9 more days … #Africa #Bioinformatics #Health #Informatics #Education

Original post: mastodon.social/@WAHa_06x36/...

Zuckerberg has money but he will never once in his whole life be cool, same as nearly every other billionaire, and that fact eats at all of those extremely rich losers

Stephen Jay Gould was born OTD in 1941. “Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table.... Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.” 🦫🦋🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci #EvoBio

the media rush to canonize charlie kirk is legitimately maybe one of the weirdest things of this nature i have ever seen in my life

Article in UZH News and here below the dark matter pullover www.news.uzh.ch/de/articles/...

The entire global economy is currently so over-leveraged on "AI" that if we don't find a credible use case for it, and fast, we're likely to tumble into an economic meltdown of 2008 proportions, so please, your corporate overlords beg you, use "AI" to write that fucking email

To be fair, elon promises stuff all the time and never delivers and it’s all magically forgotten as people give him more money.

AI: “…database sorted and outputted with algorithms…” - thank you @scalzi.com for this succinct definition! (A blockchain btw. is just a distributed database with complex and inherently inefficient locking and integrity check mechanisms.)

AI: “…database sorted and outputted with algorithms…” - thank you @scalzi.com for this succinct definition! (A blockchain btw. is just a distributed database with complex and inherently inefficient locking and integrity check mechanisms.)

ML can be incredibly useful. It is not intelligent.

Not *that* distant from Sam Altman deadpanning that he didn’t know how they’d turn a profit but if investors would only pour a few more billions in, they’d build AGI and ask it for a business plan

The Germans’ argument that is. Took until the late 60’s to really question it so there goes any optimism.

Let’s stop calling them ‘medical miracles’, let’s instead call them, SCIENCE. Keep your miracles for your books of fantasy and fairy tales.

It irks me a bit that this is being pitched as medical groups "defying" RFKJ. They're just doing their job and putting out reasonable recommendations, declining to lie about their work just because there is some absolute crackpottery in the federal office.

"We’re all in favor of a gold standard for science. But it’s misleading, & even a little insulting, to say that somehow NIH didn’t already support that. Everything that NIH stands for is rigor in sci...There’s some implication here that NIH has been systematically sloppy. I reject that conclusion."🛟

Some incredibly good news: One year ago this week, The Onion returned to print. In that one year, we’ve grown to the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States, just ahead of the Boston Globe, and growing fast. In short, it’s working. So… thank you. Thank you for helping save this thing.

Indeed! The contrast with #ISMBECCB2025 in July is striking, and frankly restful.

Is AI transforming science? Apparently not in evolutionary biology. Of nearly 1,700 abstracts at #ESEB2025, only four mention AI or artificial intelligence, another eight mention deep learning, and another two explicitly refer to AlphaFold.

Having Copilot reading my code is just poisoning the enemy from within.

🧪⚒️ You probably know that arthropods, such as insects and crustaceans, need to molt (shed) their exoskeleton in order to grow. But you might not have known that female lobsters mate right after molting. Why? Because they carry and brood their eggs on the undersides of their tails, and if they molt,

Cross this w/ ancient DNA and Urs Widmer would have been proud… www.diogenes.ch/leser/titel/...

I have previously used the metaphor of replacing Excel formulas with the random number function as a metaphor for chatbots but they've gone and literally implemented exactly that

I got that joke

Please @nytimes.com do not send your reporters to another of our favorite destinations (unnamed, alas) like you did for Le Lavandou and Cap Ferret before …

Swiss Rothko

💥How can light-sheet help reveal dark matter?💥 Join Prof. Laura Baudis @lbaudis.bsky.social at #mesoSPIM Symposium, Oct 13–15 in Zurich or online, to see how light-sheet fluorescence microscopy 🔬 is used to image nuclear ☢️ recoil tracks to detect elusive particles! Register now: t.uzh.ch/1Ss

Just in case there was any doubt, ChatGPT 5.0 still makes up completely random citations that don't exist and should not be used for literature search.

The one thing Trump and Putin can agree on is that those (we) Europeans are a nuisance. Democracy, environment, participation, diversity, international law … This will be reflected in whatever they will produce. I guess it will be a strong hit against the world order - Ribbentrop, Stalin.

Dracula is nowhere to be seen, nor Vlad Țepeș, who never lived here. But beautiful interiors and surroundings

I used to think the right just wasn’t prepared for this. Now I think the authoritarianism *is* their preparation.

What an utter travesty

So far (if I may) chatbots are to me what emails are to Donald Knuth (OTOH emails are my main information management system).

There's not enough money to be made in using tech for the things for which they are most suited and efficient, and there are both too many people hoping to be billionaires, and too many people not smart enough to know when they're being sold hype.

Not substack, but generally. I was upset for at least 5 minutes in 2002 that someone had already filched the “first name initial last name @ gmail.com” pattern for our newborn daughter until realising that our son has the same initial. Obviously not using enshittified Gmail anymore but still.

Hiking in the Carpatian mountains.

Hiking in the Carpatian mountains.

New ArsTechnica story about the new steaming pile of Executive Order... arstechnica.com/science/2025...

From Hangjia Zhao & @mbaudis.bsky.social in #OUP 's @bioinfoadv.bsky.social journal | #pgxRpi: an R/ #bioconductor package for user-friendly access to the #Beacon v2 API | #Bioinformatics #RStats @bioconductor.bsky.social #OpenScience CC/ @ga4gh.org 🧬 🖥️ 🧪 🔓 ⬇️ academic.oup.com/bioinformati...

Action-packed life or death chase between barnacles and their natural predator, the horrid dorid (Onchidoris bilamellata)

(As to what we'll do with that money we're no longer paying taxes with: Probably put it into our charitable foundation and use it at least in part for local stuff that taxes used to help with, which is a really fucking inefficient way to do things)

Loculus, an open-source software for building pathogen sequencing databases, is on the shortlist for #SIBRemarkableOutputs 2024. It’s a joint project by the teams of @neher.io, @tanjastadler.bsky.social and @firefoxx66.bsky.social xx66.bsky.social. Congratulations!

True then, and now “Dr. Gaillard’s appointment showed that physicists did not have to be arrogant or aggressive to succeed, said Marjorie Shapiro, who was then a physics graduate student at Berkeley and who in 2004 became the first woman to chair the physics department at Berkeley.”

Original post: infosec.exchange/@adfichter/1...

GenX kids will know the pain of needing just the right kind of pencil to rewind.

Wearing a big rosetta stone outfit and goddamned strutting it for halloween this year and calling myself a large language model.

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

So “Nothing works properly here any more, but hey, it’s an experience.” Elon Musk opened a diner in Hollywood. What could go wrong? I went to find out - The Guardian

From a good Virology textbook near you:

Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin. She captured an X-ray diffraction image of DNA and stated that a helical structure was probable. Watson and Crick then created a detailed model based on her results. They initially received credit for the discovery and were awarded the Nobel Prize after her death.🧪