Capitalism tries to make products seem like necessities. But they aren’t. They’re products. This is marketing. And you can say no to bad products.

Every week I see a post like “well, Silicon Valley has built a dick-breaking machine. No matter how you feel about getting your dick broken, it’s our responsibility to integrate mechanical dick-breaking into our schools.”

Finishing off where #DOGE left off. "Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration. Budget proposal would also curb federal payments for scientific publishing." www.nature.com/articles/d41...

More context on this #Artemis II image: * This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right * The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon: ☀️🌍🚀🌕

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

This is so, so well-articulated.

The waternotcoal.ca petition is still moving forward. Join us in protecting our drinking water! #ableg #abpoli #cdnpoli

The policy described would violate rules of international law prohibiting (i) the destruction of property without absolute military necessity & (ii) forced displacement. The former is a war crime, the latter a war crime & crime against humanity. I discussed this with Reuters here: reut.rs/4dStXyu

Free newsletter: The Subprime AI Crisis is here. I explore the disturbing parallels between the run-up to the global financial crisis and the heavily-subsidized AI bubble, and how Anthropic and OpenAI's rush to IPO accelerates the crisis further. www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

We have 2 cool shirts! I have to sell them out by early April for 2 reasons: 1) 5 of my family members are staying in the Skype a Scientist stockroom in mid-April 😅 2) I need to fund our mural project which starts the first week of April! They're soft! They're cute! Get a shirt! SquidFacts.net

A small price to pay for poorly written meeting summaries

For serious tho. We have a provincial holiday for St. Patrick’s day and St. George’s day and everyone in St. John’s gets the first Wednesday of August off to watch the boat races (Regatta Day), unless it’s too windy, in which case it is postponed until the following day.

"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude. Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice." But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs". Am I losing my mind?

If you are interested in doing high-impact, public-facing research ... Join Our Research Team! We are hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. socialmedialab.ca/2026/03/04/p... #PhDSky #AcademicSky #comsky

This was a fucking masterclass in interviewing. Crucial for any of us whose work has become fodder for AI churn in this dystopian hellscape but also just a hell of an interview for ANYONE on capitalism and exploitation, and what CEOs really think of you:

This is one of the most important issues with the global food system, yet it is often ignored. Put simply, we don't actually grow much *food* in our farms around the world. Instead, we grow grossly inefficient animal feed and biofuels. drawdown.org/news/only-ha...

"Nation-building! Something, something, Canada Strong!" Employment and Social Development: ❌ 1,500 jobs Health Canada: ❌ 942 jobs Environment and Climate Change Canada: ❌ 837 jobs Statistics Canada: ❌ 700+ jobs Canada Food Inspection Agency: ❌ 542 jobs #CdnPoli

China is winning because the US gave up. #DOGECuts

This is so fucking bleak www.science.org/content/arti...

As one of the authors of this thought I’d share a bit about how we got here and how you can do what we’ve done at you institution. Over the two years I’ve been at the University of Edinburgh I’ve grown increasingly concerned by fellow academics uncritically using LLMs, especially OpenAIs’s ChatGPT.

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

Yikes

Modest (<10%) Increases for Tri-Agencies, decreases for DFO (70%), ECCC (45%), Canadian Space Agency (33%), AAFC (10%)… and Canada Post will apparently decrease spending by 99%!?!?

Here's a cool tool a made to help you write more good. academic.oup.com/ae/article/7...

Undergrad and graduate students! Could your work benefit from visiting one of the NHMLAC’s collections? Apply for our Collections Study Award, due Apr. 1. I’d love to have students make use of our Entomology collection! Details here: tinyurl.com/bdduefsy

Attention Science Communicators! We are conducting a survey on the landscape of science communication & need your help gathering experiences. Please send this to #SciComm ppl you know. We want to get as thorough a sense of the state of the field as we can. umiami.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

🧪Science friends: Participate in this (quick) survey-based study of GenAI use in ecology & evolutionary biology research clemson.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

"The govt, in the middle of an energy 'emergency' Trump declared & an energy price spike he precipitated by invading Iran, is proposing to spend nearly $1b in public funds to ensure that *less energy gets produced* b/c the current occupant of the WH lost a lawsuit 20 years ago & never got over it."

Dobsonflies!!

Do you (or have you ever) worked with natural history collections? Are you trans or non-binary? If you said "yes" to both of those, @rin-krichilsky.bsky.social and I want to hear from you! Please consider filling out our survey and please share with others! 🏳️‍⚧️ 🐛🦕🦴🌿 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Ages ago @vivschwarz.bsky.social told me about these bug-noculars, & I'm eternally friggin grateful (& also to Kitty for gifting me them!) If you like looking at bugs/lichen/things in rock-pools but have shitty eyesight? They're amazing.

What Carney is doing here is beyond irresponsible. (1/3) Bay du Nord is not, nor never can be viable. Stop misleading people on oil futures that don't exist. If you want facts on the project: www.sierraclub.ca/bay-du-nord-... #NLpoli #CDNpoli #BayduNord #Equinor #Norway #Newfoundland #Labrador

And the austerity continues.

We deserve better trains

Share with all mosquito researchers. 🧪🦟 I'm co-organizing a special issue in the Journal of Medical Entomology on systematics, taxonomy, and natural history of mosquitoes. See details in the link. Happy to answer questions. Proposal Deadline 15 April 2026. academic.oup.com/insect-scien...

lol as a #PhD student, I have very strong opinions (surprise, surprise) about social science findings that generalize human behavior when they only focus on white people.

"Forcibly displaced Lebanese are now gathering along the sea; they have nowhere to go; Israel has announced its intent to make conditions that render civilian life unsustainable. A second genocide. Now in Lebanon."(Philip Proudfoot on X) #Israel #Lebanon

The Trump regime is currently holding more than three times as many detainees as Nazi Germany had six years into the Third Reich, and the stated goal of 15 to 20 million deportations would exceed the entire population that moved through the Soviet Gulag system over more than twenty years.

I know very few people would notice if I didn't point it out but it bothers me mightily that my phone autocorrected "meagre" to "merge" in the alt text of this photo. My meagre existence is of course what I am contemplating, for my fellow pedants & alt-text friends.

Today I turned 40.

Nominate somebody, y’all! 🧪 #SciComm

Was recently thinking about a sort of hierarchy of needs that speaks to this moment. 1) Survive. Nothing happens without this. 2) Hope. Believe in a better future. 3) Plan. What can I do to help make that future a reality (even a small thing)? 4) Act. Put your plan in motion.

So ChatGPT and Claude have facilitated suicides and a school shooting in Canada and the US bombing a school in Iran, but that’s the price you pay to have tools that mean you don’t need to spend as much time dealing with emails or writing code or first drafts, I guess?

Tech has long since passed the point of solving problems or even making life more convenient. It's just throwing crap against the wall to see what will stick. And now there's crap all over the floor and the wall.

Each Friday night, I write a briefing on what happened in US science & higher ed. 🧪 Mar 6 (Year 2, Week 10) - NIH revoking certification of early career workers union - FDA 'chaos' & Prasad out (again) - even more delay & interference in NIH funding & so much more buttondown.com/liminalcreat...

Quick plug for our new resource, the Drosophila Species Stock Exchange. This is a database and mailing list that documents species currently in culture and the labs holding them. If you want to know more or sign up then please get in touch. See attached for more info and please share!

Yesterday, I was reading a used book from 1959 I bought some years ago, and I found this bookmark, which must have been there when I bought the book. Given the age of the book and Deese at Johns Hopkins, the bookmark would be from the 1960s. Useful advice to students even now. #TimeCapsule

Sorry Reuters you’ve already been scooped by No Shit Magazine

My refusal to hand over an irreducibly human endeavor to technologies that were foisted on society and became ubiquitous in like five years is a categorical one. When the machines learn to simulate a better me than me, they will still not be me. They can't be. So I'll do the writing, thanks.