David Fainstein

This ought to be engraved somewhere.

v1.108 is rolling out today 🚚

Now live, at long last: Bookmarks, aka Saved Posts. For all those posts you'll definitely plan to come back to!

Update the app and give it a try. The button is right down there 👇

Good dialectical reasoning at it’s finest and applied to a significant public health concern

Comic. [Three people standing behind podium labeled math department. Person with bun holds up a paper. Behind them is a projector screen displaying the equation 💀>26 x 10^21] [caption] Good news: Mathematicians have put a new lower bound on the *Cursed Number That Destroys the Minds of All Who Perceive It!* It’s at least 22 digits, which means it’s unlikely to be seen by any human no matter how many random numbers they look at. They say it’s once again safe to view large random numbers without eye protection.

Cursed Number

xkcd.com/3137/

Sending positive, healing, restorative, and related vibes your way 💞

YouTube video by Casually Explained Casually Explained: The Greatest Country on Earth

For the uninitiated: youtu.be/ri2YukcvXFM?...

Woah. Soccer enthusiasm has grown impressively

See, here’s the thing, when you include credible sources calling the theory of action underpinning a causal link into question, you ruin good’nuff journalism by using this shitty click-bait title.

.. and in Seattle of all places! 🙄

As a related PSA: get screened, runners and non-runners!

2 bits of data from new Economist/YouGov poll.....

13% support for cutting research funding to universities. 24% among Republicans. Polling on this continues to be catastrophic for the Rs, suggests Dems should be learning far harder into standing up for science and our universities. 1/

The massive list of suspended UCLA grants came out today: 300 NSF and 500 NIH grants. I am miraculously not on the list, but this is devastating. Science will be lost, progress will be frozen, people will lose jobs, and careers in science and medicine are being destroyed. This is not ok.

Ichiro Suzuki in a suit with a mic in front of a red stage curtain with the Netflix logo and words reading "Stand Up Comedy Special"

Ichiro Comedy Special Somehow Already Up on Netflix: tinyurl.com/mry8xvj5

Comic. [3-column table with headers Period, My Favorite Part, and My Biggest Complaint] [Row 1] P: *Precambrian*, MFP: Life develops, MBC: Snowball Earth episodes [Row 2] P: Cambrian, MFP: Trilobites!, MBC: Evolution could stand to calm down a little [Row 3] P: Ordovician, MFP: Earth might have had rings, MBC: Scary volcanic eruption in North America [Row 4] P: Silurian, MFP: First land animals, MBC: Earth’s newfound mold problem [Row 5] P: Devonian, MFP: Big mountains in Boston, MBC: Yeah, sure, what those giant killer fish needed was *armor* [Row 6] P: Carboniferous, MFP: Cool forests, MBC: Bugs too big [Row 7] P: Permian, MFP: Pangea, MBC: Google “The Great Dying” [Row 8] P: Triassic, MFP: Tanystropheus [dinosaur with extremely long neck next to tiny person for scale], MBC: Damage to Canada still visible from space at Manicouagan [Row 9] P: Jurassic, MFP: Birds, MBC: Parasitoid wasps [Row 10] P: Cretaceous, MFP: Raptors, MBC: Raptors [Row 11] P: Paleogene, MFP: Pretty horseys!!!, MBC: Paleocene-eocene thermal maximum [Row 12] P: Neogene, MFP: Forests of *Dracaena* Dragonblood Trees, MBC: Zanclean Flood [Row 13] P: Quaternary, MFP: Burrito invented, MBC: Whoever picked this name for the third period of the Cenozoic

Geologic Periods

xkcd.com/3120/

It is fucking insane that we had a decade of people complaining about the dangers of cancel culture, and now literally hundreds of thousands of people are being purged from government jobs for ideological reasons, but that is not cancel culture.

useful_data_resources

I think you are thinking of Paul Bruno's list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

New paper about a brief word-problem screener for use in the elementary grades. It's free to read this article! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
And then download the screener at: www.piratemathequationquest.com

"In the meantime for the sake of transparency to transit riders, King County Metro says it will be officially renaming Route 8 to Route ∞."

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

This is generally a must-listen podcast anyway, but this episode hit really hard. While none of my close friends and family who are teachers worked in the US during the pandemic, the statements that teachers' lives were the trade off to reopen schools still felt so true and validating.

BREAKING: A federal judge ruled all transgender and intersex people can obtain passports that align with their gender identity while the case against President Trump's executive order proceeds.

While this is good news, we will continue fighting until this executive order is blocked permanently.

Cutting the NIH—The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe This JAMA Forum discusses the recent budget cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH), the effects of these cuts on scientific research and health of individuals in the US, and the prospects for cha...

Over the next 25 years, if proposed cuts in NIH funding are made real, “In a population of more than 340 million, this reflects **82 million** fewer years of life.”

In the US alone.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

An important thing to know about Donald Trump is that very few people actually like him! The structure of his support at this point is a relatively small number of psychotic groypers and a much larger swathe of the public who have been convinced by right-wing propaganda that Democrats are worse.

I want to help teachers work smarter, not harder.

That’s why I rely on respected researchers like Dr. Brian Poncy & @rastokke.bsky.social to tell me what the research says AND which resources to use to support my instruction. I don’t have time for new fads in education & my students don’t either.🧵

Huge thanks to @rastokke.bsky.social for not just telling teachers like me what to do but for providing great tools to support us!

Most teachers aren’t trained how to read, understand and interpret research papers. I only learned in my M.Ed. So here’s a helpful “cheat-sheet” for those who need it:

Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are increasingly popular in the social sciences, not only in medicine. We argue that the lay public, and sometimes…

Increasingly believe that this should be required reading before anyone is allowed to do science.

I spend an *inordinate* amount of time these days citing this piece and explaining that RCTs are not instrinsically and exclusively causal.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Figure titled "conceptualization of factors with strong empirical support for special educator wellbeing and burnout, 1979 to present. Figure includes working conditions (specifically, administrator support, planning time, and instructional grouping) predicting special education teachers' workload manageability, which in turn predicts stress, which in turn predicts burnout. This chain of special education teachers' workload-stress-burnout is moderated by their identity, characteristics, and experience as well as their affective responses to work stress. Teacher wellbeing/burnout, in turn, is associated with teacher outcomes, including teaching self-efficacy, evidence-based practice use, intervention fidelity, and intent to leave. All of these, in turn, predict student outcomes.

Updated literature review on special education teachers' occupational wellbeing and burnout is published online! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/... @lizbettini.bsky.social @michellecumming.bsky.social Excited to see the nascent intervention work prior research has catalyzed!

Read the whole thing. You won’t be surprised, but you should be outraged.

Europe launches program to lure scientists away from the US EU will spend over $500 million to recruit researchers and scientists.

The program will invest €500 million ($568 million) between 2025 and 2027 to recruit specialists in various fields of knowledge to come and work in Europe.

The world needs more of this and less of most other things

Bennobecks on Threads: "The Pope was chosen in 2 days. Your remote hire doesn't need 5 rounds of interviews. I said what I said."

!!!