I challenge anyone go try and reproduce some random papers, even those based on open free public datasets, but without the code and/or a detailed description of how the data was obtained and processed, and not become militant about the necessity of code and complete data sharing at a minimum.

📣 I'm hiring! Two positions (PhD student & Postdoc) in my ERC project Macroevolution of European Literature. Let's study the cultural evolution of literature using massive data 📚📈 📍Frankfurt | Apply by August 15 Details: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/career/jo... Please repost to help spread the word!

all the things we're doing in our attic apartment in the European #heatwave #canicule wet towels, fans, aluminium foil on outside of window, blinds on inside, curtains inside, parasol and splash pool.

technology is nothing without culture to hold it if you think about the interplay between community culture and tech, I can heartily recommend the tv show "Moonhaven" from @amcplus.com . it sadly didn't get a second season, but that happens to the best of shows.

it's been about a month since I started properly weening myself of reshape2. Today marks the first time I used tidyr::pivor_wider() correctly on the first go without having to look anything up!

Next week is the biennial meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT) in Lyon, France. I'm going, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing interesting work from colleagues and catch up! #LINGTYP alt-2026.sciencesconf.org

Great recognition for the R development team at UoAuckland stats dept. Ross Ihaka & Robert Gentlemen changed the world.... phys.org/news/2026-06...

New car sales have declined over the last 25 years in both the US and the euro area.

this is about discussions in Aotearoa, but we should make visualisations like this more often generally everywhere

If you aren't a football-head, but you want to understand the hype bc of family/friends then I can recommend the podcast "We Came to Win". It's unfortunately only available via Spotify now, but it is very good and covers a lot of essential social history of "The Beautiful Game".

The longer a man stays in a form not his own, the greater this peril.

If recent discussions of ethics of gassing pigs for slaughter upsets you, it's probably best to just cut down on meat altogether instead of setting your hopes on a new more humane technique. The scale of this industry is not compatible with treating animals well.

(available in our shop) becauselanguage.com/shop/

And I don't like pompous dipshits, but we are both going to have to get used to disappointment, Lou.

Thrilled that the Diamond Open-Access journal "Journal of Pacific Archaeology" is now ranked about the top 25% journals in their subject (archaeology) in the SCImago ranks! pacificarchaeology.org/index.php/jo...

Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting "reviewers" with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.

If you want to actually be right, sometimes you’re going to be wrong. It’s called learning. It’s okay. And the fact that we’re creating spaces that make it hard to learn is a lot of why gas is $5 a gallon right now and democracy is falling apart.

"CLDF Meta" (meta.clld.org) links to data from over 800 CLDF datasets that have been released on Zenodo (e.g. WALS, APiCS and Grambank). There are links to data on over 9000 languoids, e.g. 98 entries on Ambulas (to take a random language). Great work by my colleague Johannes Englisch!

Fantastic Arxiv find arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514

I'm a very loyal and long-time customer of @lushcosmetics.bsky.social , however I refuse to participate in they loyalty programme bc it necessitates an app. it should just be an ID thing, an app is just off putting.

we have to bully fashion brands more for dumb marketing. HUGO is trying to gaslight us this is risky, different and new.. 🤦‍♀️

one of my absolute favourite things about subscribing to the comedy streaming service @dropout.tv is the "24/7"-channel. the same content for all users, no way to pause, no choice fatigue. it's like linear tv! just turn it on & tune in. so good! www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmFu...

I didn’t realize Saul Steinberg — the artist behind the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue“ — had a whole series of similar illustrations. 😍 saulsteinbergfoundation.org/essay/view-o...

@berkleeonline.bsky.social is teaching bad AI tools for music editing/creation like Suno. Here's a very nice & nuanced take (e.g. "there is a place for machine learning in music editing tools") that clearly outlines what the issue is & how the school is out of touch www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfeG...

Is there a system in Germany whereby if you get high grade for your ERC proposal, but don't get funding, you can get financial support elsewhere? This is the case in several other EU countries like Sweden, Romania and Czechia. Doesn't seem to be the case in Germany though, afaik? #researchfunding

lunch conversation: 5yo what are those eggs with the mustard and mayo in the middle? We should make some. Do we have mustard? Do we have mayo? Do we have paprika? 2yo, joining in. Do we have the muffin man? does corn have a face?

Yeah, it’s a “hard exercise” because you have to be psychic and guess the gender of the musician and baker

I've been a big fan of reshape2::melt/dcast() as opposed to the the corresponding tidyr functions, however.. I am now coming to the end of this rope as I'm moving into R >4 & the version mismatching errors are just not worth it anymore GOOD BYE RESHAPE2::MELT!!! I WILL MISS YOU SSOO MUCH!!! #rstats

"Based on the dataset you shared, US and UK responses differ mainly in tone, intensity, and wording style, even though they express similar emotional states" New post on what happened when I got Copilot to do some data analysis: kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signa...

The normative fraud that Errington describes is something I've seen my whole career. A biologist once told me, if p is very small, it can't be a false positive. Teams condition on null being false, see anything that makes p small as truth-seeking. These traditions spread bc they get you published.

Many thanks to @laserhedvig.bsky.social & Daniel Midgley for having @yngwienielsen.bsky.social & me on @becauselanguage.com to talk about our NHB paper where we show priming of non-hierarchical linguistic structure. It was so much fun to do a deep dive into the nature of linguistic representations

My group at the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics now has a name: Cultural Evolution of the Arts! You can read a bit more about the idea behind the group at the group's web page: www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/research/... And here's the obligatory door nameplate :)

This is possibly the most blatant case of citation farming I've seen. Quality control at Elsevier: www.chrisbrunet.com/p/third-edit...

Today is the National Day of British Sign Language in the UK, and here's an interesting talk with BSL interpretation :) #nationalbslday

Liz Irvine and I once ran an experiment which went so wrong that I spent the next 10 years figuring out what had happened. Today we've published the explanation: a new theory for the evolution of symbolic signals (with Kateryna Krykoniuk & Fiona Jordan). academic.oup.com/jole/article...

We had a great time at #AdventureX in November. You can now watch our our talk on women's dialogue in video games here ... With BSL interpretation! #videogames #linguistics www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA--...

Oh my god, I love this. It's a simple little interactive website that helps you find where you personally draw the distinction between blue and green. My boundary is apparently at 179, where's yours? ismy.blue

How did language evolve? We ran some experiments in Minecraft to find out! youtu.be/7vgS8s6MhSk?... And link to paper: academic.oup.com/jole/article...

🥳 so glad the #evolang proceedings are out. First time I'm in them!!

This is why it's important authors read a lot, Murakami has no idea this has been done already

pls repost! Are you an academic or someone who has published academically who has requested name changes in your works because you were married (or used to go by a former name)? please let me know via reply/DM/the contact form on my website if you're willing to chat about! #AcademicChatter 🗂️🗃️📜📚

New theme issue of #PhilTransB: The evolution of collective intelligence. Read #OA: buff.ly/f0gWUxH

She found that their company revived her, carried her away from the constant presence of last night's terror, little by little, till she could begin to look back on it as something that had happened, not something that was happening, that must always be happening to her.

TIL "There is little evidence that spicy food in hot countries is an adaptation to reducing infection risk" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

You can read about our research at the Department for Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social , our webpages have gotten an overhaul :)! www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-a...

say what you will about buzzfeed, but their series where they get food&drink experts to try cheap-ass versions of the product they've devoted their life to is chef's kiss 👌 here's the wine one www.youtube.com/watch?v=840w...

Während #Palantir ein Manifest voller rechtsextremer Talking Points veröffentlicht, droht die Bundesregierung KI-Massenüberwachung durch die Hintertür einzuführen. Das darf nicht passieren. Wir sollten unsere Grundrechte vor KI-Überwachung & Big Tech schützen – statt sie schleichend auszuhöhlen.

The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.

I can highly recommend drinking Earl/Lady Grey tea when eating mapo tofu. The bergamott really hypes up the sichuan pepper even more, because citrus I guess.