Holy hell, what an obituary

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

Postdoc in statistical ecology & evolution! Develop models bridging evolutionary theory with empirical data on sex differences in immunity and life history. Apply now! #postdoc #statistics #evolution #academicjobs #ecology jobs.helsinki.fi/job/Helsinki...

Great; now Julia programmers will start using this for variable names all over the place.

My grandfather going around the house to wind up the clocks.

This delicate sponge has a remarkably clever survival strategy.🪝✨️⁠ ⁠ Most sponges filter small plankton and bacteria from the water and pump them through their bodies. But the harp sponge (Chondrocladia lyra) uses small hooks along its vertical branches to trap and eat larger prey.

DFG erlaubt Einsatz von KI in der Begutachtung. Wenn wir jetzt noch die AI dazu kriegen, die komplette Forschung zu machen, haben wir den Menschen komplett von der Last des Forschungsprozzeses befreit und er kann sich komplett auf wichtige Dinge wie Reisekostenerstattungsanträge konzentrieren.

The de-skilled leading the unskilled is not what academia should be about.

Initial conditions: m1=84.9 m2=51.6 m3=83.2 (solar masses) v1x=3.066 v1y=6.955 v2x=6.747 v2y=6.667 v3x=-6.828 v3y=-6.519 (km/s) x1=-5.0 y1=-3.0 x2=32.0 y2=-33.0 x3=-26.0 y3=-35.0 (AU from center) Music: Passacaglia (BSG) – McCreary

This open access paper in TREE, "From rivals to partners: adversarial collaboration in ecology and evolution" by Juan Gefaell and Tobias Uller, looks like it could be of interest in #philsci, and in #hpbio in particular. www.cell.com/trends/ecolo...

Initial conditions: m1=97.8 m2=130.8 m3=89.0 (solar masses) v1x=-6.806 v1y=-1.184 v2x=3.172 v2y=1.147 v3x=4.488 v3y=-4.358 (km/s) x1=33.0 y1=32.0 x2=28.0 y2=1.0 x3=-3.0 y3=24.0 (AU from center) Music: Dune (2021) Medley – Zimmer

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... @ckunze.bsky.social tested whether the concept of response diversity holds for pulse disturbances & realized response diversity. Turns out interaction strength is key. Great collaboration w @owpet.bsky.social & Shyamolina Gosh @icbm-uol.bsky.social @hifmb.de

It's only unimaginable to US self-image. The US under Trump maintains its traditional foreign policy in Latin America, but does it in the open, with no pretense or subterfuge. Dropping the mask annoys the propagandists, denialists, and wishful ignorant, as it disturbs their necessary illusion.

It’s a dark night when you look at the news and are forced to admit that you no longer believe in the power of the FIFA peace prize

Did you know there are freshwater sponges in Germany? Spongilla lancustris is a demosponge growing in shallow, clear and clean ponds, lakes etc. it becomes dormant in winter and can survive dry periods! seen today in a dry pond in northern bavaria :)

A visual metaphor of AI’s role in Society

Contrary to what is often assumed, most (but not all) technological improvements have been bringing *diminishing* returns since the industrial revolution. E.g. the internet and mobile phones brought important changes, but not as much as the printed press, hand washing, and vaccination.

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

It’s weird how there’s always moves to make fiction more “interactive” with different endings etc. It’s like these people have never seen the same film twice a few years apart and had a completely different reaction. All fiction is interactive. That there’s an audience is the interactive part.

I'm an LLM-luddite. But anything James Somers writes is worth reading. (I remain a luddite.)

Look man, someone’s gonna build a torment nexus, we can’t just not build the torment nexus.

It's terrifying and exciting. Anyone written a guide to the challenges of taking up a legacy package? Others have been through this (@bbolker.bsky.social comes to mind, and surely there are others)

I wonder to what extent good writing principles transcend languages. And conversely, to what extent any differences in such principles and conventions feed back into how non-native English users (like myself) write in English.

So, very charismatic? @worldbollardassoc.bsky.social

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

POSTDOC JOB AD: I'm hiring a Bayesian ecologist to build a (IMO, extremely fun) model of humpback whale spatiotemporal dynamics in California 2-year position starting fall 2026. in-person in Santa Cruz; collab w with Mevin Hooten's lab at UT Austin. ask me Qs or apply: recruit.ucsc.edu/JPF02003

This video does a good job at summing up my worries about genAI. Yes, good stuff can come from it too, but it largely produces useless slop that is quickly filling the internet, and steals our attention from important things. (And I like kurzgesagt, who usually present problems in a balanced way)

Does this mean I can let my co-authors know that starting a sentence and forgetting to finish it is about to become cool?

Does body size predict abundance the same way in all environments, as predicted by the Metabolic theory of Ecology? Our new study challenges this assumption. Read it here: 📄 doi.org/10.1111/ele....

The new Wiley journal review system is an absolute nightmare. Editorial assistants have been replaced by a clunky, AI-enabled website that makes it harder to find and invite reviewers. Associate editor workloads have increased. I'm not convinced the invitations to reviewers are even going through.

I sat down with Prof. Cordelia Fine for an in-depth discussion about her wonderful new book “Patriarchy, Inc.” She critiques two dominant stories of inequality — the “different but equal” view and the “business case for diversity” — and sets out a richer vision of what equality should mean today.

BTW this "Frequency Reduces Difficulty" post from @martinfowler.com is the origin of the mantra "if it hurts, do it more often" (at least, it's where I learned it). It's amazing how broadly this applies. martinfowler.com/bliki/Freque...

New paper out in Ecology Letters! “The Imbalance of Nature: The Role of Species Environmental Responses for Community Stability” 📖 Read it here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... We tried to answer the question: What drives community stability in fluctuating environments?

Help! 🚨 Looking for resources on structural equation models—favorite methods papers, example studies, or guides for building an SEM pipeline. Thinking of using one for a dissertation chapter & not sure where to start. Suggestions? Please share!

Now this is Content

Looking for openly available: - before-after data in space - with a restoration measure inbetween (e.g. dam/invasive spec. removal, urban green space creation...) - min. 10 sites (quadrats / random places along a stream / ponds...) - species data, env. data of some sort, GPS coordinates

They've lost the 9yos

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

MC Stan is here! Follow for the latest Stan news, and tag if you want us to repost your posts about new papers, packages, courses, etc. about Stan

Is this platform useful for asking biology questions? 🌾🧪 Question for my plant-peeps: Is there something newer and better than microsatellites for assessing paternity? (where newer and better means cheaper and easier?) Have field arrays, known parents, need to genotype offspring seed for paternity.

The Desperation of Causal Inference in Ecology statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/09/15/t...

@raviranjan.bsky.social & I are teaching a free online workshop with on experimental design for environmental scientists on the 23rd. We'll focus on using simulations to evaluate how well different experimental designs help achieve your goals. Please sign up & share! forms.gle/MZTxeQs4UpMr...

‘Like walking through time’: as glaciers retreat, new worlds are being created in their wake

"AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Super awesome new paper in #MEE describing #causal #detection of shifts in #biodiversity! So many great insights here—a must read for those interested in #causalinference And love Fig 3! Congrats team! @lsantinieco.bsky.social doi.org/10.1111/2041...

Sphagnum fallax in a mesotrophic sloping fen in central Germany 🌿

An extension of joint SDM to jointly model species abundances and intraspecific trait variation. #ecopubs @esajournals.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/ecy....