"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

Spider Pot 053

Insightful summary of an extraordinary person being extraordinarily fired: "you don't silence a woman of color who raised concerns about racism by silencing her...The fingerprints are distributed perfectly across the system." www.linkedin.com/pulse/uclas-...

“Never Interrupt Your Enemy When He’s Making a Mistake”

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

Job opening! Asst/Assoc Prof (TT) in Forest Ecology at McGill University in Canada. mcusercontent.com/1319f832ffab...

PLEASE SHARE. PhD Opportunity with me, Ben Raymond and Jan Engelstaedter and Andrew Letten at University of Queensland. Experimentally testing mechanisms of how temperature may change selection and spread of AMR in E. coli. Coupled with some advanced modelling and sequencing. 🧪🦠 #microsky

I agree, this is important. Here's a Gift Link 🎁🔓 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/o...

Wikipedia bans LLM-generated content en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.

There’s no such thing as the history of science (and this is a blog post about it) (inspired by a great 2017 article by Lorraine Daston) williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/t... 🗃️

We need to acknowledge that science has always emerged from a mess and a lot of misunderstanding. That is the constitutive character of the scientific process. Failures of understanding at the individual level can even be critical for collective progress. Science is a distributed activity.

We should reconsider the term „energy crisis“ when speaking about the effects of the Iran war. This is very specifically a crisis of fossil fuels and their single point of failure. Fossil fuels are no longer synonymous with „energy“. We have other, better options.

New one for @climateconnections.bsky.social

The Vernal Equinox means that it's time to rename the folder on my desktop that contains thousands of unread pdfs from "Winter Reading" to "Spring Reading". This is how I mark the passing of the seasons.

Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy. Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks. Those that didn't now pay the price.

Resizing Microsoft Word a joke I have about an image

Too many students are convinced by their own universities, by some of their teachers and professors, and by the AI companies themselves that ‘using ai to study is getting ahead of the game’ But the process they seek to get ahead of is the point.

Fantastic new paper casting doubt on explainability of explainable AI. To explain complex machine learning algorithms you need reproducibility of the explanation at a minimum academic.oup.com/ehjdh/articl... #machinelearning #Statistics #StatsSky @maartenvsmeden.bsky.social

As my mentors have always said, every talk is a job talk

Tom Lehrer - a song from 1967 is ever-topical. youtu.be/HHhZF66C1Dc?...

1/ Paul Ehrlich died this week at 93. The takes split into hagiography and dismissal. But the interesting question isn't whether he got it right, he didn't, it's why he got it wrong, and who was asking the right questions instead 🧵

#PhDPosition in Ecological #DataScience in our group. For details, see www.uni-regensburg.de/universitaet... #MachineLearning #AI #DeepLearning #Statistics #Ecology #AcademicJobs

Another robo-grouse drop. If you didn't see the thread yesterday (quoted below), I am looking for unusual examples of hidden Markov models to use as examples in a new lecture I am writing

Curious about the origin of development during the transition to multicellularity? A very belated preprint alert: bit.ly/4rr2mHU Reproduction emerges from ecological interactions at the onset of multicellularity. A short 🧵 with lots of videos...

Ok. But any discussion of ‘useless’ knowledge should also appreciate scientists’ incentives to claim uselessness. The history of performative irrelevance (e.g. Faraday claiming he could see no uses for the electron; Polanyi saying the same about Einstein while the bomb was being built) is rich.

I have written my first R-package for feeding experiments! BayesFR allows fitting functional responses by providing dynamical prediction models for use in #brms. Includes models for classical type 2 and type 3 responses, and also prey mortality or predator interference (more to come) #Rstats (1/3)

This is hilarious. Also, completely enraging.

iDiv and @uni-jena.de are recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher (f/m/d) in Trait-Based Community Ecology and Modelling. Highlights: 🔺Full-time (100%, 40 h/week) with the option to reduce to 80% 🔺Fixed-term for 2 years 🔺Salary up to E13 TV‑L 📆 Apply by: 29 March 2026 www.idiv.de/career/job-o...

Hey fellow scientists, I'm just letting you know that if you're promoting something with some junky AI image, I'm not gonna click. You've got a workshop, a conference, a new paper? Just not gonna bother. You want a bespoke image? Hire an illustrator.

With @saramitri.bsky.social, @sonjalehtinen.bsky.social and L. Lehmann we’ve launched the UNIL Center for Theory in Ecology and Evolution @unil.bsky.social🇨🇭 To kick things off, we’re offering short visiting fellowships for theorists in ecology & evolution. Apply & pls RP 😀 tinyurl.com/2wem36zz

We are happy to announce 36 great thematic sessions for our #NSO2026 #GfOe2026 joint NSO-GfÖ conference – bringing together diverse perspectives across the field of ecology. We look forward to be inspired! Explore the full line-up: vist.ly/4txjq @gfoesoc.bsky.social

Does anyone have better solutions for extracting the contents of vdat files on Linux? Perhaps that don't involve a slightly finicky wine prefix?

This is a mental war that we have to win. It's not about being a luddite, it's about destroying or retaining the ability to think. It's about how insidious this becomes in a situation where generative AI is adopted and then subverted intentionally. www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-whar...

"One Toolbox, Many Tools: A Practitioner’s Guide to Latent Variable Modelling for Community Ecology" doi.org/10.32942/X2K...

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it. Camus

We are hiring🚨 We are looking for 2 postdocs and 1 reasearch assistant to work in the ERC project “Tipping dynamics and resilience in adapting ecological systems” at @eawag.bsky.social Find the description of each position and the link to apply in the thread ⬇️

🚨 GAMs have moved on—so it’s time for an update. On March 3, 2026 (17:00–19:00 CET) I’ll be livestreaming an updated introduction to Generalized Additive Models in R 📺 YouTube livestream link: youtube.com/live/A9U8e1K... #RStats #mgcv #GAMs #gratia #statistics 🧪

I am doing a short workshop in this symposium (quoted below) for folks in and around Leipzig. Here's the abstract. I really indulged myself with this one. A Guerilla Approach to Scientific Workflow:

This is a post about animal excrement and the English language. bull$#!% = nonsense/lies chicken$#!% = petty or cowardly horse$#!% = nonsense/lies dog$#!%= low quality ape$#!% = wild bat$#!%= crazy Ordered above from oldest to newest: bull$#!% (1914), bat$#!% (1971).

Took me way too long to realize that its super easy to just merge pdfs in R rather than fussing with Adobe #rstats library(pdftools) pdf_combine( input = c("file1.pdf", "file2.pdf"), output = "merged.pdf" )

Dear colleagues, we are searching for candidates to fill a Full W3 Professorship for Plant #Ecology at the University of Regensburg, Germany. For details, see www.nature.com/naturecareer... 🌐 🌎 #AcademicJobs

New paper with @mhab.bsky.social @jdyeakel.bsky.social and @thilogross.bsky.social out now in @pnas.org! We show when and why you can know something about an entire network, just by knowing the behavior of it's building blocks: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

Everytime some asshole starts taking about how "EU regulation stifles innovation", this is the kind of stuff they are hoping to enable.

Does greater biodiversity always increase ecosystem functioning? I used to think so, but now I'm not so sure.

Great postdoc opportunity in Sweden!! With the one and only David Wardle 🧪🌐 www.umu.se/en/work-with...

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder. Auschwitz took time.

Less than a month to apply to join the BES editorial board as an Associate editor!🌳🌍 📖 If you're interested in contributing to any of the BES journals, check out the link below 👇 buff.ly/6ymRGcB