Department at my home university where I'm not even faculty wants to schedule exam in 2 weeks (before term officially starts, I'm on unpaid leave). Already giving 3 exams once term starts. Previously pushed to be removed from 2 other committees wanting to schedule exams. If not my tenure home: nope.

Nussbaum hits hard. www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/23/m...

Sitting with a good conversation I had yesterday in my mind. Sometimes you have the right people finding you at the right time to ask you THAT question. Thinking now rumbles under the surface.

If I owe you an email just know that it‘s 2025. Have a great decade!

And I must not leave out the famous Greek goddess, Telephone. Or her sisters Cellophane and Methane.

My top five favourite words to pronounce like they’re Greek philosophers…   5. Monocles 4. Bicycles 3. Popsicles 2. Obstacles 1. Testicles

“Compilers are… the bridge between human thought and machine execution. Everything modern software is built on this assumption that you can write in a language designed for humans, and a compiler will translate it to machine code that executes efficiently.” voxmeditantis.com/2025/12/13/f...

This entire weekend

What a preprint: Jitter analysis of sub-millisecond timing driven by mono-synapses, ephaptic coupling and gap junctions in the cerebellum. Basically a whole local circuit. "Coordination of spike timing among the neurons of the cerebellum" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I withdrew 2 papers from PhilSci journals in my career. Each returned w R&R in a way that questions peer-review. One asked to explain the difference between DNA/RNA (published in Cell instead). The other was deemed very good yet returned R&R. I cannot do lab-science + humanities flagellation at once

Maybe they believe in pre-estasblished harmony.

Today I learned from my grad that, apparently, I'm portrayed as advocating a sort of subjective hedonics according to another philosopher working on olfaction. I laughed so hard at this - and now I am really tempted of redoing my entire research program to do this view at least *some* justice.

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

You know what? I'm willing to empirically test this as many times as it takes to reach statistical certainty about any conclusions we reach

Edward Gorey 'In the middle of his kitchen he had a big marble ball fountain. Much of the art in the house consisted of found objects. He had an entire wall of antique cheese graters, which was very impressive, and an enormous ball of rope in the fireplace' Johnny Ryan

On the reading list! (especially after @pessoabrain.bsky.social's comment: "That's an interesting twist, Gene expression differs in live human tissue")

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... damn this is so very clever! "... we investigated how the brain categorizes stimuli that are not linearly separable in the physical world ... The sensory manifold was ... expanded into a seven-dimensional perceptual manifold..."

‘You will be haunted by three spirits.’

🥳Excited to share our latest human multipatch paper, now out in @natneuro.nature.com 🧠 We studied the cellular and synaptic physiology of human L2–3 pyramidal neurons and identified subtype-specific local connectivity rules across individuals. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Join us: penglab.de

It's not just social media. Looks like visitors to the US from Europe and other countries that are part of the visa waiver program will have to submit an enormous amount of data about themselves and their families, including DNA, if proposed new rules are accepted

I'm more and more convinced that low-dimensional manifolds in the brain are just an artifact of the experimental designs and analyses we use... 🧠📈 🧪

What if thinking doesn’t begin in the brain, but in the ceaseless labour of our cells? Today’s essay rethinks the question of how we become minds, arguing that cognition begins not in the mind but in the collective processes that keep a body alive @annaciaunica.bsky.social

If you analyse time-resolved data (M/EEG, iEEG, pupillometry, force recordings…) and feel limited by cluster-based permutation tests (CBPTs); especially when trying to determine when an effect starts or ends; you may want to try our new R package: lnalborczyk.github.io/neurogam/ #rstats #brms #EEG

You're Divine, Gabriel Vitel www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVSo...

Happy 73rd Birthday to Michael Dorn. 🎂🎉

So did Hannah Arendt. To mention... a woman scholar.

The Border’s There to Be Crossed, Jon and Roy www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YE2...

Just to annoy all neuroscientists... (and others) Even drawing this in terms of spikes and waves is just missing the point that biological complex systems are multilevel and have dense interlevel interactions. We're not in the domain of physics where one averages point particles in a chamber...

This week’s Shelf Awareness Maximum Shelf pick is Beronda L. Montgomery’s WHEN TREES TESTIFY, a reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery that offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees. 👉 tinyurl.com/yu5ekrjk

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning. Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

Bonaparte - Melody X www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAPv...

One good thing from the current techbro-government-alliance debacle is that no one from any underrepresented group ever needs to take those cries for meritocracy and reason as anything more than what they have shown to be: naked "but *I* wants".

You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one

"...academic capitalism: knowledge refashioned as commodity and students as consumers... impoverishes universities, turning them into debt-financed shells of themselves... a university that no longer asks what education is for, only what it can earn" The addition of 'AI' is just the latest assault

For all the "WE HAIL THE FUTURE WITH AI INITIATIVES" Indiana University is doing, burning millions in the process, gutting/centralizing IT turned it into an overworked/underpaid help-desk wasteland. Been locked out of my lab's laptop for months after its order took months. Frankfurt called it: BS.

Mood

Been continuing writing poems but stopped posting them on Bluesky. Feel free to check them out here: as-barwich.medium.com

In Germany it is.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

Suspirium, Thom Yorke "This is a waltz thinking about our bodies and what they mean for our salvation... Is the darkness ours to take? Bathed in lightness." www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTZl...

EEG, the real MVP of neuroscience. And my kinda gal. (@thetransmitter.bsky.social) Source: stateofneuroscience.thetransmitter.org/trends/

Women Photographers 1900 to 1975: A Legacy of Light – in pictures www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Newspapers are closing at an emergency-level rate—over the past 20 years, America has lost more than 3,000. For the past six years, the photographer Ann Hermes has been documenting the lives lived in these dying places across the country. See more images: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/059DXx

No, no, NO! He was a phenomenal observer. Every sentence uttered could be jotted down. He was utterly mesmerized by wit at play, and his eyes lit up when a close-up magician performed tricks for him. He also was genuinely kind. He bought me a beer on two brief occasions, even remembered the first.

"Sketch, Shade, Smudge: Drawing from Gray to Black" exhibit at Harvard Art Museums harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/...

Harvard gets its research funding back through defiance and lawsuits.

Edna Andrade "Imagination is never static" exhibit at Harvard Art Museums en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_An...