My inbox has suddenly become very busy...

Gawd, that's annoying. I just pasted 2 paragraphs of a human-written email I'm sending out (brief summary of a project). Out of curiosity I ran it through an "AI detector." It claims "High probability of being flagged as AI-generated content." I wrote every word myself. No em-dashes. F these guys.

‘Many of us are doing our stinking best to maintain scientific integrity and produce rigorous research. But we do that mostly despite the incentives created by the academic system, not because of them.’

I like this opinion piece that explores academic fraud and the systems that enable it: www.voxweb.nl/en/academic-...

"It is not about whether AI will help itself to your job. It is about whether the people who make AI are helping themselves to your country."

The Smurfs were gay communists, with a token beard (Smurfette).

Thanks but no thanks. Indeed, looking forward to our science council discussion today in how best to protect applicants and reviewers from abuse of AI in applications and reviews. Scientific integrity is essential for peer review.

The famous Andor line is that "tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle." Here is a perfect example of that through malicious compliance: Idaho forced the city of Boise to remove its Pride flags. So the city painted rainbows everywhere else.

I have been thinking about this photo!

SPACE NUTELLA

I think my dog just now trolls me for extra cheese with his dinner. He's doing this exact same game today...

BlueSky is pretty heavy right now. Perhaps some doggo would be appreciated.

seems like a good day to remind people that all posts and actions on bluesky are fully public, by design blocks, muting, reply-limits, and please-dont-show-this are behaviors of the app that do not affect the underlying data which, to reiterate, is **completely public**

Some stars/planets identified

· #AcademicSky · #EduSky · #HigherEd · #InternationalStudents · ‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK

GRANT REVIEWER REMINDER: in Canada you are not allowed to use AI of any kind for peer review of grants. ** reviewers are meant to keep grant content confidential ** please do not share someone’s unpublished, planned research with an AI program. kthxbai

#Artemis II - We have the first image from yesterdays Lunar flyby captured by the crew on Orion EARTHSET. April 6, 2026. Humanity, from the other side. First photo from the far side of the Moon. Captured from Orion as Earth dips beyond the lunar horizon. 🚀🌕🌍

On the theme of kids of astronauts, this is Maya Glover, the daughter of NASA astronaut Victor Glover and Dionna Glover. Maya is at Cal Poly doing architecture. From her Insta: mayalorinnn.

My dog - hesitating and not very interested in his dinner bowl. So... I sprinkle some cheese on top. Suddenly he's very keen and licks the bowl clean. 🤦‍♂️ Doodles...

Whenever I see "old twitter drama" kicking off on BlueSky, I think this platform has a chance (provided some numbnut doesn't buy it somehow...)

Can an AI chatbot ease loneliness as well as another human? A UBC study finds that texting a real person—even a stranger—outperforms AI companions. Human connection still matters. Read more: news.ubc.ca/2026/04/text...

I like that we are in the dystopian timeline where I can't tell if it's an April Fool's joke or not.

CRediT has been updated so we can more honestly attribute contributions!

Very proud to have worked on the 2026 update to the CRediT taxonomy with @rbly.bsky.social

Wait. You can just say "we might infringe on your rights" in your Terms Of Service?

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

Today, MSF is going public with something we've been fighting behind closed doors for months: Gilead will not sell us their new HIV drug, lenacapavir. The sticking point isn't even price, they just refuse to sell. Open letter linked + explainer 🧵1/ www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gilea...

This is a fun piece of work - where we continue to uncover new things that may be important in the world of scanning electron microscopy 🧪🔬

I am curiously, and impatiently, watching as my next preprint gets announced on the arxiv. Concurrently recognizing that lead than ~72 hrs ago I submitted it, and the public will be able to access it & read our work. The same can't be said for legacy publication venues…

Revisiting publishing revenues for a chapter on public history and I'm reminded of the astonishing statistic that UK consumer publishing has annual revenues of £2.5 billion while academic publishing, the bit aimed at the tiny percentage of us working in research, earns £3.5 billion.

When every university follows the same bad advice from the same consultants with agendas separate from their institutional mission ... they lose their identity as well as their independence. They lose the ability to play to their own strengths when the consultants' agenda causes systemic failure.

There's nothing quite like the smell of a manuscript submission on a Friday.

Watching a dog eat a body part on a crime scene on TV makes me wonder how my dog would behave on a crime scene...

You need to see baby goat zoomies. Trust me. Sound up.

New: Wikipedia has officially banned AI-generated content. After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of LLMs, volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

IMO kids should be taught cursive if only because they should learn to *read* cursive. But back in my day poor penmanship was often why kids (usually boys) were forced to repeat the third grade, which is ridiculous. Teach it, *and* accommodate kids with dyslexia and/or fine motor issues. Do both!

I'm #dyslexic too. I can't read or write cursive. I remember those horrible lessons trying to force myself to write in a way that was totally alien to how my brain works. Then not being able to re-read what I had written. I can type pretty quickly though. My handwriting is a "print" style and this..

I am a reasonably functioning adult, and I can't write cursive. In fact, my handwriting is terrible when I write at speed (partly due to dyslexia). On the other hand, I can touch type pretty fast - and that's a fundamental skill that's been essential in my life. However, it's not an either or…

Today is Equal Pay Day, a day later than last year. It is the day to which women must work to earn the same as men did working to Dec 31 last year. Women earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn. Down from 83 cents a year ago, and 84 cents the year prior. www.npr.org/2026/03/26/n...

"The panic now visible in British Columbia is not evidence that reconciliation has gone too far. It is evidence that reconciliation has begun to have material consequences." @khelsilem.bsky.social in @macleans.bsky.social: macleans.ca/politics/can...

When people ask me about restoring trust in higher ed, there's a reason I bring up presidents calling the police on their students and how I find it curious those students' trust is never a concern

I don't have candy at home, because I have limited self control. But I want candy. Sighs.

The Farm Bureau estimates that a year-round increase from E10 to E15 (15% ethanol blend in gasoline) would increase US corn demand by 2.4 billion bushels a year. Latest yields per USDA are 188.8 bushels/acre, so growing it requires another 12.7 million acres. That’s about half the size of Indiana.

From a recent police board meeting, crime trends year over year up to Q3 2025. Something clearly stands out! And yet despite ABC being in a constant moral panic about crime, it's the one thing they consistently ignore (or sometimes actively make worse).

As the first reanalysis data become available, I think I can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the March 2026 heatwave will go down as the most anomalously extreme heat event ever observed at any time of year in the southwestern U.S.

Today is a classic "day in the life of an academic" - some teaching, some governance work, some mentoring, and some research - the variety is quite fun, even if tiring.

Peeping tommery is here to stay, here are the best shirts to blend into the bushes.

Today in AI: Canada rejected the PR application of a McMaster postdoc from the Sorbonne who works in the immunology of aging because the generative AI being used to process applications (😱) entirely hallucinated her credentials. Everyone involved should be fired. archive.is/ELrCI#select...

A new, and quite nerdy, piece of work where we conduct a full pattern simulation that includes BOTH the electron spots AND the Kikuchi bands, combined with an energy-based scattering model to enable us to weight the combination of coherent and incoherent scattering 🧪🔬

One bit of good news from the Glasgow fire disaster- engineers took advantage of Glasgow Central Station being closed to do maintenance and renewal work in a few days which would normally have taken ten months www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/major-e...