🚨 Postdoc opening -- Come work with us at Northwestern! 🚨 This position is to work on evaluating LLMs for sociopolitical value expression: postdocs.northwestern.edu/announcement... -- Please share!

Not quite as funny as the University of Alabama betting scandal getting found out by a guy going into a sports book and being like "no no I have insider information" but I am not surprised that this got revealed because the NBA actually tries to keep an eye on gambling behavior re: players/coaches.

Saw my first e-ink bus arrival time pilot at Grand & St. Clair! www.transitchicago.com/cta-announce...

Playoff baseball hits different when the weather finally cools off

#NowPlaying soundcloud.com/pcmus/ten

We just spent 6 months to add 1 figure to this paper. Some people said, "Couples aren't prioritizing men's careers. Men just have better earnings opportunities when moving." Earnings effects of moves for couples on the left, singles on the right. Negligible gap between single men and women.

Quick look at the Uptown-Edgewater July Red Line station ridership. Lawrence and Berwyn returned to service on 07/20 while Argyle and Bryn Mawr moved into their new stations.

South Shore residents returned to their ransacked apartments after an ICE raid. "It looks like hell." blockclubchi.co/4gV8ODq

Changing the default fonts on your browser is surprisingly a huge value add.

A friendly reminder as Nobel season approaches, the Nobel Prizes are not real Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Bluesky is overall much better than Twitter but I do think we have the worst case of “so you hate waffles?” in the history of websites

Oh, you have criticisms of my paper? Surely you noticed the part of the paper where we already rebutted your critique, by writing “Possible criticisms: the methodology of this paper is bad. We are aware of this.”

Just discovered a neat little #QuartoPub trick for formatting a range of dates. Quarto doesn't support start/end dates, but you can modify the date formatting string to fake it quarto.org/docs/referen...

Kind of funny that the gap between LCD Soundsystem's breakup and "American Dream" was longer than the gap between "American Dream" and now.

You know things are rough when the AAUP's advice on how to use social media is just "set all your accounts to private."

Turning off auto updates

Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out www.gavi.org/vaccineswork... "Before vaccination, the prevalence of HPV was between 15 & 17%, which has decreased in vaccinated women to less than one percent by 2021." #VaccinesWork

Setting the work slack to a serif font @dame.is

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

I am recruiting PhD students this year! Our research group is holding an info session in a few weeks - details are at blog.communitydata.science/prospective-... , including a sign-up link.

Bleak

Looking like it’s a pop punk fall

I encourage people to watch this video. The selected footage shows the professor doing nothing even slightly out of line, whereas the student misinterprets the law and hopes to impose her religious beliefs on the material. Administrators caving to this is terrifying.

Finally solved the #degoogling debate. Anyone who finds fault with this list = Skill issue.

Let’s Get Buses and Trains funded Quickly

Univ of Rhode Island has an open rank faculty position in the Dept of Political Science to lead their new PhD program in Computational Social Science. jobs.uri.edu/postings/15597

Are you interested in Bayesian Optimization? Do you think multi-arm bandits are cool? Do you like donating to good causes? We'll, I'm super excited to say I'll be hosting a charity workshop on Bayesian Optimization with Multi-Arm Bandits on October 23rd. sites.google.com/view/dariia-...

cursed vim.gabornyeki.com

Interesting post critiquing syntax like Python's list comprehension

Just read this incredible paper by @s0hw.bsky.social & @jeremydfoote.com: Why Do People Participate in Small Online Communities? The authors question the assumption that growth is always good, and instead show many benefits of small online communities. Highly recommended! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

When you look at Bluesky activity stats, things aren't great. But bots have gotten worse here in my experience, and so I can't help but wonder what "actual" activity metrics would look like.

People making apps on ATProto should probably stop adding -sky to the end of product names. It's a separate product! Own it.

some light teasing for an upcoming quarto revealjs plugin I have been working on

Accidentally created a map with rivers only. Check the Sahara.

This really seems like the beginning of the end of the open web. Devastating for archiving and research.

TIL you can have your own personal, secret little list of files for git to ignore if you edit .git/info/exclude

Can Bluesky say every word in the dictionary? I dunno but I plan to find out! I made a website that tracks every single word said on bluesky (as of yesterday).

My mind is blown 🤯

As the battle for Mecatol Rex rages, change comes to the Galaxy. Twilight Imperium: Thunder’s Edge is a new expansion to everyone’s favorite galactic conquest and diplomacy board game Twilight Imperium Fourth Edition. Learn more: www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2025...

I am being 100% serious when I say a social network being first to break baseball trade stories is a great proxy for its general utility for following the news

One of the greatest baseball players of all time, probably the greatest Chicago Cubs player next to Ernie Banks. His legendary performance against the Cardinals in 1984 will never be forgotten. RIP Ryne Sandberg. youtu.be/34mz7wQKTB0?...

i’m gonna — use more — em dashes — so many em — dashes — that not even — an AI could — be assumed — to be the writer — of my posts — this is — how we assert — our — humanity

This is the end of a defamation lawsuit that Project Veritas filed against Stanford Internet Observatory, UW, and the NYT back in 2021. It lost its case against SIO in 2022, and was ordered to pay $150k in legal fees. They sue to tie organizations up for years. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/b...

Working with @lit.dev and finding it a great fit for academic projects. The components are self-contained WebComponents you can drop anywhere. They rely on web standards, so unlikely to break over time and perfect for research code you build once and don't touch for years.

Adding "All ATProto traffic needs to go through one central node that controls everything" to the list of Mastodon myths that I'll need to mention in a blog post…

map of the courtyard buildings in Chicago (this includes buildings with all kinds of courts, not just the obvious ones in the front like the OP above)

This is evil