today i am thankful to caleb mcdaniel, who i’ve never met, but whose generic syllabus maker saves me every term: wcaleb.rice.edu/syllabusmake...

More than five years later, Cronutt is still seizure-free and living his best life at Six Flags after receiving an experimental therapy with transplanted interneuron progenitor cells that was developed by the Baraban Lab at @ucsanfrancisco.bsky.social: youtu.be/hZpFH5J5lbo 🧪 🧠🟦

WYO 789 Overland Trail Monument, 1/8/2026, 10:47:31 AM

It’s interesting how the “pink was a macho color until mid-century when marketers switched it” has spread everywhere. While color language changes, Rudolph Valentino was insulted as a “pink powder puff” in the 1920s and they didn’t mean machismo.

Less than two weeks left to apply for the Cephalopod Neuroscience Gordon Conference! An exciting lineup of speakers and posters, and financial aid is available upon request. 🐙🦑 www.grc.org/cephalopod-n...

My favorite evidence that congestion pricing in New York has reshaped peoples’ behavior: we can see a surge of people trying to enter the zone before the price kicks up at 5 a.m., and after it decreases at 9 p.m.

Isn’t it time geometric string art made a comeback? This stuff is the absolute suds. The fact that it had a limited fashionability is surely outrun by its COMPLETE AWESOMENESS. I mean, look at this. It fucking SLAPS. Artist: SMW (1975) 📸 Decorative Modern

My French word of the day: le trombone = paperclip (Also, trombone, the musical instrument. 😄)

Maybe it’s because we have fewer smokers now but a movie smoker inhales and it sounds like someone is frying a steak.

having read that, and because I am a whole brain imager, I am wondering, are (almost) all the MEEG and fMRI signals we measure active inhibition? @fmri-today.bsky.social @practicalfmri.bsky.social @benhayden.bsky.social @danielemarinazzo.bsky.social @robertoostenveld.bsky.social

Decoding speech from sensorimotor cortex. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

55 years ago today the Beatles ended.

Which parcellation to use? The authors here propose to build theories on gradient-based, connectivity-based and population-level explanations instead of focusing solely on areas. True👏, but also cytoarchitectonic areas vary considerably between individuals, which limits how much we can rely on them.

This is absurd, but also slightly funny. Academic faculty are, in general, a pack of neurodivergent weirdos who often bristled against traditional educational processes, like the SAT, and love academia *because* it celebrates creativity and innovation and the ability to synthesize knowledge.

In 2026, if you want to be nice from distance on your toddler hoop, your shot should look like this

Throwback to this Reddit post I saw in 2024 and that I still think about sometimes

Latin had six noun cases, but in all Romance languages except Romanian, nouns and adjectives only have one singular form and one plural form left. What happened? This extra large infographic tells you how the Latin case system collapsed – and why it's the accusative case that lives on in Romance.

Wikipedia is truly one of the greatest things on the Internet. It is absolutely incredible, and must be preserved at all costs.

Welcome to the Public Domain, AS I LAY DYING (1930) 📖 🧠 William Faulkner’s groundbreaking modernist novel uses multiple narrators & stream-of-consciousness storytelling to reshape American literature. Learn more ➡️ blog.archive.org/public-domai... #PublicDomainDay #PublicDomain #CopyrightFree

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵

The last bombshell paleontology discovery of a year of bombshell discoveries: Ammonites survived the K-PG extinction! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today I made a small but momentous start to work in 2026 by changing a single number. I renamed the file “Papers to write and submit in 2025” to “Papers to write and submit in 2026”. Stay tuned for more file updates on 1st January 2027.

Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), Paris, 1925 #museumofmodernart #marcelduchamp

Happy birthday(ish) to all of the new polar bear cubs being born around Hudson Bay right now. You have a long, difficult road ahead, but we're all rooting for you. #mammals 🌿

REMEMBER Feliz Año Nuevo = Happy New Year Feliz Ano Nuevo = Happy New Butthole

Ask yourself

31 December 1995. Still the perfect goodbye.

Should grad schools bring back the GRE for DEI purposes??

Glad to see the conversation continues to grow and data speak to the enormous class bias that is built into bans on standardized testing, which end up only exacerbating them more. x.com/garrytan/sta...

"If you *only* used SAT to admit to elite colleges, share of admits from top 1% income falls 15.8% → 9.9% and representation from <$200k rises by +8.8%, with no reduction in post-college outcomes."

before I started my lab, I asked several senior PIs what their one piece of advice would be and PI pointedly said: “Know when to drop a project.” And that advice has been invaluable in my lab. There are always other projects to follow up on, dropping one isn’t a failure in and of itself.

Tiny Tot n°3 - July 1946 https://www.comics.org/issue/237792/

Only Wet Hot American Summer (2001) got academia right

A lot of people habitually turned off their computer at the end of the day anyhow, just like it was a television. There was a sense that NOT turning off your computer was both wasteful and bad for the computer. So if it was superstitious, it *fit* what people were doing.

modern diner, pawtucket, rhode island, 1978

Absolute top-shelf nursery rhyme by obscure 18th century poet Sarah Catherine Martin.

Edward Hopper, “Marshall's House,” Cape Cod, MA (1932)

When Bamman et al examined increasing narrativity in a slightly larger sample of songs, they found it strongly connected to the expansion of hip-hop. So our social inferences very likely need to be mediated by a theory of genre and of the genre composition of the sample. bsky.app/profile/berk...

I recommend this book to anyone who owns a Lakhovsky Multiple Wave Oscillator

find yourself a profession where you can buy as many books as you want and charge them to your employer

Haida Grizzly - Huaji Bill Reid ~ Haida 1973

This is the decision tree for millennial Canadians, in my experience some branches (like height) have been pruned for younger generations. Metrification is gradual.

Possibly this is just that mass media finally displaced a lot of the transmission of kid-culture, but actually in my experience a decent amount of it (e.g. jokes, songs, superstitions, who-will-you-marry games) persists. So maybe a better guess is you don't need code-language if you can text?

Kinda interesting: so I have talked to several kids under 12 from different parts of the US, and none of them were familiar with Pig-Latin. Which is a bit of a bummer since there's evidence it goes back to the 16th century or earlier. In general, there's almost no "kid-cant" familiarity.

Weird Science n°9 - September-October 1951 https://www.comics.org/issue/9170/

Once again, my extensive body of work on topics that no one cares about goes unrecognized, smh

And that, in turn, is leading us to measure things we’ve never been able to before, like this! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Indeed! Luckily we finally have the tech (bio and compute) to gain real traction with these ideas - eg The parts of complex adaptive systems are best measure all at the same time (b/c their properties follow from interactions). In 1987, we could only measure ~1 part at a time. Now many/all!!

Bergell serpentine on an aluminum base, c.1964 by Max Bill & Bruno Giacometti