The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

"They're the kind of people who frequently say things that are so healthy it could make you sick"

The problem with "by any means necessary" is that if you use it eagerly, or for more than the rarest of things, you justify people using it against you. Generally best to find an idea of acceptable means at least a bit, potentially a lot, more limited.

It would be better if the civilized world were to do less banning of Ben-Gvir, and instead do something about him. Put out an international arrest warrant, or something stronger.

It would be nice if having access to archives of messages from one's past made one feel less rather than more lonely. The vast gulf of time can be really strange to stare across.

Increasingly weirded out by Ireland's language policy bullshit the more I see of it. Nobody loves the outsider who turns up with opinions on how to run the place, but I'm used to that. What I'd go with is an "English first, other languages if you like, no special effort for others" national policy

A longstanding suspicion I have is that laughter shares a lot of the feel of cognitive restructuring. Consider, from MST3k: Movie: "Where the hell am I?" Callback: "You're the hell here!" The latter doesn't really exist in common parlance, but it calls attention to a quirk of language/phrasing.

I don't know tons about the company, but I think IKEA still is one of a short list of companies I view with a general sort of goodwill, without having heard anything in terms of reasons to dislike it.

Oh man…. Fixing this slop would actually be a really good homework assignment

Any pundit or politician that's trying to tell you about constitutional amendments they'd like to pass is just talking fantasy. Doesn't mean it's bad to do that (and I certainly have ideas of my own that'd require an amendment) but it's important they recognise it's almost certainly not gonna happen

Just finished Stross' The Regicide Report; not exactly the ending I was hoping for, but I'm not sure there was a great way to end the Laundry Files series. Uncomfortable additions to continuity were introduced a few books back and a rosy ending didn't seem to be in the cards.

I'm wary of this argument in principle (not claiming to take stances on where it's applied) because it suggests that so long as you have a good goal you can do whatever you want. There must be in theory potential remedies worse than the malady they're aiming for. They're avoided in medicine.

Today cancer took one of my friends in Pittsburgh. I've known for about a week he wasn't going to make it. Still hurts. Wishing I could've seen him before his curtain call.

I still get some good laughs at the idea of setting up a data centre in a place called Lansdowne.

One thing I like about a lot of jazz is it trusts the listener enough that if it sets the start of a musical voice, it doesn't need to keep playing it when it's obvious it should be there; it can build a chorus of 8 voices in the listener's head while only playing 3. (numbers are arbitrary there)

Cool to learn that while plays without any spoken/sung parts in them are rare, there are a few. Samuel Beckett wrote a play called Act Without Words. Would be cool to see it if I ever find a production.

Had a former-coworker-now-friend remind me that it's not just the US I miss - she pointed me at some amazing opera clips of Aida that really makes me yearn for the Metropolitan Opera. I don't know if I'll ever live in NYC or the US again, but NYC was an awesome, messy place to live.

When I was a kid, I'd guess 8th grade but I don't know, one of the assignments I remember asked us to imagine a country/society and design it and write a paper about it. Being really fascinated by Japan at the time (but not knowing much yet) I called my imagined society Nipponia.

The soundtrack to Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is an excellent introduction to the more experimental side of jazz.

Very sad that cancer is a thing (someone who was a friend of mine in Pittsburgh is dying of it).

Sooo my new apartment in Dublin is close enough to some kind of christian building (not sure if it's actually a church) that I can hear its bells ding out every hour as if I have a grandfather clock, but thankfully not loud enough to be annoying. It's pretty alright.

It feels weird to withdraw papers that are presumably good science but fail in some other way, but it's probably for the best that that's an option. There are a ethical concerns around the practice of science that are not purely about research integrity - things that keep science functioning.

Step 0 in using a GenML system: tell it to stop complementing ideas, stop being enthusiastic, and to be direct. I find all the bouncy positivity they start with to be like garlic to my vampire.

I really don't know if there's a way to express to Amazon how dumb it is they can't give a delivery window tighter than "sometime this day before 10pm", but I would love to talk to somebody about it. I'm sure they have the information internal to the company and could give me a time +-30m.

A society where punishnemt is never on the table won't work very well, but a society where the urge to punish becomes dominant is a disaster. If you must zealously regulate your own character and those in a movement with you, this is one of the most important topics on which to focus.

A bit more on Hasan Piker and extremism: substack.com/profile/9890...

It is good to see Orban leaving power. It will be good if the social movement tied to him fades like a bad dream. He was a terrible leader.

Learning a lot about "vibe coding" in the new job, and the fact that the systems used for doing it are so stunningly capable makes me more worried for the world, not less.

Seems obvious that this is the threat that Russia should face, over its continued invasion of Ukraine. Not the threat that Iran should face for .. nothing remotely like that. Trump's threat of genocide is way, way beyond the pale. It is bonkers that he is still President after making this threat.

Russia's willingness to simply take resources when one might be able to get away from it, irrespective of ownership and norms, is why we're supporting Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. Nations should unite against that mentality, whomever exhibits it.

Been doing a few bit-by-bit thoughts on the move to Dublin in my substack, but thinking about doing some more substantial writings comparing my life in the US and in Ireland next week, a little after the 1 month mark. Will avoid talking abt work for obvious reasons, but there's plenty else to cover.

The US has fallen so far, from openly promoting a faith on social media, to bragging about murders on the ocean, to kidnapping foreign leaders, to invading and threatening other nations with war crimes. Any real patriot would, given chance, use any means necessary to remove Trump/Hegseth/Miller.

One of the things I find regrettable about how I'm popular parlance people are either put in a math-y or artsy bucket (or neither, but rarely both) is that there is a lot of cool stuff at the intersection of artsy and math-y.

While I grant the reasoning in this, there are alternative arguments for the concern being concerning. Are they good arguments? Not sure. Part of the problem of colonization is there wasn't enough accountability for the powerful in their treatment of people they might target.

The perils of April Fools: A) Cool stuff gets announced that isn't real B) Cool pranks get happen but if you're too busy with life then you miss them (or they may be short-lived and you wish they were longer) C) You end up out-of-touch about real stuff that you thought was a joke

People should not look to markets for moral approval - markets often don't appreciate the horrors of war, or the worse horrors of war-without-rules-or-decency. Some markets even profit off of war.

Annoying that pastebin doesn't let people delete comments on their posts. In most cases people should not do so, but when there's botspam it's infuriating there's no way to take it down without filing a ticket.

It's a little spooky to for the first time in one's life see a strong resemblance to a parent's face in one's own.

There's a reasonably sharp divide between science communicators who have a lot of depth in one or more of the sciences and those who just like science but can't tell bad science from good. The former tend to (but are not always) focused on a particular field, and often are researchers.

The first go at SNL UK was pretty painful to watch. It's mostly either that they don't have good comedy writers or their comedy writers haven't gelled as a team yet. There were some other failings too though, leaving a first episode where no skits are memorable, and it's rare that something is funny

Spent a pleasant part of the morning trying to remember the name of an educational toy from my youth, sketching it, sending images of the sketch to my mum, and eventually we found it - the TI Magic Wand Speaking Reader: www.datamath.org/Speech/Magic...

I wonder, if one were to have a home with no standard power outlets, only high-power-delivery USB-C, what'd be missing. Because the most common thing I have plugged into outlets, in Dublin or the US, has been USB-C power adapters, for years.

Having just moved to Ireland, I thought I'd take notes on how Irish gaelic is written to at least be able to pronounce names of places and people Fada for marking long vowels? Fine Weird sound-ligatures? Sure Other sound combos? I guess. Urú? Umm... what is going on here? Semi-úru? Is this a prank?

We might not realise that many of the tedious little things in life are the things that replenish us and keep us ready to handle the larger difficulties. Optimizing too many of the former away could be a really bad idea, and this may be something we need to learn.

It should be easier for people looking to connect to academic culture, wherever they are and whatever their job, to find people, lectures, meetups, institutions, and the like locally.

Trying to establish a local financial identity in Ireland (probably Europe in general) is really annoying when you don't have one yet and are in temporary corp housing. This week I tried and failed to open a bank account with both Revolut and Bank of Ireland over docs-not-accepted nonsense. Sigh.

Really sucks that people have gotten so used to Trump's insane, first-amendment and rule-of-law busting proclamations, that it's no longer news that he thinks news orgs should face treason charges for not covering his attacks on Iran in a positive light. And that Congress will do nothing about it.

I think a lot of activism goes off the rails when it decides "to be silent is to be complicit". Just came across a name-and-shame org (even that mission I'm not keen on) that has a long entry on how bad someone is but they can't point out anything that suggests he's hostile to their cause.

Just had the weird experience of some very outspoken late-teens kids wanting to talk to me about their right-wing politics while I was eating at a burrito place in Dublin, and one of them had memorized some statistics of questionable relevance that may have won him arguments with other people.