Men who understand cats understand consent, that’s all I’m saying.

I could find out more about those 13 missions easily if NASA's program/grant search page weren't still broken after *checks notes*... a full year now.

www.jimmynewland.com/wp/2026/01/1... it was nice to represent TACC at the UT RGV STEM Education Conference as part of the DS4TX initiative the last few days.

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Tonight I presented alongside my former high school student turned doctoral student about the QuERY program from my former life as a teacher to the QuantA&M student group. Thanks to the Aggies for letting a Longhorn and an MIT Beaver talk about education & mentorship in science

❤️

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

I keep saying it’s time we go back to Web 1.0. Everybody do their own website and link rings to other actual humans who know things.

Leaders of the so-called “pro-life, small government” party who relentlessly warn of tyranny are standing by as masked agents roam the country and brutalize its people. The hypocrisy isn’t surprising — but it’s staggering. Remember this.

Gabriel Zucman on the shocking concentration of extreme wealth in the United States…. gzucman.substack.com?r=nle0&utm_c...

#OTD 23 January 2016, ESA's #Rosetta narrow-angle camera took this image when the spacecraft was 75.1 km from Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/spaceinimage... @science.esa.int @dlr-de.bsky.social

Meet some of the flying friends of NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory! Cerro Pachón is home to a vast array of wildlife, including several different types of birds. These are just a few of many species that call this place home 🐦🔭

🌏🔥🌡️: Today's North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly is 0.66°C above the 1982–2010 mean. #ClimateChange #NorthAtlantic #SST #GlobalWarming #greenhouse #science #dataanalysis #GlobalWarming #ClimateData #ClimateAction #Python #DataEngineering #datascience

Using #datascience to teach #astronomy doesn’t have to mean programming. Here is an activity where students use spreadsheets and spectra data to determine the relative abundance of atoms in the atmosphere of a star. At the end of the page is a link to a Python version of the same activity.

I went into a super cute new local bookshop a couple of weeks ago and left when I saw their curated collection of right wing political books & Charlie Kirk tshirts for sale. I 100% support their right to stock whatever they choose, & I’ll just choose to not spend my money there.

I finally realized I can make my own specific plots to teach introductory concepts instead of finding one in a text. I needed a plot showing the idealized blackbody curves for stars of varying photospheric temperatures. thinkingwithcode.com/datascience/...

The brightest sun dog I’ve ever seen

NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky! This is the most comprehensive spectral view of the infrared sky, with 102 colors (or wavelengths) of infrared light from observations made between May and December 2025. 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭

As Nessa Carson moves from organic chemistry into a computational team, a chemical science education is proving fruitful for developing effective ways of learning.

🧪 “These findings underscore the critical role of social interventions; shifts in behavioral norms and trust can permanently alter epidemic outcomes, suggesting that such interventions are as crucial as biomedical controls” In other words, get Fox News off the air. #ImpeachRFKJr.

A simple analytical model for Neanderthal disappearance due to genetic dilution by recurrent small-scale immigrations of modern humans 🏺🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Although other factors may have contributed, results highlight admixture as a possible key mechanism driving their disappearance.

One Laptop Per Child, 10 years later: "we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression... computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills" www.nber.org/papers/w34495

Looking for lesson plans for #CSEdWeek? Go to csedweek.org/heroes#CSEdWeek?and filter for 2025 to meet this year’s CS Heroes! Each hero has a downloadable poster for your classroom, materials to read and watch, and accompanying discussion questions to use in your lesson plan.

Tomorrow, December 3 at 5:30 PM CT, join Think Data Ed for Stop Guessing! Bootstrap Your Way to Confidence, a hands-on workshop that makes confidence intervals click. Register: thinkdataed.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Re-upping this today, citing the concluding paragraph we wrote as I just responded to a frustrating survey about integrating GenAI into humanities education at my institution.

"the issue isn’t that we need more 'boy-friendly' reforms. It’s that boys are socialized to compete only with boys and to read girls’ success as illegitimate or emasculating. The result is dissonance, resentment, and disengagement for boys—and hostile climates for girls." time.com/7335723/auto...

Authoritarians use technology to spy on us and silence our voices. We're pushing back to defend democracy. Learn more and Take Back CTRL today: takebackctrl.org/fight-for-d...

I take Wikipedia for granted. Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires our support. So I’m finally donating. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/m...

Another board game night - tonight is Patchwork Christmas Edition

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

I left the classroom in 2024 after teaching physics, astronomy, and computer science because I finished a doctorate in science education. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing in academia. I assume this is normal…

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

UPDATE: Americans who use YouTube 84% Facebook 71% Instagram 50% TikTok 37% WhatsApp 32% Reddit 26% Snapchat 25% X (Twitter) 21% Threads 8% Bluesky 4% Truth Social 3% Full Pew Research Center report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-social-media-use-2025/

🧵Why I'm loving cluster photometry. Point a telescope, measure brightness in B and V filters, and suddenly thousands of stars tell a single story: temperature, evolution stage, and where the cluster sits in space. Short, sharp, and addictive. 1/6 🧪🔭

so yeah, your students should learn basic physics, not just what's immediately required for their specialty

20 years ago there was huge pressure to train for “financial physics”, then computer science, now AI. And while a good physics program will give exposure to tools relevant for the area of the day, it will strongly resist focusing on that area and instead focus on the fundamentals.

Those claiming Dems should retreat on racial justice aren't hard-headed realists, they're pushing against the electoral tide rather than leaning into it. The story of Gen Z isn't about racist backlash or red-pilled young men. It's the most racially progressive generation in American history. 🧵

periodic reminder of the existence of Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font available from the Braille Institute designed to improve readability for people with low vision I use it in talks because it's pretty and also because, as an audience member, I am perpetually squinting at people's slides

Saturn’s rings remain disconcertingly thin

hashtag data science

From Niloofar Sharei @astroneal.bsky.social : JWST reveals galaxies that built up heavy elements at record speed, reaching near-modern metallicities only a billion years after the Big Bang. ⚛️🔭☄🧪 astrobites.org/2025/11/10/f...

Next week, I am presenting with a teacher friend at the Texas science education conference about how to bring data science into a high school astronomy class. The activity is using a few different data moves. Here is the coding version. github.com/jimmynewland... #datascience #astronomy #csed

Ever handed your students a “ready-to-paint” dataset? In our latest Learning Progressions Blog post, Tim Erickson shows why students should help prepare the data—filtering, grouping, and summarizing—before diving in. Read → ds4e.substack.com/p/making-dat... #LearningProgressions

I’m a big fan of Desmos. Yesterday I taught BigO notation to teachers practicing for the CS Praxis certification exam. www.desmos.com/calculator/h... #csed

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Do K–12 computer science education policies boost CS majors in college? Using 20+ years of data, Paul Bruno & colleagues show these policies are often too light-touch to matter, reflecting, not driving, rising CS interest. 📄 edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1301

CHOOSE STATISTICAL TEST in 4 QUESTIONS (NO MATH! 🤯) Stop struggling with T-Tests, ANOVAs & Chi-Square. Use this simple flowchart guide to pick the right test every time👇 Watch the full beginner's guide now: youtu.be/EeASQZvGRcg #Statistics #DataScience #DataAnalysis #stats

"Pairing computer science with culturally responsive education shows results" great to get details of this study via Ed Finkel in K12 Ed Dive whose bluesky handle i can't find anywhere. #cseducation #k12 #research www.k12dive.com/news/compute...

Australia has so much electricity from solar power that it is going to start offering free electricity to everyone for at least three hours during the day as the wholesale price of power goes negative electrek.co/2025/11/04/a...

🔭 ~1,400 people globally have contributed to the construction of Rubin, including 500 construction staff, 500 contractors, 100 staff on operations (so far), and 300 in-kind contributors, from software and hardware contributions to follow-up observing time on other telescopes