Ok, these nerds are overcomplicating everything. What they're looking for is risk management in finding mates & preserving social status. The system is called aristocracy and people who know how to read usually think it's a crummy idea.

Cleaning up internal pipes and moving micromamba env setups to using pixi instead, as is the sign of the times. For per-directory env setup like pixi, I usually just have a central environments dir that separate working projects just call from. Is there a built in universal env list for pixi?

Guide scaffolding improves phylogenetic accuracy and enables integration across 16S amplicon regions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #jcampubs

Did you publish part of your PhD work in @journal-evo.bsky.social or @evolletters.bsky.social this year? Submit your paper for the SSE Presidents’ Award! Up to two recipients will each present an award talk during the virtual portion of #Evol2026 in May. Deadline: January 30. shorturl.at/CnVo6

It was a great ride to be on the launch team of @natmicrobiol.nature.com & then have the pleasure of leading it for a time I'm super proud of what we achieved & happy to see it continue doing well It was fun to reminisce for this birthday issue & read the other great pieces. Many happy returns!

I really don't know about Breuer Building under Sotheby's. As historic as the Sotheby's name is, something about luxury goods auctioneer taking over what was previously a public space under auspices of museums feels more like a fall, not an improvement. Granted, the galleries will remain open.

In honor of the IMG/M data portal's 20th anniversary, we want to hear how you use it in your work and what type of science it has enabled you to do. You can share how IMG has helped your science using this form: https://jointgeno.me/IMGStoriesForm @berkeleylab.lbl.gov @axelvisel.bsky.social 🖥️🧬 🦠

It looks like Asahi project's pretty decent as an everyday driver on Apple M1 - pretty impressive! I was initially a skeptic on running linux on a locked down ARM machine. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4DK...

Hmm. Ebay is surprisingly great for hunting down decent cookware, even new ones. Just picked up a ceramic microwave pasta cooker for $10, not available on amazon (except for plastic knockoffs, and I'm not cooking my pasta in a plastic container).

Webpage for thrifted voice message machine recordings. It's curiously fun to listen to, with occasional oddballs. afterthetone.com

It's been a while since I've been able to make it to the riverside while the sun's still up. Moments before the photo the whole sky was lit up in orange and purple, glad I could make it. #nyc

LLM on z80, this one gave me a chortle github.com/HarryR/z80ai

Holy cow. Nvidia and AMD will be going on another GPU price hike this year, increasing every month. 5090 is predicted to cost in the $5000 range by 2026 EOY. This is getting ridiculous. wccftech.com/amd-and-nvid...

Lots of interesting publications coming out on the last days of the year. This is one of them. I do wonder if the hypothetical homogenization of the bacterial species will really mean homogenization of the behavior - ie expressed genes and such.

I didn't do too badly for a warehouse worker running a part-time lab this year. Bit of a bummer all the actual paper writing & collab were done toward the end of the year, so sharing preprints will need to wait a bit.

I should probably check for typos and such... Only if I had the energy left. Ack.

Happy 2026 everyone! Here's a Binomica labs retrospective post. An amateur independent researcher's perspective on genome sequencing, academic conferences and approaching research themes undertaken through 2025 🧪 naturepoker.wordpress.com/2025/12/31/w...

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Companion for the last day of 2025 on this side of the globe. This and pressing need to finish writing up the retrospective post for Binomica labs 😔

replicationists take note 👇 #MicroSky no train wreck, rather 'last train home' (pat metheny) youtu.be/Tb6h7rjRAYs

I agree.

Releasing alignism, a small tool that I have found useful for doing multiple sequence alignment in browser. hgbrian.github.io/alignism/ - The hard work was done by the awesome biowasm team! - Does tree building too - V fast compared to e.g., muscle on EBI - Not tested that much!

Today is the last day that you can repost this image

뒤집어 말하면, 점진적으로 사회적 신분과 명망이 자라지 않는 사람은 노오오오력이 모자란 게으름쟁이 라는 생각이, 그냥 개인 사고방식 전면에 디펄트로 탑제되어 있고, 그것이 너무 당연한 것이라 일생을 살면서 고개한번 갸웃 해 본적 없는 사람들의 우리 사회 전반의 학계와 과학 연구계를 이끌고 있는것이 아닌가 하는 생각이 계속 든다. 어쩌면 고교-대학-대학원 외에는 아무런 사유의 기준이 없는 사람들 에게는 이게 당연할 사고방식 일지도.

문제는, 내가 독립연구 명목으로 보낸 지난 15+a년의 의미는 일개 개인, 그것도 가족이나 직인을 통한 부가 아닌 창고나 공사판의 노동자도 현대 과학 연구에 어느정도 종사 할 수있다는, 이론이 아닌 살아있는 증명을 하고 싶어서 라는 것. 재미로 진통제까지 먹어가면서 시퀸싱 연구소를 운영하는게 아니라는 거지. 그런데 이게 보통 학계인의 사고방식으로는 그냥 이해가 안되는, 거의 외계인 수준의 행동인듯. 그들의 머리속에선 노력을 하면 정부든 학교든에서 상을 받고 사회적 신분이 상승하는게 거의 물리학 법칙 수준으로 당연한 것이다.

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Stanek et al. studied the Drosophila "dot chromosome” to investigate chromosome-specific size expansion, focusing on four species whose dot chromosomes are 2- to 15-fold larger compared to D. melanogaster. 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf304 #evobio #molbio #drosophila

어쩌다 가뭄에 콩 나듯 연구 협업하는 캐나다 교수님이 있는데, 연락되서 신상이야기 할때마다 '모든걸 포기하고 캐나다로 와, 연구실에서 일하면서 학위까지 해결 ㄱㄱ' 그런데 요즘 미국이나 미국 학계 사람들 하는 것을 보면 왠지 그냥 확! 해버릴까 하는 생각이... 그런데 그랬다 안되면 진짜 다 끝인데. 흠.

저는 이 짤을 정말정말 좋아해요(ㄱㅋㅋㅋㄱㅋㅋㅋㅋㄱ

Hot pockets are 8.99??? Do they come with gold fillings?

A pair of happy hammerhead sharks (ca. 1735 Edo period Japan)

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

I have a small pipeline setup that takes my google scholar alerts and compiles locally searchable database & abstracts files & plots. And I have to say - browsing some abstracts falling under broader topics recently had been depressing. There are LOTS of bad papers out there.

'Penguins listening to the Gramophone during the summer, 1908 - 1909'

Taken heading out around 3 this morning, it was beautiful to see fresh snow on the ground. Not quite the storm of the season they warned us about but I'm happy to get what we can.

Perfect calm and silence before the snow weather in the city right now

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

The final form of my 2nd postdoc paper with the Bassler Lab! Turns out our favorite quorum-sensing phage isn’t a one-off, but rather a member of a globally dispersed family of phages that sense a universal autoinducer. #phagesky #microsky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

NGL, this gave me a chortle

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

"Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to." www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Fortran is still going strong, I see.

"..based on a common wavefront design that can be adapted to support a variety of dynamic programming algorithms: local, global, and semi-global alignment of genomic and protein sequences with a variety of commonly used scoring schemes" from @martinsteinegger.bsky.social andco

Jules Verne and Marcel Proust have long since left the building, but Le Zimmer is still open at Place du Châtelet, No. 1, on the border between the 1st and 4th Arrondissements. Your table is waiting.

Got out of back to back night shift-morning side job. One benefit of the netherworld style scheduling is I can down a can of beer and pizza rolls at 10:30 in the morning and still be a considered a normal, functioning member of the society.

Screening multiple databases for a side project - globdb.org stands out as particularly impressive in both coverage and quality control. When they say they deduplicated the data, they really mean it - here's how a quick sourmash-UPGMA cluster stacks up, all the way to about 140k samples

rapidgzip can! github.com/mxmlnkn/rapi...

Oh, pigz can't decompress in parallel - makes sense when I think about it. Bummer.

You know what, I think I earned some ice cream today.

if tumblr dies I need this video to make it's seasonal rotation here instead just in case, Happy holidays 🎄