this is a very sharp piece on why it makes no sense to run universities as if they are businesses. They're not businesses. www.afr.com/work-and-car...

I'm on a panel this week where we will allocate about a million dollars in grants and as I wade through these apps one thing is apparent: the ability to write clearly in plain language is a real asset for scientists

it's a working from home day so I made tuna melts for lunch One of the highest ratios of delicious:photogenic out there (highly delicious, not at all the other thing)

bluesky is over, twitter is full of AI bros, threads is all advertising, linkedin is for losers. see you all in the Google Docs chat sidebar

Marian Burros, the originator of the plum torte everybody loves, died yesterday

threw together some spaghetti puttanesca with chorizo, a dish of pantry staples that really has no business tasting as good as it does

Chicago Pope ftw

good advice for postdocs on the job market, served up by facebook's algo (which for me is primarily cooking videos)

getting better at tulip style pours 🌷 This one has four layers and the making of a wing base. Will keep practicing

one thing that always surprises me in new zealand is that it's socially acceptable to be openly xenophobic "are you from Canada? I wouldn't want to assume you're from the *states* <shudder>" it's like, really? are you also prejudiced against any other countries? how about ethnicities?

this is wild - i was aware of Mary-Claire King's absurdly important discoveries on BRCA / inherited breast cancer but I had no idea that her first PhD paper (King & Wilson 1975, Science, not bad lol) is the "99% of protein coding shared btwn chimps and humans" result www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

What's the point of studying humans to learn things about humans if you don't actually study humans? If patterns are present in the LLM data, in a way that's robust enough to detect, you should be doing corpus work. If you need an LLM-large corpus to detect any patterns, there aren't patterns.

parents of older children: at what point did you stop just doing laundry 100% of the time? and how long was it after they left for college?

nice interactive piece about lots of map projections, including better-known good ones like Equal Earth but also funkier ones like the Goode Homolosine www.reuters.com/graphics/AFR...

absurdly fresh Gisborne oranges from a truck on the side of the road. NZ$10 for the sack, which is 3.5kg or 20 oranges (US$0.28 apiece). Divine

“We are not working on building an AI agent. We are working to protect Signal from the invasion of AI agents that threaten privacy and that are being implemented in irresponsible ways”

4yo: I don't have enough sauce Me, an american: do you want some more ketchup babe 4yo, a kiwi kid: it's called *sauce* dada 💀😭

good news everybody in new zealand you can rant about the government on bluesky and then someone will literally read your tweet to the opposition leader to get a response

came across some very cool science on Earth's environmental history, made possible by a swamp kauri kauri are a gorgeous native species of tree here in new zealand, and the one studied in this paper lived for 1,700 years, 42,000 years ago, and was preserved in a swamp on our North Island

new zealand government reaching new heights of stupidity next year our public dollars will go more to AI grants ($70 million) than all investigator-initiated basic science combined ($56 million in the Marsden fund)

some aspects of the internet are inadvertently funny, like I saw an airplane in an odd spot the other day, thought "huh is there an airfield around here?" so I look at google maps to find an air force base where it was landing, and because it's google maps, the base has 4.1 stars with 38 reviews

disappointing news: my 7yo's school took a vote and the new name of their walking school bus is the Road Voyagers (5 votes), beating out the obviously preferable Walking Cool Bus (2 votes)

"Come join us!!!" —member of academic search committee that will receive 200 applications for one role and may in fact hire zero people for it

Nothing. I use it for nothing at all because AI is good at zero of the tasks I do regularly Honestly I don't even know what its web address is, is it like a 2000s style ChatGPT.com or something funkier like chat.g.pt

This is how I found our Robert Redford died. RIP

psych departments post a faculty job that has nothing to do with AI challenge

I'd like a survey of American expats on how much this subject influenced their decisions to leave

And they say cost of living is high in NZ! Tonight at the grocery, fresh avocados for US$0.35 apiece

nobody: sound/auditory people: JD Vance cannot be allowed to supersede Terry Gross's longstanding association with the Electro-Voice RE20 broadcast microphone

this is a very good and incredibly sad piece about Canadian national treasure Robert Munsch, the author of phenomenal children's books Angela's Airplane, the Paper Bag Princess, Thomas's Snowsuit, and many others Munsch has dementia. Fuck dementia.

broke: music makes you smarter woke: music makes you healthier bespoke: music makes your peacetime military deployments look really silly

love 2 fill in a survey from my university, and then be notified, once i fill it out, that it's data being collected by the Nous Group, i.e. the notoriously horrible consulting firm that is destroying universities globally www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/educati...

was reminded of this from more Epstein news, so I checked out Nowak's wiki page it had been what wikipedians call 'refbombed' : 50+ citations to fancy papers, a ton of text on books and awards etc, seemingly to avoid negative attention on the Epstein stuff I've edited accordingly & others can too

this is more than NZ is spending on basic science these days

once in awhile I am totally floored by how memory works today i ran across an ad for CHICAGO, a show I've performed >100x, but haven't thought of in ages out of context, I barely remember remember a note I played, but I put the album on and it's wild, I can sing like every line of the Reed I book

this is awesome and also a great example for an intro-stats lecture on dimensionality reduction for example: pont l'évêque and butterkäse are neighbours on the axis depicted here (hardness). but on another, such as the "would the median American spit it out" axis, they are at opposite extremes

me, reluctantly: what was that song you were singing about poo? 7yo: which one? The first one or the second one?

one academic view i hold is that declared helplessness surrounding administrative tasks is both rude and non-credible

Sunday waffles always feel decadent despite just being made of stuff you already have in pantry Plus you can freeze the leftover batter, or cook it off and freeze individual waffles which crisp up nicely in the toaster at a later date

Nobody: Vision scientists:

the social lives of children are hilarious to me, like yesterday this 6yo i've never met from my kid's class saw me and nearly knocked his own dad over in excitement, because they want to arrange a playdate and are powerless to do so until the parents are in touch with one another

The orangeposting will continue until morale improves

we needed the fax machine to introduce us to the idea that machines break everything real into bits of stuff that isn't real and then spit out shoddy, waxy impressions that are hard to read. young people were denied this knowledge

fyi everybody, working N64s are relatively easy to find used online, the device has no idea what the internet is, it's more fun to play as a group/family, and kids cannot add new games by themselves (unless they're extremely industrious, in which case, well done)

Tomato art from previous years (all from my garden).

my better half was in the waikato today and she came back with a massive sack of very fresh oranges she got for $5 from a guy on the side of the road and I immediately ate three of them I'm back to orangeposting 🍊🍊🍊

highly recommended for your Bluesky Experience™️

sent a draft of the thing to the guy please clap

we live in a bushy area of Auckland which means lots of bugs and lots of birds who enjoy eating bugs spiders on windowframes (outside, usually) are a particularly yummy target for tūī like this chonker who was singing away right behind me just now (nearly flew into the house at the end there haha)