I had the honor of seeing Watson's racism on display first-hand In grad school, he was the invited guest for a speaker series I ran with other students. At dinner he looked my Latina classmate in the eye and said "Your people don't usually have the work ethic to succeed in this field!" Bad guy.

In 1953 James Watson revealed the double helix structure of DNA He spent the rest of his career revealing how great scientists can be awful people www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

My kind of abundance

It's easy (and usually fun) to dump on pundits. But I think both of these things can be true 1. Very few Dems think algebra is racist or banning plastic bags is a big priority 2. Lots of people *think* D's are obsessed with these things because being a Democrat is historically unpopular and uncool

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Super cool that the FDA is out there telling doctors the opposite of what the president said as he was vibing through a press conference

More people need to realize politics has devolved into sorting people into buckets and keeping them there 1. Pick position (e.g. vaccines r scary) 2. Signal "if you're one of us, you must believe [1]" The reality of the position doesn't matter to these people. It's all just shepherding for power

Kakistocracy kills.

We can save RFK Jr some time here, because we already know a lot about acetaminophen and autism! There’s no increased risk of autism from use of this drug. This isn’t based on some small study. It’s thanks to a beautiful study of literally millions of children… wapo.st/4nkMdCO

My woe was over the character limit

Asimov wrote “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” The loss of any life to political violence is a profound failure of humanity’s potential. We must resist the gravitational pull toward dehumanization and vengeance no matter how much we disagree with someone Our future depends on it

No one in Texas is surprised that the world epicenter of weird little brother energy is leading the charge on attacking academic wrongthink. Look at what they consider normal!

The board is wrong. But politics is a game of perceptions more than it is about reality (which I wish wasn’t true but 🤷‍♂️). And plenty of bad actors have been able to make these perceptions more salient/popular, and retcon reality in order to erode trust in institutions. None of this is an accident!

When you remember that much of the modern GOP mission revolves around weakening institutions by eroding our trust in them, this seems like a big win for them

Had no idea these guys were into BJJ

The quacks and hucksters have invented a remarkable self-reinforcing perpetual persecution machine: Refuse to engage with their ideas, and it confirms their ideas are being suppressed But criticize their ideas, and it confirms that the "establishment" is conspiring to protect entrenched beliefs

The problem here is they are taking a reasonable point of view (you should be able to feel safe in your city and not be surrounded by garbage and dangerous drugs) and then turning around and criminalizing the mere existence of people they refuse to help get off the streets or give medical care to

Anyway, it's obvious why a place dedicated to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" would scare these people

The authoritarians are mad at the Smithsonian for challenging the circa-1940s Disney version of history that they so badly want to be true, but it's clear that the US government REALLY wanted it to be a place for fossils and cool rocks (great idea) govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pd...

As an Austinite I don’t think I’m alone in preferring that 78-year-old Doggett retires, lets Casar win the new district (Greg rules), and Doggett can be a shoe-in for Austin mayor in 2028 to protect the city from the mentally incompetent Texas state government

Yes. Hahaha. YES Prepare for me to be insufferable, potentially for the next 160 days or longer 🤘😎 Hook ‘em

For surveys like this, you can usually attribute the high uncertainties about obvious things (e.g. Earth orbits the sun) to lack of education or question confusion The more alarming trend is that since 2021, conspiracy thinking has noticeably increased and agreement with science has decreased

The USA continues to leap face-first onto the rake of scientific self-owns faster than any other country in modern history. From energy to medical R&D and everything in between, just a stunning trajectory of ignorance and squandered opportunity. The future demands better

We teach about the Lysenkoism when we want to showcase how politics can push a nation’s science to become deadly pseudoscience. In the future, I wonder if they’ll replace that lesson with RFKJrism

TikTok has absolutely cratered people’s narrative attention spans. I make educational YouTube videos with deliberate acts to build story, and I purposely loop back to ideas to reinforce then, but if it takes longer than 3 minutes to watch then inevitably someone comments “get to the point”

sounds like a great way to make sure we don't lead in AI or high-tech innovation

The New York Post invited someone to complain that an exhibit built by the only species in Earth's history to ever explore its own origins and build public shrines to share its knowledge does not sufficiently celebrate the "exceptional place of humans in nature" nypost.com/2025/07/26/o...

I simply refuse to believe that this man and I are the same age

Tired: #FloridaMan Wired: #FloridaFauna

Parents should be free to teach their kids if the local school system isn't setting those kids up for success, but if "evolution is real" and "guys who owned slaves weren't 100% great" are the ideas you have a problem with then you're not doing your kids any favors www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/s...

This interview is very good and underscores just how boldly the US leapt onto the rake with both feet when Republicans crippled renewable energy, EV adoption, and battery investment in their latest tax bill, ceding even more of tomorrow's energy dominance to China www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/o...

If shit ever really hits the climate fan and we someday need to turn down the warming dial in a hurry, cloud seeding/albedo enhancement is one of the few options at our disposal But distrust in institutions & rise of paranoid politics make studying this impossible www.politico.com/news/2025/07...

I highly recommend that you ask Google about being a baby animal in various scenarios and inquire about the location of your mother before they update their AI Quite wholesome and reassuring!

Welp, the Senate was just given the opportunity to save public media funding from the rescissions package. And they didn't. Cuts to children's educational programming, local journalism that communities depend on, emergency alerts for rural areas… those cuts remain in the bill.

I've been giving this a lot of thought, and I've come to the conclusion that experts are, in fact, good

I'm bringing back "Ahoy!"

Air conditioning might be our toughest environmental justice conundrum. Billions experience extreme heat each year. A/C unquestionably saves lives But A/C uses 7-10% of our electricity, emits 7% of global greenhouse gases emissions, and leaked coolants are >100x more potent GHGs than CO2

Holy crap. Listen to these comments from Kerr County residents demanding leaders send back ARPA funds that could have been used for flood warning upgrades. Did politics and division contribute to this death toll? Is there any hope of deprogramming these people? Are we cooked?

Holy crap. Listen to these comments from Kerr County residents demanding leaders send back ARPA funds that could have been used for flood warning upgrades. Did politics and division contribute to this death toll? Is there any hope of deprogramming these people? Are we cooked?

I don't know who needs to hear this, but there is no such thing as a "good faith" question about contrails, unless you are in a science class learning about upper atmospheric condensation nuclei (and spoiler: Zeldin ain't talking about that here)

The evidence we have right now suggests weather forecasts were accurate and they identified the chance of dangerous rains/floods THIS is what we should be asking: Why did TX lawmakers vote this year against improving emergency warning systems in rural areas? www.texastribune.org/2025/07/06/t...

There have been claims that NOAA/NWS did not foresee catastrophic TX floods--but that's simply not true. This was undoubtedly an extreme event, but messaging rapidly escalated beginning ~12 hrs prior. Flood Watch mid PM, "heads up" outlook late PM, flash flood warnings ~1am.

There is currently no reason to think that cuts at NWS or NOAA affected forecast accuracy for this (see here theeyewall.substack.com/p/making-sen...) It’s sick to insinuate otherwise, especially to score political points.

I’m sitting here this morning in central Texas, looking at pictures of missing girls, hearing from friends who lost homes, neighbors who lost family, seeing spots where my family has swum that are now wiped away… and people already swooping in and dividing with politics. Raise up the better voices.

Absolutely insane flood numbers coming out of south central TX today. My thoughts are with anyone along the Guadalupe right now

Lots of conservatives out there severely overestimating the aggressiveness of alligators, which are also known as "logs with teeth"

Look, this law sucks and was predicated on some as-yet-unproven China-scaries. But if we're just choosing to not enforce laws because they're inconvenient, then what the hell are we doing here? We have a whole branch of the government that could change or cancel this law any time they want to!

Is this the first actually useful thing a quantum computer has done? www.scientificamerican.com/article/quan...

Scientists and other people who research things! The Be Smart team is brainstorming a new project about Things We Don't Know Not just things we haven't discovered yet. The things that we KNOW we don't know What is something from your field that people would be surprised to know that we don't know?

On the bright side, there’s only 9 weeks until Texas Football