Being descended from those founders isn't really a flex. Virginia planter DNA abounds within Black America. Thanks to segregation, the majority of our European DNA comes from before 1865 (although quite a bit since then - humans in proximity mix, by choice, circumstance, and sadly, by force).

I don't like to share this, but I'm most likely descended from a signer of the Declaration... as are thousands of Black Americans. (It wasn't just Jefferson, most unfortunately.) Black Americans don't count as American to MAGA unless we parrot their rhetoric. (And really, not even if we sell out.)

Absentmindedly took a wrong turn on my bike, and thereby discovered a minor shortcut -- so far, so normal. But it made me think of MCMC, so I think my brain is officially broken.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Trump rose to political prominence by arbitrarily denying the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate, so it's not completely surprising that they've now started using this tactic on ordinary people.

i made a helpful reference

Everyone knows about Ahmed al-Ahmad, the Syrian Muslim migrant who took down one gunman. Another man, a Middle Eastern refugee, ran into a firefight and kicked the gun away from the other gunman. Police shot him, and bystanders kicked him in the head while he was down, thinking he was the terrorist.

Born at 350 ppm and now spending every winter of my 30s commenting on how weird it is that it is so warm, so mild.

I'm going to do my best to alt text this because holy crap, everyone should know.

Before the European Enlightenment, cultures across the world engaged scientifically with the natural history, and showcased it visually with their own unique visual language and perception of the living world. I do not understand the current aversion to different "styles" in scientific visual art.

"When you see our work, what are you really seeing? Are you seeing a robot's soulless prose? Or are you seeing the image of our Standard 8 English teacher, Mrs. Amollo, her voice reminding us to connect our paragraphs with a suitable linking phrase?" open.substack.com/pub/marcusol...

ICE sprayed a one-year-old in the face with pepper spray. The child and parents are US citizens, but that doesn't even matter. These monsters pepper-sprayed a baby. We cannot allow ICE to continue this behavior, and they aren't going to reform themselves. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

absolute bargain if any of yous have a use for 7,949,020,598 wasps

This court case said one thing very clearly; but what if, and hear me out, it actually said the opposite (we all know they Must have meant to be transphobic right??) -respectable uk newspapers

I once again ask that we all pay attention to how frequently the discourse of “realism” is deployed for the sole purpose of stopping any attempts to tackle any form of inequality. Ppl like Madeley need us all to believe change is “unrealistic” despite evidence to the contrary.

when you're a diasporic korean of 8 years old on your second visit to korea, your uncles may take you to the independence hall museum, and at some point you might see life-size animatronics of brutal tortures used by the japanese occupiers like confinement boxes and you will have nightmares after

After much research and development I have made an offline version of ChatGPT. Now you can save water and electricity while navel-gazing, and carry one of the world's most powerfully annoying AI chatbots in your pocket.

for anyone interested, @hammerandhope.bsky.social ran an article on exactly this: "An organized urban wing of the railroad called vigilance committees focused on protecting, supporting, and learning from fugitives. That education went in both directions..." hammerandhope.org/article/unde...

All of this is fascism. And not early stage either. This is the embedding of the Right Wing Daily Mail press consensus as the absolutely unshakable common sense of the UK state. Made possible because the "left wing" party has abdicated any kind of moral position on it.

Love how transphobes refused to accept "cis" and said it was a slur and that proper womanhood mustn't be diluted by adjectives, and now they've discovered they do need a word to distinguish cis people from trans people but they can't use "cis" so they're just like "...biological people??"

"All is lost" narratives are popular because people generally do not want to take action. Taking action is tiring so if all is lost, you are off the hook. Nothing is more seductive than not having to do anything.

And they really do just fall apart when you don’t agree with the assertion that *those people* shouldnt be able to live in the country. They know it looks bad to say the racism and xenophobia out loud so they keep it as this nebulous,yknow *the illegal illegals that are illegal* for *reasons* (wink)

They are very relatable birds! I once saw a crow pick up a slice of bread and land on a sloping tram shelter to eat. It slid and couldn't get purchase so flew to the other side, but dropped the bread on the tracks as it flew. Then a tram came and ran over the bread while it watched.

Editor absolutely nailed it with this subheading, "One even recommended a book ‘similar’ to Lolita". Recommending "a book similar to Lolita" is *so much more alarming* than recommending Lolita. And indeed, it goes on to detail that the relevant similarity is pedophilic lust, not anything literary.

This is a gift. Thank you to @siembranc.bsky.social for sharing this new toolkit with what they did when Border Patrol showed up in NC: docs.google.com/document/d/1... - share far and wide especially with our comrades in MN and LA (New Orleans esp).

uk government just made it illegal to glance at a lighthouse.

I live about 10-15 minutes' cycle from campus, and was 15 minutes late coming in this morning – so obviously an unpredicted torrential downpour started just after I left home. Karmic punishment rain.

My mind keeps circling around Democrats telling the military that they are "allowed to refuse illegal orders" -- as opposed to reminding them that their oath *requires* them to refuse illegal orders.

The real Turing test is that AI will stop using em dashes if you ask; humans will make you pry their favorite punctuation out of their cold, dead hands.

Just imagining how much better it would be if ALL news stories about vaccine-preventable illnesses were illustrated with pictures of people with the disease, not pictures of needle injections. If you must show something that people will find scary & unpleasant, make it the disease, not the cure.

every trans person i see post about the OU suspension knows that the suspended target is trans & a grad student, & has an innate awareness that this is about purging trans employees. every cis person i see thinks the target is a rando professor & that this is about giving conservatives good grades

I know this is besides the point but watching lawyers say that the 1st Amendment protects you from getting a bad grade on an essay is so genuinely unhinged it strips the bourgeoisie's mask of civility away and reveals the Christian nationism inherent in the sustem Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

Take a break from your doomscrolling to appreciate the fact that there are foot-long (≥28cm!!) 'supergiant' amphipods roaming the hadal depths of the world's oceans.

every neoliberal policy analyst wants to "trim the fat" of society until the lean times come. community level resilience, redundancies, etc are good actually

#OtD 1 Dec 1991 Anti-Fascist Action successfully stopped the neo-Nazi British National Party from holding a march in Glasgow. Fascists were confronted in the streets while BNP leadership were trapped inside a bar and forced to escape via the sewers stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8059...

have written that piece before but there's a whole lot of "oh wow this generation of kids are fucked" and nowhere near enough "huh what exactly have that generation of parents been doing and how can we not do that, going forward"

Elections are 3+ years away, Greens are surging in the polls, and there are already elements of UK academia pre-emptively bending the knee to Reform, which is not even in power. US unis that submitted still got screwed over. UK academia can choose to learn from that or get destroyed by fascism.

Bus I'm on left the station a full minute early, so that a guy who was rushing for it missed the door by seconds. I thought we were supposed to be a civilised society.

People keep saying that anarchists need to be "realistic" because "party politics is the only way to actually get things done" and then party politics is like

This is murder. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

we have to get out of this framing that the hard right has a point about immigration numbers, but they're saying it in a mean & racist way even if they weren't racist at all (& they very much are), what they are calling for is still national suicide

i think we have to get off the defensive on immigration it's not just necessary, it's good! - & the easier it is, the greater its benefits

This is either going to turn out to be one of those intentional hoaxes to test the scientific community, or we are all actually just doomed.

No, you're not crazy, "net migration" makes no fucking sense. "Migration" includes both immigration and emigration, so the net sum of either is the one minus the other. But UK news outlets referring to net *immigration* as "net migration" is ... telling.

Our H5 avian flu in marine bat story is in News from Science 🌊🦇🦠 thanks @martinenserink.bsky.social for covering it! Also excited to see my MSc lecturer @thijskuiken.bsky.social commented on it! 📰 News link www.science.org/content/arti... 🔬Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Figure 1 shows the overall methodology." Ladies & gentlemen: science is in serious trouble. bsky.app/profile/erik...

One of the weirdest things about growing up in the US was having to learn as a full-ass adult what a 'pilgrim' actually is, because 17th-century Puritan settlers called themselves "pilgrims" and we all just ... let them? & then use the word almost exclusively for them and not for, y'know, pilgrims?

Opened @zotero.org to find a flag saying that a paper in my database has been retracted. The listing was automatically updated with a link to the retraction notice. Very cool function!