As Ta-Nehisi Coates said last month: “.. it’s either one of two things: either you’re cowards or you’re with him. And if you’re with him, you never believed in the things you were talking about to begin with.”

This photo accompanying a news story about the heist at the Louvre is perfection.

RFK Jr. keeps repeating this ridiculous, ignorant bullshit. Trust in expertise is literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I wrote a whole-ass thread about it last time around; maybe worth revisiting. bsky.app/profile/carl...

"The single most important behaviour, design or regulation for creating streets conducive to walking and cycling, was physical separation between the modes" We've got a new study out, learning from a broad mixture of street users, planners and designers www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Experts along with 5th graders who just learned the definition of percentages.

> OpenAI’s own advanced reasoning models actually hallucinated more frequently than simpler systems. An observation I made in my book, even in the first edition two years ago, was that research gave us reason to believe that hallucinations got worse with increasing model size

OpenAI “admits” what literally anyone with any training in the subject always knew. Generative AI models work like this. They are built like this. “Hallucinations” is all they do all the time.

This. No TT/non-TT/VAP job will be offered to an int'l candidate, since it requires an H1-B until the green card is issued. This process takes at least a couple of years.

Oh. That doesn’t seem right

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

"Multiple execs felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, the two sources say, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed." They will never learn that capitulation doesn't work. Never

ah, well

UTS VC: "Our commitment to public education ... is paramount." Also UTS VC: *cuts the teacher education program.* www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

🤷🏿‍♂️

It's "great" to see my employer releasing names and information about *alleged* behavior to the Trump admin, without even telling the people who've been accused what it is that they're accused of. Utterly reprehensible. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

look Charlie Kirk started, maintained, & promoted turning point usa’s professor watchlist I’ve been on it for over a decade and until this year I was the *only* UVM professor on it which means his life’s work = my death threats

butler's literally jewish and has written extensively about this topic come on

Which work? Calling for gay people to be stoned to death? Blaming airplane crashes on black pilots? Anti-vax bullshit? Election denialism? Pushing Great Replacement Theory? Kirk’s murder is awful and ominous for this country. But no, we don’t need to honor him or “continue his work.”

Here is a word cloud of the words that were missing from the noncompetitive renewal awards but had been present in the parent award. 3/4

And far too often we still think physics is just quantum mechanics and cosmology - far away mysterious things that don't relate to our everyday life. That's nonsense. Why it is tiring to walk slowly, what limits the height of a tree, why do baby ducks swim in a tight line? Physics will tell you!

Good news about the cutting-edge AI tools from the $3-trillion-dollar company.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with: “What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

The goal:

Wapo Photo editor is clearly pro e-cargo bike.

By my count, Donald Trump is already guilty of ~14 of the 27 direct charges made against King George III in the Declaration of Independence. Do what you will with that information. www.archives.gov/founding-doc...

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years. Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

Low key one of the worst anbuses of power ever? www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

I acknowledge “AI tools are like calculators, automatic transmissions, and GPS, and people will eventually adapt without major cognitive issues” arguments - but I disagree. These tools are so much more broad in scope and also, I believe, more dangerous to cognitive function when over-relied upon.

Yvonne, I… *deep sigh* A lot happened and this is now where we are.

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

The story I heard concerned a Japanese businessman who was told we were going to make our universities more businesslike. His response: why would you do that? Your universities are excellent and your businesses are rubbish. But we appointed the wrong people and pressed ahead.

among the many things they don’t tell you about having kids is the amount of money you will shell out to buy various berries

I ran into Robin Williams when I was four. As in, actually ran into him. He was every bit as lovely about it as you'd think.

Look, speaking as a physicist, it is hard for me to put into words how batshit crazy this is.

Further context: If you’ve never dealt with FEMA after a disaster I can tell you they answer within 30 seconds. No hold times. Real live wonderful people who help while you cry and can’t even figure out what questions to ask. They walk you through it all. Every call. NOEM STOLE THAT $ FOR ICE

Everyone is acting like US scientists will just go get science jobs elsewhere and sure some will but there are not anywhere close to enough science jobs elsewhere. The end result of this will be much, much, much less science, not science happening in different places.

Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up

When critical race theorists point out that “neutrality” and “objectivity” are often a thin veneer for white supremacy, they mean stuff like this.

it’s absurd that NYT forced him to delete these skeets, which … convey the factual information that Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, a man of South Asian descent who was born and raised in Africa, and that the pseudonymous source of the hacked material is a white supremacist eugenicist.

Every time I see some horrifying ai answer search get memed I think it must be some kind of joke and every time I go see for myself that this is instead the future we want

The Voyager project arguably remains the pinnacle of human achievement: a perfect joining of the sciences and the humanities possible only when governments fully fund agencies like NASA, NEH, and NSF. Commercial industry could never do this; it cannot imagine wonder removed from raw profit.

I am thinking a lot today about how heavy things feel in my world of faculty doing scientific research. There's the immediate chaos and panic about our ability to pay people and continue our research. But there's also a deeper grief at watching everything get bulldozed for no reason

"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."

I've thought many times in the last 7 years that it's likely that the most impactful thing I will have done in my academic career was the work to organize the Tufts PhD student union. But we, as organizers talked about extra protections for international PhD students, I never imagined this.

I just got word that this federal transportation grant was terminated today, despite us removing the word "climate" from the title. The moral of the story? Obeying orders doesn't keep you safe with this administration.

Just got mine. Totally expected, but it still sucks. Probably the most for all the work that so many of us put in on behalf of US taxpayers that is now wasted and will never come to fruition.