To all those doing paper revisions: \enlargethispage{\baselineskip} is your friend to add a few sentences to a page! No more negative vspace! (I've seen the LIPIcs people use it for final touches to my papers so it should be fine when used sparingly.)

It's just insane to me that mountains just collapse like that.

Text is bouba. BWT is kiki.

I mean, sin(x) is pretty darn bouba (though not by those criteria) what would it mean that kiki and bouba are Fourier transforms of each other?

Unitary evolution is bouba. Wave function collapse is kiki.

When I post now I have to ask myself “will this jeopardize my grant applications?” One of the ways free speech slowly dies.

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and that Fable 5 will falsely flag your question as cybersecurity or biology related and refuse to answer it". --Benjamin Franklin (probably)

Gonzalo Navarro, Francisco Olivares: Optimal-Time Contextual Pattern Matching in Compressed Space https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31030 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.31030 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.31030

Francisco Olivares, Gonzalo Navarro: Practical Linear-Time Computation of Smallest Suffixient Sets https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31034 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.31034 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.31034

New on the Fulcrum blog: minibwa, a faster mapper from @lh3lh3.bsky.social and our @nilshomer.com Its speed is great, yes, but more interesting is the decision to revisit BWA-MEM as infrastructure – keep what still works, change what limits performance, then test downstream impact. shorturl.at/xxqeI

How to benchmark the *latency* of querying a Hashset for either all positive or negative queries... The if-statement on the result is highly predictable, breaking any kind of loop carried dependency 🤔

Another salmon 2 update! One of the things I hoped for, and has exceeded my wildest expectations, was that the rust rewrite of salmon would not only clean up the structure and build process, but really supercharge & reinvigorate new development. Salmon 2.2 delivers! github.com/COMBINE-lab/... 1/13

we live in precedented times

Truly bizarre story of how two papers from the 1940s by physics pioneer Max Planck have been "retracted" from Naturwissenschaften, potentially by an algorithm, for anachronistic "plagiarism" issues, leaving the current editor baffled (but it is Springer Nature so.... www.science.org/content/arti...

what the heck (complimentary)

🚀 new bwa-mem3 is out. Why use it? - 🏛️keep using a bwa-mem variant (avoid revalidation/reprocessing) - 🚅 1.7x faster/20% less memory than bwa-mem2 - 🧬native methylation support (asymmetric scoring) - ✅ matches bwa-mem2 output - 👊opt-in knobs to go even 2x faster bwa-mem3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

This is such an interesting simulation and I really like the message behind it :) (Plus interactive math! My weakness!)

In today’s “company does a thing that is an outright scam”: Cox locks their company-provided routers to default channels, so everyone in your neighborhood with forced Cox Internet (they’re the only provider) will experience interference, and Cox support will tell you to buy more Cox stuff to fix it.

2/2 ESA-E accepted: - SimdQuickHeap [w/ Johannes Breitling, Marvin Williams] - non-minimal k-PHF [Stefan Hermann, Peter Sanders, Stefan Walzer] and 2/2 WABI accepted: - O(n lg lg n) chaining [Nicola Rizzo] - anti-lex SUS-anchors arxiv: arxiv.org/search/?quer...

zero scansion. i thought england was metricated but this is all foot no meter

Congratulations to Prof Richard Durbin, winner of the 2026 Genetics Society Medal! His pioneering work in computational genomics has transformed how we analyse and understand genome sequences.

And ESA 🤞

European heatwave is worst ever and impossible without climate crisis, scientists @wwattribution.bsky.social find - Study also finds high humidity means people in hundreds of cities are enduring worst ever heat stress - #climatecrisis "is running rampant" www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Just gonna put this out there. ISMB dictating that all presentations be in PowerPoint 365 and not accepting PDF is both the morally and technically WRONG decision. It's absurd!

Leave it to the Dutch to pedestrianize American streets! #FIFAWorldCup #NothingLikeOranje

The plaque marks the first measurement of the gravitational pull of a mountain. I love it.

Honoured to be awarded the Mary Lyon medal by the Genetics Society today, here in Edinburgh. V grateful to mentors and all my previous group members and colleagues. Medal is an X chromosome!!

I've gone this far without learning what sunk-cost fallacy is, so I'm not starting now.

There is a European-owned place called Aisle that is doing world class security bug finding. Beating Mythos even. But no one in Europe likes talking up our own talent. Been trying to get them mentioned in Dutch news, but all we can do apparently is promote US tech. aisle.com/blog/aisle-d...

🔥 Published today, and just in time for summer conferences, here are your guidelines for presenting badly www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/fqa92

In other news: Great SEA talk by Nathaniel Brown on Orbit, an efficient implementation of the move structure for run-length encoded permutations. Also, congrats on winning a best paper award with this work!

literally watergate

For the summer issue of the EATCS Bulletin, it was my pleasure to talk to authors of the Decentralized Thoughts blog: Ittai Abraham, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alin Tomescu. I really like their opinions on how blogs can do more than papers and the theory and practice of blockchains.

It's crazy that all of HPRCv2 (466 human genomes totalling 1.5Tbp) can be indexed in just 24GB! Or 36GB with ~single cache miss LF-mapping, which makes it *much* faster than the B-tree representation used by RopeBWT.

On 466 HPRC haplotypes: fastest index < 50 GB, compressible to 24 GB while staying >3× faster than SPUMONI. Faster than ropebwt3, though (a) ropebwt is smaller and (b) PMLs are not as high-fidelity as SMEMs. (5/6)

Movi 2 has appeared (as an advance article) in Bioinformatics 🧬 Faster, leaner pangenome queries — half the memory of Movi 1, ~30% faster. Paper: academic.oup.com/bioinformati... Code: github.com/mohsenzakeri/Movi (1/6)

Oh well in that case

yeah, it turns out that writing up paper-shaped things was a rate-limiting step

The brain constructs sentences by firing particular neurons that can handle distinct properties of language before a single word is spoken. #neuroskyence #linguistics

Happy pride from the Netherlands embassy

On the way to SEA! Might be my longest train trip so far, and will for sure be if we don't make the 30 min transfer in Hamburg.

Well I would walk 0.1 miles And I would walk 0.2 more Just to be the man who walked 0.30000000000000004 Miles to fall down at your door

The JUNO detector, a huge sphere full of 20,000 tonnes of transparent organic goop, is detecting antineutrinos produced by two nuclear reactors each located the same distance away. After just 2 months, it measured some things about neutrino masses better than ever before! Let's dig in. (1/13)

1/18 A giant underground eye is spying on elusive particles…and it has already made a big result! JUNO — a huge sphere with 20,000 tonnes of transparent liquid buried in China — delivered impressive #antineutrino measurements with its first 59 days of data (late 2025). 🔭🧪⚛️ juno.ihep.cas.cn

Also a nice shot of the Ariane 64 with P160C #VA269 #CSG #Ariane6 #P160C

a possibly hot-take with some people: your 6k line PR that has ~50-100 lines of implementation and 5.9k lines of tests is dogshit, particularly since you probably didn't actually look at the tests or verify that they are all needed/useful/do what they say

The Strait is open The Strait is closed The Strait is second countable The Strait is totally disconnected The Strait is perfect The Strait is normal The Strait is Hausdorff The Strait is a Polish space

His problem is vocabulary When Hegseth said he decimated Iran’s military capability, Trump thought that was good Decimated actually means reduced by 10%