fusion on my cappuccino. Messed it up pretty badly but I think to make it more viable I should try with a larger cup and so a latte. Would be fun to learn how to really nail some Feynman diagrams on demand. :)

Here is my first newsletter of the year, on the destruction of science past and future. buttondown.com/carlzimmer/a...

Question scoped to software in physics: Do you currently use PPC64LE architecture hardware for anything in your scientific workflow and is it important to you to have binary builds of software for that machine? Are there high impact examples that you can think of? Or is everything x64 or aarch64?

We've shipped a major update to the JOSS submission scope requirements, affecting what is eligible for submission and what information we require from authors. You can read more about the changes and our motivations here: blog.joss.theoj.org/2026/01/prep... #joss #opensource #openscience

Pour one out for Himal chuli, the legendary Nepalese restaurant in Madison, WI that had become a favorite on my visits to my academic home over the last 3 years. www.reddit.com/r/madisonwi/...

It’s 1990, I’m 1 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2004, I’m 15 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state It’s 2026, I’m 37 years old, and the republican president of the US is attacking a petrol state

French Foreign Ministry: “The removal of Maduro from power and the violation of sovereignty constitute a serious act of aggression against the dignity of the Venezuelan people and their right to determine their own future.

It really is that bad. Grant funded science, supposedly a key piece of American exceptionalism, was already a huge headache. Now it’s looking nearly impossible.

Sinatra has gone woke

📣 Call for Proposals is OPEN for #SciPy2026! Have a talk, tutorial, or poster idea you’re excited to share with the scientific Python community? Now’s the time! 🚀 🗓 Submit by: February 25, 2026 🔗 Submit here: pretalx.com/scipy-2026/cfp

The Call for Proposals for #SciPy2026 is now live! pretalx.com/scipy-2026/cfp If you have questions about @scipyconf.bsky.social just ask and be on the lookout for proposal writing office hours!

The LHC community has had more than an exabyte of data and simulation globally distributed, but now @cern.bsky.social has hit an exabyte of experimental observations at its data centers. At these scales, analysis of data from the HL-LHC upgrade will require new approaches. home.cern/news/news/co...

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

I feel very silly that it has taken me about a decade to realize this, but turning OFF fractional scaling in #Ubuntu and just reducing the resolution of my laptop's high DPI built-in display is improving the performance everywhere! askubuntu.com/a/1257985/78...

AGU petition to save NCAR. Please share widely! agu.quorum.us/campaign/151...

NCAR is quite literally our global mothership. Everyone who works in climate and weather has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources. Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet. Unbelievable.

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Last work flight of the year! Spending time with amazing colleagues at UW-Madison is always excellent and invigorating. Still excited to be heading towards home for a final time (…before it comes time to head back to the Midwest to see family for the holidays).

I need help! 🟢 One reviewer report for this JOSS article is complete. 🟠 Since we haven't got a response from the second reviewer, we need to assign a new one. 🔵 Any volunteers to review the manuscript? 🟣 Regression estimators and R. Thank you in advance! github.com/openjournals...

Thanks to the whole LHC crew!

Big thanks to Lauren for guiding me through finding my first mechanical keyboard after my keyboard of 15+ years started to give up the ghost. So far this Keychron Q6 Max with Gateron Jupiter Brown switches is super nice! So far so good with Linux integration as well, so here’s hoping that holds.

Wishing everyone at #NeurIPS2025 a wonderful conference! Go check out the amazing work of my colleagues and friends at the Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences workshop. ml4physicalsciences.github.io/2025/

We got Weird Al out here singing Killing In The Name, the time for moderation is over

Advent calendar time with Onyx again! Starting off strong with a tasty red honey processed Colombian for day 1. ☕️

There's a nasty #OpenSource #SupplyChain worm going around named Shai-Hulud. It's also capable of exposing some projects' long-lived PyPI API Tokens. Read more on what's happening, and what you can do to protect your projects. TL,DR: Adopt Trusted Publishing 🔐🚀📦 blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-1...

Fifteen Years xkcd.com/3172/

Today’s xkcd made me cry. In a good way. xkcd.com/3172/

Make sure you catch my latest for @wired.com -- with comment from @defcon.bsky.social and @blackhatevents.bsky.social founder Jeff Moss, and @adafruit.com founder + engineer Limor Fried: www.wired.com/story/this-h...

Beam Dump xkcd.com/3168/

Students, apply for a CERN summer studentship. Greatest experience ever! Deadline 26 January 2026. careers.cern/programmes/s... (It's not just for physicists. Check it out.)

Northern lights in interior Alaska.

DSI Director and @uwmadphysics.bsky.social Professor @kylecranmer.bsky.social has been honored with the inaugural Pritzker Prize in AI for Science for his role in establishing a powerful new approach to data analysis that leverages advances in machine learning and AI. dsi.wisc.edu/2025/11/10/d...

Here we are again: stunned & full of hope, because of you–each of you wonderful humans in the #Python community. Since we shared the news about our withdrawal from the NSF grant opportunity two weeks ago, we've received >$160,000 in donations across 1,937 donors, which includes 313 new Members–WOW!

I am incredibly honored to have received the inaugural AI in Science Research Excellence Prize from the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation dsi.wisc.edu/2025/11/10/d...

Fifty years ago today

I am very excited about my "Deeper Talk" seminar hosted by the Institute for Underground Science at #SURF. If you would be interested in learning more about the @snolabscience.bsky.social science program and the recently developed 15-year vision for […] [Original post on mastodon.cooleysekula.net]