Remember, when something in the news upsets you, you are *not obligated* to spend the next hour hunched over your phone reading live updates and social media hot takes. You *can* stay informed without succumbing to this urge -- an urge deliberately conditioned into us for decades by the 24-hour […]

An interesting account of how the gunpowder plot ended. The Gunpowder Plot’s Forgotten Ending in Staffordshire https://www.theredhairedstokie.co.uk/the-gunpowder-plots-forgotten-ending-in-staffordshire/ There's a call for help, which I'll repeat here: > Ideally, I would like to identify who […]

Help me fediverse: I vaguely remember a website offering various simple services, with the defining feature that everything it provides is accessed exclusively over ssh (except the website itself documenting how to access the services). I think it was made by some small entity that, on the […]

You are not a "human resource", you are a human being. For people new to the workforce, Human Resources Departments might be staffed by nice people, but they work for the interests of management. If you want an entity that looks out your interests as a worker, that's what labor unions are for.

RE: https://fediscience.org/@Guillawme/111534984107819771 Something really cool happened to me this year! @HRBridges re-processed a #CryoEM dataset from some previous work of mine and colleagues (publicly available as EMPIAR-10739; see quoted post below for a summary of this work). She […]

JOB: Research Scientist at Wikimedia "We’re hiring a Research Scientist strongly committed to the principles of free knowledge, open source, privacy, and collaboration to join the Research team. As a Research Scientist, you will conduct applied research on the integrity of Wikipedia knowledge […]

Instead of a Mozilla fuck-up drinking game: Donate to @servo every time Mozilla gives its community another middle finger. 😁

If your #fediverse instance is run by an entity accepting donations (typically, an individual or an association), and you can afford to make a donation, do it! Even small donations are better than nothing and will help keep the lights on!

Books are art, and art is labor. Welcome to the rereading Project! We're working to build and maintain tools that respect and support the relationship between readers, authors, editors, and independent publishers by making it easier to read and archive books. Check us out at […]

«Kovid betrayed us with Calibre 8.16.2, and we as a community never should have let that happen, never have placed such a burden on individual generosity. The synthesis of these two truths, then, is nearly self-evident. There must be a new effort, free from AI encumbrances, that is built from […]

RE: https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/115725340534744039 In any kind of normal timeline this would have been stopped by regulators. Instead we let a single company become the sole gatekeeper for everything in #hpc .

If you were born after 1994 in South Africa, it’s easy to forget that being gay used to be a crime. 🏳️‍🌈🚫 While the racism of #apartheid is well-documented, the regime's extreme homophobia is often overlooked. Under the National Party, it wasn't just […] [Original post on mastodon.africa]

Today we are calling on institutions around the world to take control of their #digitalsovereignty, including their social accounts. Governments should communicate directly with their citizens on open platforms, not through the mouthpiece of a corporation […]

Good news everyone! We hit our first milestone: maintenance is 100% funded. Thank you all ❤️ Next up: unlock the stretch goal to co‑design federated groups: community‑owned spaces to organise across the fediverse, with no server or platform lock‑in. Read about why this matters and how it can […]

RE: https://mastodon.online/@Centre_Mersenne/115661990703325565 Society journals adopting the diamond open access model with financial support from science funding bodies and research institutions is a key step towards getting us out of the mess academic publishing currently is. This is […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@burger_jaap/115657217368994510 For a complete picture: Norway is also one of the largest exporters of oil and gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway#Oil-exporting_country

Amazon might not notice that you stopped shopping with them* but if you take that same modest bit of disposable income and spend it on art bought directly from artists, the small electronics projects of your friends, helping people in dire financial situations and the the local theater all of […]

Late and still at work PDB deposition Bug in the portal #haiku #StructuralBiology

I was reading someone talk about the difference between an academic ML conference and a hypey industry AI conference and they said ‘it’s like the difference between chemistry and alchemy. Or between astronomy and astrology.’ I really like that

Had no internet at home since yesterday morning. I eventually traced back the problem to the fact that I had set up the router to use https://www.dns0.eu as the DNS resolver. Apparently it no longer exists, and was replaced by https://www.joindns4.eu All IP addresses and domain names changed, so […]

Wow, *two* big outages today, in the top web frontend (CloudFlare, in front of about 25% of sites), and the top git forge (gitub, with something like 97% of public git repositories). Stuff like this is why I built https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/ to keep an eye on how centralized some of […]

We’re still an absolute skeleton crew of 14 people, competing with teams sometimes 100x as large as ours. To get to our humble team size was only possible through the less than 1% community members who donate to Mastodon, a handful larger donations, & EU grants, all of which we are forever […]

Most importantly, thanks to everyone here, to the whole community. I promise to always put the humans here first and to keep this a safe space for you, no matter how you express yourself and where you come from. I will treat my new position with the most respect. Let’s make Mastodon and the […]

Notre message est simple : nous avons besoin de dons pour couvrir les frais de justice de nos collègues. En effet, cette procédure a été longue et coûteuse en frais d’avocats ainsi qu’en dépenses de déplacement et d’hébergement pour les trois audiences qui se sont tenues en personne à Munich […]

Après 3 années de procès, cinq de nos collègues qui avaient participé à des actions de désobéissance civile lors de la campagne de @ScientistRebellion en Allemagne en 2022 ont été condamnés à 11 250 € d’amendes par la justice allemande. Vous pourrez trouver plus de détails sur le procès, notre […]

Trying LocScale2's feature-enhanced map for the first time. It better be helpful, for the time it's taking to run... #CryoEM

Streptavidin and streptactin can't be used interchangeably. I wish I had educated myself about this before I wasted a day (and reagents) on a failed experiment. But at least now with first-hand experience, I will never forget this lesson. 😅 #biochemistry

Pretty excited about this "2025 Community-Wide Assessment of Cryo-EM Heterogeneous Reconstruction Algorithms" #cahra2025 https://heterogeneity.notion.site/challenge I started looking at the compositional heterogeneity challenge (#comphet), some very weird things in there. Curious to figure out […]

I’ve been testing a theory: many people who are high on #ai and #LLMs are just new to automation and don’t realize you can automate processes with simple programming, if/then conditions, and API calls with zero AI involved. So far it’s been working! Whenever I’ve been asked to make an AI flow […]

yes yes Yes YEs YES YES YES!!! PURPLE! RED! ORANGE!! GREEN!!! WOWWWW (It was not this bright naked-eye, but these colours are all totally visible! Incredible!)

Abandoning these rankings is way overdue, IMHO: "The higher-education sector should collectively — and vocally — agree that the current rankings are not fit for purpose." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03636-x Lizzie Gadd @lizziegadd is spot on, as always! #rankings #universities […]

New diamond open access journal Replication Research welcomes reports of replication of previous works. #academicchatter https://www.uni-muenster.de/Ejournals/index.php/replicationresearch/index

I haven't yelled that many (overwhelmingly excited) swear words at the sky for a long time. WWOOOOOWWWWW. Reddest auroras I've ever seen!! Usually it takes a long time exposure/CCD camera to see red at all. This is BRIGHT!! You can actually see easily outside […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I applaud the new #stockholmdeclaration for the reform of academic publishing. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.251805 It calls for action on four high-level principles, and makes 34 specific recommendations under those four heads. Here are the four: "(i) Academia should […]

How did @biorxivpreprint make it this far without a #StructuralBiology "subject area"? 🤔 I will choose "biophysics" as the closest one, but this feels inexact for this paper...

Aaron Swartz should have been 39 years old today #aaronswartzday

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #unix v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973 Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum #retrocomputing

A man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent in Washington, D.C., has been found not guilty of misdemeanor assault after a trial. A federal grand jury rejected more serious charges against Sean Dunn over the incident in August, but Dunn was fired from his job as a paralegal in the Justice […]

[Rant on academia as a customer of big tech] The university had a subscription with Box, giving each employee 100 GB of cloud storage. I am not a big fan of these services, especially from companies based in the US, especially these days... But it was convenient to share large files with […]

Is biology too complex to ever understand? https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/biologists-physics-envy/ Probably...

This is the coolest polar expedition you have ever seen: crossing #antarctica by #snowkiting! https://www.underantarctica.com/en

They say that before the Thousand Suns, the sky was black, but for the pinpricks of other worlds. No one has seen it, for a dozen generations since the sky was lost to us. We have calculated a path through the debris, our vessel Noxifer will shoot down the sunsats; Nightfall will come. #tootfic […]

Can we create this future please? "Collective Intelligence as a great scientific, technical, and political project that aims to 'make people smarter with computers, instead of trying to make computers smarter than people'" link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

morning routine 1 get coffee 2 read the news 3 facepalm about yet another #advertising feature in #mozilla #Firefox 4 update the `policies.json` to block (3) https://codeberg.org/dmarti/browser-adfraud-protection/commit/a0e7ee4653c8246c9b14ebc5800bdd6038a5bc11 (If you want to follow along […]

Between 2019 and 2025, I went from being a SF-dystopian author to a realistic/naturalist writer. With the same set of books.

Don't forget.....

@sundogplanets SpaceX also litters the ground with stuff that was never in orbit, but some fight back. You might like this story, if you hadn’t seen it yet: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/cards-against-humanity-gets-settlement-from-spacex-plans-pack-of-elon-musk-cards

I propose a navigation plugin for the AI slop era. Tool should help us find LLM-free sites based on Web of Trust crowd verification. Browsing the web, you label a site as either free from or polluted by LLM slop. One button in your browser toolbar with a keyboard shortcut. An icon indicates how […]

I _wish_ this were the last word on this subject it's a good one https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/order-2