Key stat from @amandamull.bsky.social article "The richest 10% of US households—those making roughly $250,000 or more—now account for almost half the country’s consumer purchases, according to Moody’s Analytics" www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

I wrote a little about some of the little details you might have missed in this video and why it hit me so hard as a trans person this morning: www.burnsnotice.com/you-have-to-...

From my father's house, the Northern lights glowing faintly in the night sky. #blueskyartshow #glow #photography #devon

Think of how much better off we'd be if every established researcher got in the habit of writing papers entitled "Second thoughts on [thing I'm famous for]"

"Today, I have only one dream: that our children live in the best possible world. Between the global rise of fascism and climate warming, this dream faces many challenges. But we can fight for it. For this, as always, we need to gather people and unite around the right causes." 👏

Love this call to action: - So send the tweet. - Use the disfavored word. - Donate to an embattled non-profit. - Subscribe to your local paper. - Read a banned book. - Show empathy for your fellow human beings. - Throw the (metaphorical) tomatoes. 🇺🇸

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

Does the news reflect what we die from?

Doesn't hurt to be a little extra careful on Halloween. 🎃😱

I really like this design submitted by 14-year-old Isla Dalisay-Hockett! 👏

"Usually depicted as a beaked mask, the recurring image is Sentrock’s analogy 'to humanity: a person who is able to find or escape to their freedom by placing them in a different reality.'" 🕊️

Jane Fonda relaunches free speech group started by her father during the McCarthy era www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oc...

“ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later….’They was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other.’” It can’t happen here, you say. But it is happening.

If you think this is US-only, it's not. If you think the GDPR protects you, it's doesn't. If you hadn't realised privacy is a national security and corporate espionage issue, it is. If you think politicians can't tackle this, they can. If you believe that tech or business need this, they don't.

Turns out I like a timeline with plenty of zip! I'm following @davidzipper.bsky.social and @benzipperer.org, both great follows!

"a little bit of history: it’s called an 'emulator' because in the 80s a 'terminal' was a separate machine from the computer" Great info!

I just read "Why I Am a Liberal" by Cass Sunstein. I didn't love it. I think he wants liberal to mean someone who is committed to liberty. For me being liberal also means we have a responsibility to help others, and government is our best way to coordinate that. www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/o...

Stunning work! 😍

"It’s important to note that 'transgender ideology' is a term created by, and used for, anti-trans messaging specifically. The TJA advocates against media using the term, as it frames being trans as a 'political choice' rather than a lived experience."

Just in case you were wondering why capital letters are also called "UPPERcase" :)

On agents and Obsidian

QOTD: What organization or person do you appreciate for making the world a better place?

Every time this worry comes up (www.ft.com/content/d419...) I post some Landy et al. (2018). People just answer questions about proportions (of anything) in a rather particular way. So I think it's unlikely that what they are being asked about is as important as you might expect it should be.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? ChatGPT and Grok responses today.

Kentucky Fried Ceramic! 🤯

LLMs are motivating me to learn the difference between the hyphen, en dash, and em dash. Here are ChatGPT's tips: Hyphen (-): short = small job (word glue). En dash (–): mid-length = medium job (ranges, connections). Em dash (—): long = big job (emphasis, drama). Conclusion: I'm a good-writer.

Great reveal! 😂

I wrote some notes on how I'm using the Viwoods AiPaper: andrewmarder.net/viwoods-aipa... #niche #blog

🚨NEW RESULTS (w/ Slattery & Nober) - When gov't engineers retire, highway projects cost more: the engineers pay for themselves 6 times over - Improving gov’t engineer quality from the 25th to 75th percentile reduces costs by 14%, equal to 3x avg. engineer pay Paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This paper had me bummed out initially. Then I read the section "Why is power low and what can we do about it?" and now I'm excited! 👏

On a wall outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, a new Banksy piece appeared this morning before being covered up within hours. The work depicts a judge in traditional robes beating a protester with a gavel. www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/bank...

I will never apologize for a post

I like squares! ☑️☑️☑️

I updated my profile pic using @nicolas-lebrun.fr's random memory: forsaken-ideas.nicolas-lebrun.fr/sketch/rando... So crisp. 👍👍

D3 searchable tool for short books rec'd by NPR (I love their end-of-year reports)!

"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

A beautiful visualization of the state space of puzzles, 11 min of joy, h/t @danlarremore.bsky.social

Yes, the stakes here are large. Very large.

To borrow another example, taken from the `dbreg` README: github.com/grantmcdermo... Here I am running a fixed-effects regression on 180 million(!) row parquet dataset... and it completes **< 2 seconds**... on my laptop 🤯 This is powered by @duckdb.org under the hood. #rstats #econsky

I'm thinking about getting an E-Ink tablet for taking notes and reading papers, leaning towards the Viwoods AiPaper. Any experience out there? viwoods.com/products/viw...

NJ Transit's official data makes it difficult to tell just how bad it is. So @suryamattu.com and I spent three months collecting the raw location data for more than 190,000 trains on NJT, Metro-North, and LIRR. Then @mariepastora.bsky.social made the graphics to show you. The answer: Very bad.

I enjoyed this interview with Don Rubin: muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/artic... #statistics #causalinference