Creationist journals are wild

What else can we hope for?

Maintenance is the mortar of any society

My girlfriend and I went to a shanty night at Boston's West End Museum. Great fun to see how many locals knew all the words. I'm usually the folkie in a group, and I was utterly outclassed.

Lots of posts using the 2020 NEJM superspreading event paper as estimate of typical hantavirus transmissibility. Reminder that superspreading events are by definition an outlier. If you want to estimate transmissibility you need to look at ALL infections, not just cherry pick tail of distribution.

The R install you never knew you needed #rstats

Monty Python's Flying Circus That Mitchell and Webb Look Deadwood The Wire The Sopranos Seinfeld Strangers with Candy The Office (BBC) True Detective Futurama The Simpsons Space Ghost Coast to Coast I Think You Should Leave Treme South Park

Tragic. Please pass this along to US Chairs and Deans, and consider it when you sit on promotion committees. This, combined with the review backlog, is dire - especially for our early career researchers.

The past and the future are both now

If you've not read the ggdist package paper in IEEE, you're missing some excellent footnotes. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/102... #rstats #dataviz

The Slow Science Movement advocates for a more thoughtful, sustainable approach to research that values quality over quantity and depth over speed. It sounds trivial, but if you are an active researcher you know it is not. 👉 www.slow-science.com/index.html

We’ve launched @liberalism.org! It’s a online journal of liberal ideas, exploring the ways liberalism points to a better future and how we can get there, from me and my @theihs.org colleagues @jkuznicki.bsky.social and @uncanonical.net, and feature essays from top scholars, podcasts, and more.

Why I think, in the current A.I. moment, we should be reading Paul Churchland. #philsky #philsci thehangedman.com/philosophy/p...

In case you ever wondered about the differences between magrittr pipe and base pipe 🤔 This table is taken from a great stackoverflow answer by @GeorgKindermann stackoverflow.com/questions/67... #rstats #dataviz #phd

I've found JabRef to be a pretty good interface for managing a big bibtex database. Customizable and capable of addressing many of the issues summarized here. Even still, I almost always have to make tweaks to the local .bib files I pull off for individual papers.

Once again, immigration is not even a problem. Immigrants are not more criminal, they don't cost jobs, they don't harm the economy. There is no reason for any of this. It is hurting ourselves to hurt them.

This is hilarious: creepylink.com

Welcome to the shithole.

If we hit $70k today and $35k was matched by our donor, we would get to 21% of our goal. Crowdfunding campaigns that crack 20% are highly likely to meet their goals. Please help us hit this important milestone gofund.me/638697766

Heyo! Gemini 3 Pro actually does the tool call. gemini.google.com/share/f88a98...

One "upgrade" in Gemini 3 Pro is that my "Asshole" gem, which I instructed to be a complete asshole to me, no longer works. Flagged as abusive and profane. As an alternative, Gemini suggests roleplay a specific character. So I said "embody Begbie from Trainspotting". The funniest "thinking" step:

It’s astonishing how many researchers seem to believe that a cluster analysis is such a sensible analysis that it needn’t even be justified through a coherent research question. Just cluster analysis go brrrrr

I was opposed to the deal Brown struck with Trump over the summer, knowing full well it would probably cost me my job if the university didn't do it. I am happy they rejected this compact, at the very least, though I would have liked a more forceful statement.

This is a good one. I've got some remedial reading to do.

New post on what happens when you can't press undo, from research and banking to cryptography and modern AI: kucharski.substack.com/p/not-going-...

Palmer is a libertarian, so when he says "liberalism" he's referring to the small-l variety. I agree wholeheartedly with this quote.

That warm feeling when someone cites your paper for... *skims article*... the background claim for which you cited the original source.

We have established that were you to combine the worst comedic timing, instincts, skill, and craft, you would come up with Adam Sandler. If you add to that mixture the sun shining on a horse's ass twice a day, you'd get Will Ferrell.

Thank you

Interesting that Gemini 2.5 Pro gets the correct answer in its "thinking" but then reports the same incorrect answer as ChatGPT5.

The complaint against "wokeness" was that student mobs could brand a professor as a bigot and get the prof "cancelled." Now under Trump, the "anti-woke" types are formalizing this as a power granted by government to conservative students.

A sad day at Brown.

LLMs don't lie because they want to. They lie because they're trained to role-play, reinforced to please and lack grounding in truth. This misalignment isn't just theoretical: it’s showing up in fabricated data, hallucinated praise, even red-teamed blackmail. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

One of the dadgummed dumbest things about Gmail / Google Drive is that they won't preview code scripts as plain text without a third-party add-on. Something tells me this cannot be Lindy.

This is often misunderstood. Crappy fraud, like manipulated images, sometimes can be seen with a little care. But if someone is smart about it, we can't reasonably expect normal peer review to pick it up.

If you want to understand how the federal government could turn into a bunch of white supremacists with guns abusing minorities while 20 something neo-Nazi shit posters fill official state social media accounts with groyper memes, my conversation with @noupside.bsky.social is a good place to start.

Depending which methods guru you ask every analytical task is “essentially” a missing data problem, a causal inference problem, a Bayesian problem, a regression problem or a machine learning problem

douglas hofstader has taken his gloves off garymarcus.substack.com/p/are-llms-s...

Stop spreading this garbage about em dashes in ACTUAL EDITED PROSE OH MY GOD. Plenty of actual human beings know how to type em dashes! We’re called “writers” and “editors” — maybe you’ve heard of us?

Libertarians: is this freedom

What is alive? What is dead? To follow the tree of discussions, click below and navigate. Here, I briefly give some reflections that might be useful to spur further discussion. A “life thread” 🧪🧬🦠🌍🌐 🧵 1/

Any physician who refuses to treat a person based on their politics or anything other their ability to treat that person should lose their license to practice.

This is madness. I am an old person and widely-published writer who has proudly overused the em-dash professionally for 25 years. You will take my em-dash when you pry it from my cold, dead, bleeding human fingers.

I was just thinking idly about the potential for unwitting large-scale release of sensitive health care or study data via the use of AI coding "copilots". Along those lines, we have:

"nuisance at scale" is being added to the glossary