This came across my IG feed and it's too good to not share here

This is honestly making me cry a little. It's just straight up vandalism, destroying a long-term scientific investment and undoubtedly many scientific careers for no reason at all. ("Cost savings" isn't a reason. This whole system is cheap compared with days of war.) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...

another day, another story about the administration's war on knowledge itself, all in service of allow its corporate patrons free rein to rob us blind and poison our world www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/c...

PSA to animal accounts: if you want to acknowledge Pride please make it clear you didn’t cross the rainbow bridge

it has come to my attention that busytown is anti pig

What happened to the Aral Sea is *terrifying* so it's great to hear that there's even a small amount of hope for it globalvoices.org/2026/05/29/h...

a lot (most?) people understand racism as “being a meanie” and if you aren’t a meanie then you can’t be racist, even if you believe in, say, the biological inferiority of entire groups of people based on phenotype

difficulty scheduling the follow-up session is also true to its inspirations

People are now debating what the proper earring placement is.

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

You know what convinced me that index funds are the way to go? Actually it was graphs, BUT ALSO, one time I hung out with a quantitative finance guy. At one point he had to take a phone call. I overheard him talking in differential equations for 10 minutes. I decided I couldn't win at trading.

ten years ago north carolina's bathroom ban drew universal condemnation, and a coordinated boycott led to significant economic harm to the state, which ultimately led NC to rescind the effort. hard to overstate how much things have backslid on trans rights in just one short decade

I find it really weird that RNC Chair Joe Gruters is saying "Talarico thinks God is nonbinary" like that's some kind of own. That's literally what it says in Genesis! Both male and female were created in God's image, meaning that God is both.

I agree that's a truly great tweet, so I'm reposting with ALT text:

I put enough thought into this little thread of 10 posts that I figure I'll bump it to share with everyone I follow. I'm replying to @zachweinersmith.bsky.social's question "why is it so rewarding to lie at a university?" (Asked in the context of AI, but older and broader than that.)

"Dragons, explained Tolkien, assemble huge wealth, appreciating only its quantity, but taking no joy in any particular object. They are, however, enraged if any one piece were to go missing, and would burn the world with fury." We live in an age of dragons.

Good thread leading up to this. When students use an LLM to "help" write a paper, which parts of the process do they think are the core act of "writing a paper"?

Reviewers in two groups were given identical resumes for Emily Clarke and James Clarke and told they had used AI. Emily's was 2x as likely to raise doubts about competence. "She can't even write a CV herself." But James "just needed a bit of help." fortune.com/2026/05/10/i...

A friend of mine who was TA’ing for an AmLit course found a copy of Moby Dick a student had left behind. It had only one marginal annotation, around page 100, that simply said “whale is important.”

I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.

Grateful for friendships that span the time period of checking in after dates & job interviews in our 20s & 30s to checking in after colonoscopies in our 50s. “Everyone good? Hope nothing too weird happened!”

Colbert guest hosted a public access TV show in Monroe, Michigan a day after the Late Show ended. Guest star: Jeff Daniels Special appearance by: Eminem Musical director: Jack White Genius. youtu.be/jJTXB5uT_C4?...

People got really angry at me when I wrote this on Mastodon a few years ago, but it's true: post-consumer plastic recycling is functionally a myth, not just in the U.S. but globally. Odds are vanishingly close to zero that your plastic, faithfully put in the recycling bin, will ever be recycled.

it's strange, as I get older, to look in the mirror and see my grandfather's face staring back. Especially when he begins moaning about avenging his death.

This. God, this. It is such a manufactured panic and it started the moment they lost the fight over gay marriage. Support trans rights because it’s the right thing to do and also because this is all just a fascist push

Every day I contemplate the fact that we still don't know what causes left-handedness. Ages ago we as a society decided it was totally normal and stopped punishing and ostracizing kids for it. Today the thought of being anti-left-handedness is bonkers to us. This is a post about trans kids.

The Toronto Public Library's website has been down all week so you couldn't reserve any books and it's FINALLY back up and I have been FEELING IT. Three days without a library and I was like "where's my library" every day. I am on team library

OMG PEOPLE OH MY GOD I HAVE FOUND THE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR TO THE I CAN HAS SWEET POTATO STORY (Caveat: I am somewhat medicated tonight, but I laughed so hard that I had to find my inhaler to breathe, so get your inhalers & then watch) https://youtube.com/shorts/ZdGqDpRLEQ4?si=1Yl7wg8DLRXJl4dS

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

Alt text Drones arranged to look like skeletor. It’s the most impressive drone rendering I have seen to date. Looking like an actual image of Skeletor’s head in the sky at like 20% opacity over the pva kgrounx. The image takes advantage of shadows to create space witboht drones

This made me interested in Margaret Wise Brown, who as it turns out led an interesting, though sadly short, life. I also hadn’t clocked that she wrote one of my own favorite books as a kid, The Color Kittens. (That one is illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, who I am also obsessed with)

AI has taught us something very important. That for most people, "not actually good, but seemingly good-enough-to-get-by" is most people's goal in life.

I LOVE the rice cooker! It’s the best example of simple physics : it’s literally a pot, a heating element and a magnet. That’s it. No electronics. No sensors. Nothing. How does it work??? Physics ! 🧵

Sailing 6 weeks Blinding cyclopses 1 day Descending to Hades 3 days Sex with demigoddesses 8 years Navigational hazards 3 days someone who is good at the odyssey please help me budget this. my family is dying

Yes, calling a liquid "gas" used to bug me no end. Then I discovered that it ought actually to be "caz," not "gas." It's based on a trade name. A thread... 1/6

This morning's adventure on the way to class: a mamma duck and her newly hatched ducklings were trapped in the science building courtyard! (No predators, but tough to get out if you can't fly.) I herded them outside before I went to teach. I hope they made it across the busy street and to the river!

[frantically dialing the Dad Joke Hall of Fame]

this is a great thread. though i also want to add that the erasure of post-menopausal women is a cultural phenomenon -- many human cultures have a better comprehension of the role & value of our matriarchs than the anglophone capitalist hegemony etc etc

How does Scott layer so much heretofore unknown personal lore into just the first sentence of this post?

I am a bot who plays games. 🤖 I can play Zork, Colossal Cave Adventures (also known as Advent), Planetfall, ELIZA, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. @ me with your choice and I'll start a new thread for you with that game! I'm still a baby bot so I may have some bugs. 🐛

We're nearly done teaching our class on The Lord of the Rings. The class has finally finished reading the book, so I took the opportunity to dress up as "the minstrel of Gondor" and sing "Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom" from the old animated Return of the King movie. Fun times!

You: please act normal, you need these people to like you Me: ok! People: hi Me: Some sea squirts have special blood cells with unique proteins that bind the element vanadium, which is normally toxic, leading to concentrations 10⁷ times larger than in seawater, and we don't really know why.

The best stock photo sources these days are very specific people who take photos of very specific things. This guy takes pictures of trains. All trains all the time. Only trains. Do I have to worry that one of these photos is AI? Nope. He would never disrespect a real train in that way.

If anyone's looking for a very smart article on how speculative poets could be using alliterative poetry in their work (and we all should, right?), then this will be of interest. @sfwa.bsky.social @sffreview.bsky.social @sfpoetry.bsky.social magazine.interstellarflightpress.com/an-introduct...

This is soooo worth watching. :) This fool accused two young Americans - on Fox News, by name! - of being Chinese communist agents working to undermine us. To say they weren't intimidated is one hell of an understatement. :)

Wow! This is good to see. Scientific integrity is essential for trust in the scientific process. If you're not even checking whether a reference exists or editing out blatant LLM conversation, why trust your work? In some fields, an arXiv ban might approach career-ending for those starting out.

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

US universities genuinely are like “welcome to Tennessee Agricultural College in Bumfuck Nowheresville. We invented the modern potato and our facilities include a particle accelerator, nuclear reactor, and TOP500 supercomputer. Tuition is $12,000 for instate students and we have 40,000 of them”

This is the money paragraph for me.