Hope to update soon on Fossil Ridge Trail by Beverly Glen (closed since '90s) but I did hike another Fossil Ridge Trail near Topanga at Stunt & Saddle Peak Rds. Mostly bivalve imprints on rocks & shells, millions of years old from when the SM Mtns were under the ocean. Very cool!

It rules to live in a shabby gangster state where you can get side action on the state abducting a foreign leader

Mamdani's administration plans to use existing authority to go after companies illegally hiding fees. Right now, Ticketmaster is breaking NY state law by hiding fee breakdowns behind additional toggles and clicks. (same with Seatgeek, Stubhub etc.) Fees are supposed to be clear & conspicuous!

New preprint from the lab: The fact that human brain activity can be measured at high res is *thrilling*. But often it's not spikes; it's "LFP". Sometimes LFP is 3x better for decoding (wow!). Sometimes it's a lot worse (sigh). Why? A mystery! In this thread, Catrina explains. Read her 🧵.

Our new paper out in NHB! We started this back in @ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social's lab when I was a postdoc and Rolando was a grad student, showing that stable fMRI representations of places (learned in Rolando's custom-made VR world) provide the best anchors for later item learning

Propaganda works - this is also why conservative oligarchs are investing so much to purchase trusted media brands and convert them into propaganda outlets

Support the 2026 Palestinian Advanced Computational School chuffed.org/project/s4p-...

amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders

Watch this. Watch again. "This incredible thing last night... We have to do it again [in other countries]. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us."

Happy new year, all!

They talking about you @314action.bsky.social??

sam altman is just a sales guy with one goal: getting obscenely rich in silicon valley. his big thing previously was an app where you can find your friends on a map and after he sold it it turned out to have 500 users. he's not a stemlord he's just a run of the mill song and dance flim flam man

NY Times Deputy National Editor:

Cool -- NPR covered Ben Kay's study on ritalin's effects on the brain.

One of my favorite presents ever—my dad found and framed this pic of my mother @sunminkimes.bsky.social at a Seattle courthouse after she passed her US citizenship test in 1981. Like so many of the people who come here to start a new life, she is the best of us—the bravest, strongest person I know.

First-ever US airstrikes in Nigeria put the second Trump admin’s 2025 combat actions at: —Nigeria—tonight’s strikes —Yemen—1,000+ strikes (Mar-Apr) —Somalia—120 strikes, 1 ground raid —Syria—78+ strikes, 3 ground raids —Caribbean—11 strikes —Eastern Pacific—20 strikes —Iran—3 strikes —Iraq—1 strike

Wife got me a Cybertruck for Christmas and it already stopped working

Secret Santa came through @ryanboyd.bsky.social

💡 Pretty remarkable, right? But sleep is still super-important for brain health, just ask @jonykipnis.bsky.social! Stay tuned for more research on what happens if you override your sleep drive for too long...

Watching the NFL slate tomorrow? Yeah, games are mostly on Flub. Except for the ones streaming on Arcteryx Plus or HBO 3. Then you’ve got your out-of-market packages on the terrible humming monolith, of course.

I see various people posting this up. Here’s me from 2001 talking about AI. Dunno how accurate it is. I hope it isn’t. youtu.be/6mvUqM2Ty5c?...

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

We used Network Level Analysis @muriahwheelock.bsky.social to assess relative stimulant-related changes in attention, arousal, and reward networks. Attention was the least changed, arousal and reward the most. The effects on arousal were so great, stimulants negated the brain effects of drowsiness!

my festive spirit amidst our grimly stupid reality (2025)

When Bari Weiss wrote about the national crisis of “woke private schools,” all of her sources were anonymous students, parents, and teachers who agreed with her premise—and she ran the story without getting a school on the record, for “context.”

Evil shit.

An absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth

Well, this is an utter disaster for science. This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next. 🧪

Once in a century political opportunity here, if only there were a party to claim it

I am convinced America crossed an event horizon thirteen years ago, when even the deaths of elementary school aged children at the hands of a monster weren't enough for their government to say "enough is enough". Hard not to think that Americans would rather have their guns over their children.

Governor J.B. Pritzker: “We’re a nation mostly of immigrants — that is who we are fundamentally at our core. We ought to always be that, it’s what’s made our country great — Immigrants are the most entrepreneurial. Immigrants are the most grateful & patriotic”

When I lived in LA 97-99 (and you may recall this @davidjroth.bsky.social), Rob Reiner led the smoking ban in bars. I couldn’t believe bars could exist without cigs. And I don’t even smoke. He kickstarted all of it. I still go to bars. I never have to Febreez my clothes. So, also that.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. By not condemning and expelling Tuberville from the party, Republicans have essentially endorsed and normalized his repugnant views. He speaks for every Republican.

Extraordinary courage from Ahmed al Ahmed, a Muslim, 43-year-old father of two, who bravely risked his life to save his neighbors celebrating Hanukkah. Praying for his full & speedy recovery. And so deeply inspired by his example.

Been trying to figure out how to distill their whole deal into one image and they just posted it on Facebook:

Why did so many previous studies report low dimensionality? 1. High-quality neural datasets are finally large enough to probe representations beyond just tens of dimensions! 2. Standard methods in cognitive neuroscience are insensitive to low-variance—but meaningful—dimensions.

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Daily Memo: A Thousand Confirmed Kidnappings in the Past 90 Days, Plus Two More Deaths in Detention @eltragon.bsky.social

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I bet this will be the opening of the dam and >$500k direct will be increasingly common. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

I didn’t know Buzzfeed still was churning out listicles but this is a good one! www.buzzfeed.com/hannahloewen...

Full pardon for the convicted drug trafficker who helped move 400 tons of cocaine. Death by airstrike for the guys on the boat www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

cab screen opened with bari weiss giving some stupid ted talk thing, immediately hit mute, looked up now and it’s newsmax doing war propaganda. love to live in an age of billionaire funded right wing agitprop funneled directly into every public and semi-public space around

I am proud to appear as the seasick scientist on left of this picture, filling in a data log (clipboards still in use in 2025) of my guess at where the hell we were out in the pacific!

Today, in Utah, homeowners *or renters* can simply buy a solar panel at Costco, take it home, and plug it in to a wall socket, like an appliance. It just sits there & trims about 15-20% off a residential power bill. If you move to another apt., you can take it with you.