The Casual Hiker

A river otter chomping on a fish at Phoenix Lake today.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Almost petted it. :)

Juvenile bobcat encounter on Tennessee Valley Trail.

Tech Billboards Are All Over San Francisco. Can You Decode Them?

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/b...

In Turkey, when authoritarianism took hold, satire was one of the first casualties. Political comedy shows disappeared—now, airing one could land you in jail.

Dictatorships always follow the same playbook.

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

Renewable energy is humming along despite the setbacks: “…people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours.” www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

🔬API-first feature extraction for image-based profiling workflows

If you need to obtain interpretable features from your segmented microscopy images, but want to do it in a fully automated way, we know the struggle.

1/6

For many years while I was running a scientific skepticism site/podcast I repeated the mantra "vaccines were so successful, we forgot their impact due to vanishing diseases."
Bringing a major pseudoscience conspiracist in charge of HHS is a sure way to remember their impact- in the most painful way.

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

More on this @latimes.com by @niamhordner.bsky.social
www.latimes.com/science/stor...

Benim yazdığım kod pek maintain edilmiyor. Her projeye ayrı, bir seferlik kullanım için yazılıyor.

Valla artık kod değil comment yazıyorum çoğunlukla. Bir iki satır ekleyip çıkartıyorum aralara. Boilerplate kod için harika. Debugging için de öyle. 40 satır hata mesajı okumuyorum, Copilot’a soruyorum hemen. Çok işe yarıyor. Ama daha low-level kod yazanlar için o kadar kullanışlı olmayabilir.

A meme-style comic panel with three parts. Left: A stylized enhancer with a mutation, surrounded by colored blocks representing functional motifs, a neural network diagram, chromatin accessibility signal traces, and a sequence motif. Two cartoon mouse embryos below show different LacZ reporter activity patterns. Top right: A hand hovers anxiously between two red buttons labeled “Experiments” and “AI,” with the caption “HOW DO ENHANCERS REALLY WORK?” Bottom right: A sweating superhero wipes his forehead, looking stressed about the difficult choice.

Textbooks: “Enhancers are just a bunch of TFBSs”

But how do they REALLY work?

New paper with many contributors here @berkeleylab.lbl.gov, @anshulkundaje.bsky.social, @anusri.bsky.social

A 🧵 (1/n)

Free access link: rdcu.be/erD22

San Francisco voters urge unity to tackle fentanyl - The Voice of San Francisco Our justice system is facing unprecedented times of polarity. San Francisco watched as ICE protests in Los Angeles erupted into violence and Waymo burnings. Subsequently, our city faced its own violen...

'Even in a city renowned for its bleeding heart, there is a breaking point, a collective exasperation with those who weaponize our compassion to fuel a crisis that claims lives young and old, drawn to our streets by cheap drugs and lax enforcement'

thevoicesf.org/san-francisc...

"After court order, OpenAI is now preserving all ChatGPT user logs, including deleted chats, sensitive chats, etc."

Terminal Genome Viewer (tgv), written in Rust github.com/zeqianli/tgv

It's not Musk or Bezos who's keeping us from building new housing, building mental health facilities or prosecuting the bippers + drug dealers. It is our elected officials who are responsible, and we have only ourselves to blame for electing them.

Pretty much everything we don't like about SF now -be it the cost of living, homelessness+mental health+fentanyl crisis or property crime- can be traced back to decades of progressive politics.

We should tax the ultra-rich for sure. But if we don't diagnose the problem correctly, we can never solve it. Our problem is not lack of money. SF spends $1.2B on homelessness annually. What do we have to show for it?

SF mayors don't have much power. It's the BoS who calls the shots. Past BoSs are responsible for many things that we complain about the city today.

NIMBYs are not the rich. They're us, the people of SF, who voted for "progressive" politicians such as Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston, etc. SF politics has been dominated by progressives for decades. Let's not blame it on the rich.

It's the NIMBYism that creates inequality. Artists had to move away because housing is absurdly expensive. It's expensive because we don't build enough. The Tech Boom made it worse, but it by itself is not the root of the problem.

Ring Mountain is lovely. It's a great place to hike in any season. Would be a good to bring along a geologist. 8/end

There are other rare species here, for example Oakland Star Tulip. 7/n

Calochortus tiburonensis - Wikipedia

TLM was identified in by a plant enthusiast in 1971. It is endangered and protected by the California Endangered Species Act. 6/n en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calocho...

Luckily, I was able to find a better looking one. Doug mentioned that the TLM only grows here because of the unusual geology of the mountain. I guess the plant adapted to the high magnesium content in the serpentine soil and it can't spread elsewhere. 5/n

They showed me a TML specimen. I was a few weeks too early, though. The flower hadn't bloomed yet -- the plant looked a stalk of grass. But they also pointed me to a trail where there are more of them. 4/n

Tiburon Mariposa Lili (TML) blooms only for a few weeks a year, starting late May. There were a many wildflowers on the trail, but no TLMs. I was disappointed. Then I came across two Marin Parks volunteers: Doug and Belle. 3/n

This area is interesting geologically as well as archaeologically. There are large boulders scattered around here some displaying petroglyphs carved by the Miwoks. I wasn't able to spot any though. I need to come back for it. 2/n
www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?...