James Hoffmann getting adorably excited when putting bits of rock through expensive coffee grinders For Science: www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5v5...

A major milestone for next generation Covid vax: The first clinical trial for a pancoronavirus formulation of an existing vaccine was registered. With more news incl trial results & 12 preclinical reports—in my monthly update @plos.org absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/12/31/m... #Vaccines

I'd not call it an enormous impact exactly, but I did do this and it seemed to land with a bunch of people

Even more girt by sea

“many angry posts should have been naps or little packets of crackers” is deep wisdom and you don’t need to reproduce to embrace it!

TIL 'blackboard bold' maths fonts were invented for the typewriter and only subsequently used on actual blackboards in the 1960s

Just in time to squeak in under the line for 2025, the audiobook that I recorded of @zachweinersmith.bsky.social's Shakespeare Sonnets (abridged beyond the point of usefulness) is now available! They're very silly and I had a blast recording them! smbc-store.myshopify.com/products/sha...

Sites that say "you've read your last free article" on your first visit

To be fair, this is the "same panel" approach that the NYT has done for a while. But it's not made as clear as it could be that "yes, we keep talking to the same people." So this comes up each time they run a new story with the panel.

Neither "I didn't need to read the cases because I'm just writing a draft for my supervisors" nor "I didn't need to read the cases because I have minions to do that" is wonderful defence, but running them in the same hearing seems particularly infelicitous websitedc.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Jo...

A useful complement to PhyloPic

The 2025 news cycle, in 1 chart www.axios.com/2025/12/29/g...

I have put together an index page compiling my various #rstats blog posts using #Pacific island countries and territories; data: freerangestats.info/blog/pacific.... Topics such as choropleth maps of the Pacific, demographic techniques and trends, and multidimensional vulnerability.

Attention Is Not What You Need They propose an attention-free architecture based on Grassmann flows where the sequence interaction is governed by flows on a Grassmann manifold rather than by an L × L attention matrix.

99% of bluesky is hyperbole

i heard that if you successfully sue someone for defamation, everyone has to like you again

ffs 🏏

Maybe Australia will declare at lunch with a lead of 150 and finish it all today 😐

Differences in perceived speed

Had to call Qantas on the actual phone to confirm their website was lying about a temporary check-in problem (check-in only at the airport -- presumably flight's overbooked) and the AirNZ website (where I booked) was lying about the check-in time.

It's not anecdotal, it's small batch artisanal farm to table data!

Unseasonably nice weather at Adelaide's famous palindromic beach #glenelg

No but this is true. It’s based on the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, but GM mothballed the Saturn line in 2010.

Two halves

Saw my first cybertruck last night. The phrase "large as life and twice as ugly" really fits

I failed "cutting and tearing" in third grade #XmasWrapping

Lo, Hrodulf the red-nosed reindeer – That beast didn’t have unshiny nostrils! Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in Anglo Saxon meter: allthingslinguistic.com/post/1359368...

There is an unfortunate error in this newly published @globalchangebio.bsky.social paper. The caption for this image reads "upper panel with dragon icon symbolising all tetrapod" but this is incorrect. That is either a wyvern (with two wings and two legs) or it is not a tetrapod (6 limbs).

Last Christmas I gave you my heart. The very next day You gave it a weigh.

Adelaide has a hidden City Library! You got down through the food court in a mall, take the obscure corridor just in front of the supermarket, go up in the parking elevator to the 6th floor, take another twisty corridor with locked doors warning of electrical equipment, and it's suddenly there!

NEW EPISODE🎙️On Humans in Public Health we usually talk research results. But for our latest episode, Professor @rhubbbstat.bsky.social discusses how we get to those results, and how we know we can trust them. Listen now! https://humans-in-public-health.captivate.fm/episode/messy-data-real-answers

I always try to uphold the annual New Zealand tradition of the Nativicado.

Signs of a dodgy neighborhood: first convenience store is closed for 28 days for unlicensed tobacco sales, second doesn't sell milk.

Quite a good ad for saying "yes, this is really a thing"

Shouldn't "centi-millionares" be people with $10k dollars? #hectomillion

Did a wrap-up post for my blog/mailing list ExcursionSet today. Looking back I realised that I ended 2024 with a list of things I would write about but wrote about other things instead... excursionset.com/blog/2025/12...

I bought some coffee in Sydney and asked for it to be ground for use in a plunger. The young person appeared a bit concerned about my tech choice, but went off to consult a piece of paper taped to the wall. She came back with a further query: ground for white coffee or black coffee? #Nerds

RSMF grant and the STF grant are both providing the R Foundation and the #rstats community a solid opportunity to modernise the infrastructure and lay the ground work for the next 10 years of language roadmap while mentoring new R Core members and enabling the community to participate directly.

We have three wet lab genomics positions open, all supporting our sequencing for public health Two permanent snr tech roles will be trained for accredited Illumina and ONT workflows (apply for both) nzcris.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/nzcris... nzcris.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/nzcris... (1/2)

is there a good citation discussing recent Gelman/Vehtari/etc style choices of prior? like what's on the Stan wiki but in the form of an academic paper? github.com/stan-dev/sta...

This smells distinctly like collider bias and/or selection bias and/or regression to the mean... You simply can't select teen prodigies, and world class athletes rom databases, and go run regressions without serious consideration of the selection process!

Good to see that 'Singapore noodles' -- stir-fried rice vermicelli with egg, shrimp, meat, and curry powder -- is still part of Oz fast food. The quality has improved since I were young. (those curious in etymology may wish to note that it's probably Hong Kong Cantonese in origin)

Old bridge, new bridge

This is great, if you’re into this sort of thing.