Is a surge in tattoo removal shops a recession indicator?

Still surprising to me that there’s no conversation happening right now about additional libraries at minimum in the SLU/Belltown/LQA area. The densest part of the city not in the walkshed of any library!

this is HILARIOUS therepublicjournal.com/essays/ai-an...

Guest editors of special journal issues have been abusing their powers by publishing an excessive number of their own papers, according to a new study. This is "a blatant case of scientific misconduct" www.science.org/content/arti...

Just a reminder that Esri proudly touts that they work with DHS, whose agents are currently doing door to door Nazi-style raids in Minnesota. Probably using ther software to support these operations www.esri.com/en-us/indust... #gischat

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

It is fun to go to the movies

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

a civilized society cannot just let a platform like xshitter exist without heavy social sanctions

Sighing wearily as I install the Chik Fil A app on my phone

When are they gonna let John Wilson do a Criterion Closet episode?

First returns in Columbus, OH! - Contested city council race is going to be a nailbiter - Tax levies out to a comfortable lead - Southwestern BoE incumbents all behind - Things not looking great for Columbus BoE outsider candidate Mounir Lynch

Hello, Meowlets! Early Voting for the 2025 General Election starts today. I'll be at 1700 Morse Rd to cast my Meowlot soon, and the BoE will be waiting for you 8am-5pm weekdays, with more details on their website. More details in the newsletter. See you there!

the Green New Deal was pretty clearly doing “abundance”

This is an astounding piece of work — the authors employ metadata signatures to suss out entire academic publishing fraud networks. A small subset of PLOS One editors, representing 1.3% of articles accepted for publication, accounted for 30.2% of retracted articles www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“Folks say “I don’t like kids,” as casually as they’d say they prefer Pepsi to Coke. When people say things like “kids are okay, but I just don’t want them around me,” we don’t generally question that. I think we should.”

Today I learned that “Frontiers of Computer Science” and “Frontiers in Computer Science” are two different journals, but maybe they’re actually kinda the same

A classic in the genre (link to details www.peri.umass.edu/publication/...)

Free the Spokane 9 Largely ignored in a small market, this week's federal indictment of 9 anti-ICE protesters in Washington state, including a former council president, shows how far the Trump regime will go to crush dissent This was always the plan. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.

dudes rock www.axios.com/2025/06/14/f...

Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model. What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it? A 🧵 the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...

Highlights of 1-star French letterboxd reviews of RESURRECTION (2025): "Je ne suis pas venue au festival de Cannes pour souffrir." ("I didn't come to the Cannes Film Festival to suffer." "Ohlala j’ai dormi" ("Oh la la I slept") "non"

Last night my wife Vibe Cooked (prepared a recipe provided by ChatGPT)

This study on automated traffic enforcement is now 15 years, pretty modestly framed. Automated enforcement changes behavior over time but notably (in this study of red light cameras) it meant fewer accidents with injuries and more rear-end collisions. Intuitive! isr.unm.edu/reports/2010...

Realization: the cost of a hospital stay isn’t *that* much more than daycare

And Vim-inspired key bindings!

Somewhat delayed mail day. The Bunuel box set is marvelous. Also a… unique entry from my in laws: some very early footage of my wife as a child, including her birth. So, uh, now that’s on the shelf too.

So excited to cry at this movie

Just learned that former roommate @eclectichutch.bsky.social is at Cannes and I’m reeling

kids literally wanted to grow up and be public servants because of Richard Scarry.

there should be a summer camp for adults where you can simply embed with a given civil infrastructure discipline and watch

Policy changes often take years to show results. And then there is congestion pricing in New York. Here are all of the ways we could find it having an immediate effect: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Sorry to hear of the passing of Joseph Nye, originator of the concept of soft power which itself passed a little over 100 days earlier. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...

In this evaluation of AlphaFold3 (and other methods), we show that (i) accurate predictions are limited to RNA structures/complexes with structural similarity to PDB and (ii) that current methods are bad at estimating the accuracy of the predictions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

the greatest trick crypto ever pulled was convincing the world AI was the environmental danger

Columbus, Ohio's NWS office in Wilmington is missing key personnel, according to this report.

Americans really do grossly underestimate what a difference “walking everywhere” makes when they travel like yeah the walking is the reason you lost weight while eating bread in Italy, it’s not because Italian bread is imbued with magical nonna sprinkles that give it fewer calories

been thinking about trying something like “documentation-driven development”. Write docs for the ideal software you want to have, then fill in the code that fulfills it.

there's so many layers of fraud and abuse in this story that "someone might have been trying to log into the NLRB's systems with a valid Doge username and password from russia" doesn't even make it into the first 5,000 words

Included here is a quick discussion about the citeability (and lack thereof) of research software. Also notes a kind of paradox, that while we might cite individual programs, we ~never cite languages or runtimes supporting them.

If even a fraction of this is true, hoo boy. www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

Transportation costs are a huge problem! Housing costs in regions like New York City are, definitely, very high. But transportation costs are much lower! That's what makes it possible for NYC region to have lower overall housing + transportation costs than the Dallas region. htaindex.cnt.org/map/

you don’t have to rain 3s to know how to control runoff. rain gardens can be attractive and functional ways to reduce flooding, keep extra flow out of local sewers, and bring some new life to your property. also go Cavs.

Georgetown scholar Dr. Khan Suri, who was abducted by ICE, was refused food/water to break Ramadan fast, housed in a room without a bed, and issued *used* underwear. His child cried for days after he was taken and has since stopped speaking. ccrjustice.org/home/press-c...