In the comments: ”I'll just note that Canvas is no longer a pedagogical tool; in its current iteration and ownership structure, faculty and students are trapped in a digital learning environment that mines our labor without consent or privacy and intellectual property protections.”

ggplot(ritual) + geom_sf() + theme_c̵̤͛̌̎̀͘t̶̡̨̯̝̼͗̂͒͊̀̾̇̾͜h̸̡̰͉̼̖͉̉u̶̡̗̮̜͍̠̯̙̍l̸̞̲̓̒̒̓̓̃̔h̶̛̖̣̲̩̖͉̠͍̬̄̔̊̽͜u̸̱͛̈̽̀̅() + coord_noneuclidean() #RStats #rayshader #rayrender

Again this should inspire wall-to-wall media coverage for months. The crowning achievement of the Civil Rights Movement is dead. Black people just lost all of their remaining political power in the South. This is a monumental moment in American history that simply isn't being treated as such.

“HANDS OFF MEMPHIS!” Protestors & Democratic legislators leave the scene of the crime arm in arm, after Tennessee Republicans broke the law to strip Memphis of representation with a racist 9-0 map, drowning out the majority Black city with white power. @GovBillLee

hello @botsocamerica.bsky.social members! Need help planning your summer reading list? Check the books available for review for the Plant Science Bulletin! I just added a bunch of new books (botany.org/home/publica...)

These viruses have been known problems in Korea for so long that there’s literally a M*A*S*H episode about them. People work their whole careers on viruses most people have never heard of…so that you never have to hear about them.

Some insects will go to great lengths to avoid answering email. (Blue death-feigning beetle, Asbolus verrucosus, very much alive but trying to convince me it's not; Mojave Desert, California.) 🐙🌿 #bugsky

Introducing * READMEBuilder * A shiny app that helps users build a high quality README to upload along with their data and code. Just install the package and run the build_readme() function to launch the app! github.com/EIvimeyCook/... Comments and suggestions welcome!

The man who overmedicates with steroids and cocaine would like you to know that your anti-depressants and other necessary prescriptions are in his cross-hairs.

The single most defining thing Elon Musk has ever done is killing untold numbers of people by having DOGE illegally raid and disband USAID. Not rickets, not cars, not even the CSAMbot on X. It’s this, and so many media pundits just choose to unsee it.

If you are the editor of a journal and you have received a submission from me that looks a bit weird (weirder than usual) please assume it is a LLM-generated paper from a ghost author. This has happened four times in recent weeks. In each case it is possible to see how a genuine published paper 1/2

What the hell www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

Kids should be learning that AI output isn’t trustworthy, where it really comes from, and how it’s disrupting our ability to tell what’s real. They shouldn’t be learning that AI will make them more efficient or do their work for them because it can’t. That would be propaganda, not education

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

An artist’s archive is never just about preservation. It is about who gets to decide what is kept, how it is ordered, and who has access to it.

Introducing the #ReplicationAtlas: The FLoRA (FORRT Library of Reproduction and Replication Attempts) lets you browser over two thousand (!) pairs of original and replication studies. Search by DOIs/keywords and find out about replications from your field, maybe even replications of your own work.

An Atlanta suburb learned Flock was using livestreams from a children's gymnastics studio, a pool, and a playground in sales pitches to other cities. Residents are furious but the city renewed its contract with Flock anyway: www.404media.co/city-learns-...

Residents of Dunwoody, Georgia are furious about the city's surveillance contract with Flock. Do their elected officials care?

I was asked to speak with a graduate class today about research data management. I was asked, "How do people become convinced that beginning data management early on in a project is worth it?" Me: "Suffering. They usual have to suffer first." 😅

Wealthy Florentines collected Citrus spp. during the Renaissance. This one is Bizzarria & is a graft chimera of a citron & a sour orange. It still exists. Check out the Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wik.... Illustration: Pomologie française (1846). #Citrus #Rutaceae #Botany 🌾🧪🌱 1/2

Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’ https://theonion.com/supreme-court-overturns-right-v-wrong-1819573211/

My best craft advice is "Put a giant worm in it." You can never go wrong with a giant worm. Sci-fi: Giant worm on an alien planet Fantasy: Giant worm in mountain sitting on a pile of gold Horror: Giant worm (eats people) Romance: Giant worm causes third-act breakup Mystery: Giant worm investigates

Beyond fossil fuel giants, a key culprit of the polycrisis is Big Meat, with a global playbook & impacts: huge methane emissions, destruction of Amazon rainforest & much else. JBS is expanding into Africa via secret agreements - a direct threat to food sovereignty, human dignity, local livelihoods.👇

Posting this again because it is just absurd!

The International Association for Plant Taxonomy mourns the passing of Dr. Peter H. Raven, whose extraordinary life transformed the Missouri Botanical Garden and helped shape botany as a truly global enterprise.

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

Congratulations to our 2026 Huxley Award recipient, Matheus Januario Lopes de Sousa, for the educational resource: “evolved: an open-source R package designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate instruction in evolutionary biology”! Read more: shorturl.at/1ZdFE@mjanua...

ASU Atomic, a new tool in beta at Arizona State University, takes faculty lectures and chops them into extremely short clips, that AI then attempts to turn into learning materials.

Developers want to build 51 data warehouses, each the size of a Walmart Supercenter, in a Pennsylvania town of just 7,000. And they are refusing to tell the community what technology firms will occupy the buildings. Is it any wonder why a nationwide backlash against AI data centers is brewing?

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

The series finale of Dinosaurs was an emotionally brutal reflection on corporate greed and climate change, the entire family accepting the grim inevitability of death due to a handful of rich assholes making life for everyone else literally impossible. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changin...

U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. https://scim.ag/4cxQWhl

Brazil bans Kalshi and Polymarket from operating in the country. obviously things aren't perfect there but I think we need to think seriously about how to get institutions like theirs

Hey regional friends, UConn's Titan arum is blooming next week! Follow the botanical conservatory (instagram: @uconnbotanicalconservatory) and come visit! We'll have extended hours on the night of the bloom. 🪰👃🌿

Most people in trench coats are actually cats stacked on top of each other. This usually goes unnoticed because we are too distracted looking at our phones.

It's not hyperbole in the least to say Musk purchased a six-month shadow presidency for $280 million and used the power of that shadow presidency to 1. Steal the government’s data, 2. Permanently damage the state’s ability to regulate his businesses, and 3, kill non-white people.

Jay Bhattacharya pulls a study because he doesn’t like the conclusions. I cannot explain how bad this is and how it reeks of the stench of ideological zealotry and has no basis in science. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/u...

Behold the snake.

A key point: the admin has made things worse & less efficient. "American scientists already spend some 40 percent of their time on grant-related administrative tasks. Now they are being deluged by ever more paperwork, said Dr. Michael Lauer, who led external grantmaking at [NIH] until last year."

it's so crazy that we funneled billions in environmental subsidies to Tesla, only for it to become one of the most rampantly polluting companies in business today

Happy Earth Day! Big AI companies are developing new gas projects to bypass the grid and provide power solely for their data centers. @wired.com found that projects linked to just 11 data center campuses could emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. www.wired.com/story/new-ga...

I know I'm always harping on about this but it really is corrosive to public life that our major media institutions are run by people who do not know how evidence works and cannot distinguish between a real social trend and something their algorithm feeds them on tiktok.

But today we haven’t seen that disruption at all. Millions of jobs were not wiped out in the way the industry suggested. Instead, tech companies implemented new tech like algorithmic management to disempower workers, break unions, and push down pay. disconnect.blog/sacrifice-yo...

Perplexity’s CEO is just the latest tech leader to tell the public their jobs will be sacrificed on the altar of the glorious AI future. It’s a compelling narrative, but it distracts us from the real impact of AI: not to take the human out of the loop, but to take away their power and cut their pay

Asking your employees to donate to your fundraising drive while you're threatening to cut a bunch of their positions or greatly reduce their institutional support because of fiscal mismanagement is...a choice.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years. Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.” wapo.st/4euUt1c

i gave a talk ~1 week back, unpacking an idea @tressiemcphd.bsky.social mentioned in November at the Urban Consulate in Detroit - that an optimistic future is one where we can exercise autonomy over our lives & consent is not some immaterial issue - a future with refusal. and a guy got mad about it!

this is an organization that exists to kill people. you should want it destroyed and you should be trying to put as much distance as possible between everyone that ever worked for palantir and any amount of power. this shouldn't be a moral quandary for you. hesitation means you failed already.