I've been slogging through a sinus-y cold for some days and just realized last night that since I'm not breastfeeding anymore, I can take the good cold meds!!! Here's to 24 hours of almost-normal breathing!

December 6: Apricot-Lavender Bees are buzzing nearby. The sun is shining and I am warm, but not too warm. The lavender fields are in bloom. The postman waves to me as he rides a bicycle past. My beloved jam has returned to me once more #jamvent

December 3: Plum-Pear-Star Anise Really delightful! Tangy, almost layers of different flavors. Lives up to its pretentious double hyphenated name. The sort of jam discovery that is the reason I continue to put us all through this annually That positive reward prediction error>>>>> #jamvent

Nobody. I do not think you can eat chair

Heartbreaking. The University of Nebraska will terminate its entire Earth science department. One of the country's most successful and respected geology & climate programs: gone. When ideologues & politicians are threatened by the very act of studying climate change, I wonder: who of us is next?

This is horrific and exactly what those of us in Black studies, gender studies, women’s studies have been warning our colleagues in the sciences about. Their seeming neutrality will not save them.

Most discussions about “misinformation” treat the problem as if people simply don’t have good enough critical-thinking skills. It sounds intuitive, but it’s not entirely accurate. The problem isn’t just individual ignorance, it’s the structure of the information environment people are placed into.

My dog looks like a medieval drawing of a lion

I'm starting to wonder how much "the male loneliness epidemic" is just straight and bisexual women identifying low-effort, mean, and incompetent men and choosing not to date, marry, and tolerate them anymore

Ladder press conference.

Two independent studies found that AI chatbots were better at persuading voters than political ads. The most persuasive bots also lied the most. This is something that humans working in psyops have known for decades. AI is psyops at scale. www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/04/1...

This is older and very “of the times” but still makes me laugh when I think about it 🤣

"Man Puts Glass Of Water On Bedside Table In Case He Needs To Make Huge Mess In Middle Of Night" (Sept 5, 2013)

listen I don't have any illusions about the United States military, what it does, or how many times this has happened before but the fact that they sat there for 41 minutes, watched two scared, human beings desperately struggling to stay alive, and then murdered them has fucked me up so deeply

Recession looming—U.S. job cuts reach -1.17 million this year, most since 2020.

What a lede on this story: Man who complained about narrowing a road in order to protect pedestrians, so much that the city eventually reversed the change, then kills a woman on that very road with his car www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

I'm doing #toastmas with the Bonne Maman advent calendar!! I started eating the jams on time but didn't post here until now! It's my little treat after the toddler is in bed: I make some toast, butter it up (unsalted), apply the jam, and eat while it's still warm.

I don't want your spotify wrapped I want to know what were your top 5 intrusive thoughts this year

It looks like Athena (NewAthena? I've been out for over 3 years and things get renamed) is much more secure!! 🔭🧪 www.science.org/content/arti...

Also if you missed the original @sciam.bsky.social article, here it is from earlier this summer! www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

Traffic laws and norms of driving basically no longer exist outside of automated enforcement and parking tickets. I am not exaggerating or making a joke. Post pandemic, there are no longer constraints on how people use the road.

How about we worry less, as a society, about whether individuals might be cheating to get a disability accommodation or some help buying food, and more about whether extremely wealthy people and corporations are paying their fair share of taxes?

What's that? You'd like to pre-order The Edge of Space-Time? Here you go! bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

I would rather have a world where we all trust each other and accept that a few people will take advantage of it than a world where folks have to perform disability constantly in order to get the help they need. Let kids have an extra 30 minutes on the test, jesus fucking christ

"Rich kids are gaming disability accommodations to gain an unfair advantage" is actually very different from "America has an extra-time-on-tests problem" — and the author hasn't proved that either! Rich kids might just be more likely to be diagnosed.

Fantasy, bad dream or bad movie plot? Even the all-knowing Dr. Steve isn’t sure.

This charred-remains-by-the-side-of-the-road review would also make me want to run to the woods and immediately die in a massive underground well. slate.com/culture/2025...

The real question is not "Why is Bluesky so left-coded," the real question is "Why can't the right exist in a social media environment without algorithmic assistance, where people can ignore them"

Picking up library holds for the toddler when I researched in advance: oh yes Picking out library books for the toddler just off the shelf: oh no

Manoush Zomorodi says her tombstone would read: "she clicked links and saved lots of articles to read another time and never actually read them." I've never felt more seen.

Tech bros 🤝 eugenics

Sweet, I'm no front door, like you lured your Sims in then edited it to remove the door.

This is extremely bad and worrisome for obvious reasons, but it's worth pointing out that this was obviously the student's goal She knowingly wrote a garbage essay for her trans prof's class and when she obviously got a terrible grade stirred up a media storm This was clearly the intended outcome

What is with boomers' obsession with broadcast television? My dad loses his mind that our main tv "just" does streaming.

In retrospect, I didn’t know how well we had it when the crackpots printed out their artisanal psychoceramics in full-color books and put them in the grad student mailboxes. I mean, I didn’t read them back then either, but at least it was human-generated nonsense and people put in some effort.

I again suggest that the world shut down between Thanksgiving and the Epiphany. You cover many holidays that way and we all get a rest. Essential workers make double pay and we have lots of feasts. Neighborhoods celebrate together and we bring back wassailing and 12 days of Xmas. Elect me president.

It's that time of year again... time for #DisabledInSTEM 2026 Mentorship applications! I'm so excited to be running this program for the sixth year and seeing the growth over the years! Mentee form: forms.gle/um5DvYnBi3tn... Mentor form: forms.gle/BvaxnQm8uhUR... Applications due December 5th!

Also, despite the movie's famous tagline, you might be surprised at how little of Alien was actually filmed in space.

Fun fact: For the movie Alien, they actually used a man in a practical suit because the studio was unable to afford a real Xenomorph.

remember.

Wake up babe, a new way to be horrified by AI just dropped. Talking to a librarian friend back home, she mentions a patron looking for help finding a book she liked as a kid. Super common request. Lady is adamant the title is “something like XYZ and there’s a picture of a rabbit on it.”

if youre trans and youre struggling to justify why you as a person should be allowed to take up space in the universe just consider that by your sheer existence you make a lot of the worst people on earth mad enough that they will die early deaths from stress. so thats a p good reason

Anybody who is like “Piracy is activism!”—trust me, supporting your local library is about 1000% more effective activism, and it’s still free for you and authors still get paid!

I phrased the search a different way and the bot happily gave the opposite claim also as true, once again connected to a different set of semi-credible sources. Among the other issues, then, is that we are dealing with de-contextualizing tools. Information lifted from its chain of reference.

In other words, even good students who are mostly doing their due diligence may be misled by how the bot takes nearly-accurate information, and then presents it as field consensus. The claim in question was one of those borderline bits of field-discourse, which can understandably be tricky.

An illegal order was given. An illegal order was followed. This puts into context the reaction of the Trump admin to the video by Democratic lawmakers urging troops not to follow illegal orders. Now it’s illegal orders to kill foreign nationals. Next it could be illegal orders to kill Americans.

Gift link. Folks in the DOD and military are actively trying to underbus Hegseth.

GOOD NEWS! Researchers have made a HUGE breakthrough towards a UNIVERSAL antiviral. By targeting sugar molecules found on the surface of many viruses that SHARE structural similarities, they identified FOUR compounds that successfully BLOCKED infections from SEVEN different viruses.

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.