I can't fucking believe we're doing this again.

In the new Pitt episode they have to shift to non-internet operations from the 90s. Makes me wonder if we did this at my university, would this make things actually simpler, easier, and be more time efficient for faculty? I believe it would.

When academia's stars mistreat people, they're "punished" with relief from teaching, mentoring, and service responsibilities. This frees them to spend more time on the more valued work of research. And dumps less valued responsibilities onto colleagues, making it harder for them to become stars.

Claudine Gay was punished and lost her job for incomplete citations in her PhD dissertation.

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

Harvard Places Math Professor Martin Nowak on Paid Administrative Leave Over Epstein Ties

Are administrative-burden audits a thing? I think the amount of STUFF UConn requires of our time is excessive - trainings, inspections (ok these might be fine), paperwork, surveys, approvals, etc. It’d be interesting to quantify (in work hours & $$$) although I already know it’s TOO MUCH

Came across the phrase "cognitive DDOS" to describe our present culture. Understood instantly what it meant.

Welcome to Bro Talk, the podcast where we get guys to talk to a therapist by telling them we want them as a guest on our podcast

Autosatire is not a word yet, but it should be.

Where was I a few weeks ago when they launched Coalie? Did this drive @theonion.com out of business? How can one satire this level of autosatire?

It's about time! Summers has been disparaging women in STEM for as long as folks have been listening to him

Damn did @bardcollege.bsky.social not get enough money from the pedophile sex trafficker?

It was them, all along.

New linky post, including: -NSF Bio restructuring and rejecting GRFPs without review -Thundercat on happiness -An extremely wild story about a fake soccer coach interview that turned into a kidnapping -Eusociality not caused by haplodiploidy -Diverse editorial boards results in better peer review

Last night I went to the theater. It was special, it was wonderful. It mattered. What I love about the theater is that you cannot reduce it to "content." It is art of the moment. Nothing else to sell other than the experience of being in the theater for the performance itself.

It really is fascinating how overt it now is that there are certain - really not controversial - ideas that you aren’t allowed to say on television.

Terry really hit it out of the park with this post. I even posted it on the bulletin board outside my office. I'm making time today to rekindle my joy.

Have these Olympics been as inspirational for you as they have for me? Are they helping you find more joy? 🧪 scienceforeveryone.science/sciencing-fo...

Well it only took 16 years but someone finally took our Prius’s catalytic converter. (And the VIN was etched on it anyhow)

Reading people. Body language. Knowing how to connect with people totally unlike you and with different backgrounds and beliefs. Defusing tense situations. Gaining trust. High endurance, pain tolerance, and work ethic. Reaction time. Prioritizing order of execution. Anticipating people’s needs. Tons

Do not feed the trolls. If your profile describes yourself as a contrarian reply guy, you’re not really interested in conversation…

One challenge is that pols follow journalists. There is a felt need to counter right-wing narratives that get juiced which MSM then legitimize & amplify from X. As long as legacy media like NYT etc monitor + cite X as public sentiment (which they tell us they do) it is tricky for pols to leave

Simply incredible work. Among other findings- about half of all migration stopover hot spots are in urban areas! 🤯

It’s giving middle passage

Is this you, you might ask? You may or may not know the answer to this question. But your students certainly will know, but if it is you then they're too afraid to tell you the truth. Your colleagues will know too, but they are afraid of retribution, so they are secretly mentoring your victims.

The more time I spend on this earth, I learn more about scientists who have carefully crafted a reputation for being super woke about social justice and equity, use this as a way to recruit minoritized students into their labs, and then can't be bothered to give them the time of day.

More organismal biology? Commmunity engagement? In an explicit DEIJ and social mobility framework? And the talented students of the CSU?!

We're hiring at CSUN. Vertebrate Functional Morphologist. Please apply! We still allow DEI, which I horribly need to specify. (I'm also not on the committee, but happy to answer any questions!)

Extremely grim portent when a university denies tenure to a person who literally wrote the research methods handbook on decoloniality

DOCTOR Rümeysa Öztürk has earned her PhD!!

Ever sent yourself a text to make a note of something, and half a second later you get a text and think, “ooh! A text! Who might that be?”

The best place to be a monthly donor of Skype a Scientist is unequivocally givebutter.com/SupportSAS26, BUT they don't have a nice system for updates like Patreon does, so for now we're doing this hybrid thing. You can subscribe to the patreon updates for free though!

Everyone who worked at this camp should go to prison.

putting this up in my room like a movie poster

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

So when thousands of women (and children) were being duplicated--including in non-consensual AI porn--it was no big deal. But it took "only a 15-sec clip" of these two famous white men to draw outrage and fear. Gotcha. Cool cool.

My favorite Robert Duvall performance was in Open Range. Just a supporting role but he filled it with such vulnerability, strength, and love in the face of adversity.

It is beyond insulting for @aaas.org to plan to host Brian Greene, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, for a plenary talk at #AAAS2026, then cancel it the day before, only for the replacement to insist Greene was a “good scientist” and that he wished we could all hear from him.

Today is the 36th anniversary of the pale blue dot picture. Yesterday we did a journal club about a classic Sagan paper and my grad student BP ended by sharing this video. I’d heard the more polished pale blue dot speech so many times but I find this one to be more human youtu.be/tgQ1PtkZvGU?...

if you're an older person who finds words like mogg and maxxing annoying, just starting using them. people over the age of 30 have the superpower to end trends by simply adopting them

*rubs temples* As I've spent the better part of the day explaining why I don't think Newsom should be the Democratic nominee for president, it pains me to "defend" this, but... The governor of California is legally obligated to proclaim each Feb 6 Reagan Day per a 2010 state law.

Have you noticed how people calling out Epstein and systemic misogyny in sciences, are usually early career women. They put emotional labour, time, and career on the line. While men, in the field they dominate, earn more, and behaviour they enable, just go on as if nothing has happened.

It’s an RNA world. RNA is posited to be the first genetic material, arising 4 billion years ago. It can store information and act as an enzyme. Eventually, it duplicated its information into a more stable form, DNA.

THEY ARE BUYING UP WAREHOUSES TO HOLD HUMAN BEINGS IN DETENTION INDEFINITELY. I feel crazy at how everyone is acting like this is normal. These are concentration camps being built right before our eyes. These buildings are not meant to house human beings. People will be caged like cattle and die.

Every single person mad about "putting this on the voters" my God man do you not know how Donald Trump came to be elected, people voted for the guy, that is how it works here.

At parts of the Winter Olympics in Italy, COVID precautions remain, grounded in the reality that respiratory illness is still circulating. When your lungs are your livelihood, prevention is part of performance. #COVID #COVID19 #PublicHealth #InfectionPrevention #Olympics #LongCOVID #MaskUp #N95

I'm preadapted for this era of AI by putting typos into my writing for the past several decades. It's how you know it's me!