Jim Downie

Andrew to be stripped of naval title, says UK defence secretary

Every announcement like this reads as reaffirming that he will *not* be prosecuted for allegedly sexually abusing young women and girls, which for me is, and will remain, the actual story.

Who are the people agreeing to fly these planes? Who are the people helping the passengers into the planes? Who are the air traffic controllers agreeing to do this work?

Notice how quickly we've moved from deporting "illegals" to the idea of deporting any migrant whose face doesn't fit, irrespective of legal status. Next stop: some form of ostracisation for any person whose face doesn't fit, whether they were born here or not?

We're deep in National Front territory

We're not at war with Venezuela, these boats are many hundreds of lines from our waters, much less our shores, there is no threat, this is just murder.

I really do think everyone from the SecDef to the guy who pushed the button should be tried for murder on this.

Fascism is thriving. Every politician, journalist, and influencer that talks about migrants as threats, Black folks as criminals, trans people as social contagions, etc is directly facilitating the social resentments that shape fascism. We need them to stop their destructive disinformation politics.

I am sickened by the relentless demonisation of refugees.

No refugee underfunded a school.

No refugee closed a hospital.

No refugee took away support from the sick and disabled.

We need solutions not scapegoats. Stop blaming refugees and tax the rich instead!

Keir Starmer and David Lammy belong in The Hague.

sure does seem like the british media is keen on censoring Irish artists speaking out about Palestine

Go and check out the pre-print of the landscape-scale tree microbiome study from the Future Oak project. Huge amounts of efforts and talent went into this work, with a pinch of "this is crazy, but we can do it". Well done @jamesemcdonald.bsky.social @cenococcum.bsky.social et al. Thread below 👇

Such an exciting piece of work to be a part of! So glad to finally get it out, do have a read!

People complaining about this, so all I will say is: your Progressive Patriotism is always, at all times, just Keir Starmer reiterating the Rivers Of Blood speech live on TV and it will never be anything better than that. You have had endless chances to do better, and you *always* do this. The end.

South Gaza: Tents, Food & Water **With Famine on the rise, we will significantly lower tent purchases and focus on food (rice and bread) and water over the next couple of weeks**

Things are unimaginably bad. The Sameer Project's South Gaza campaign operation is under intense crisis. They're trying to find any food they can to help people in serious need. If you can, please donate! The situation is getting worse every day.
chuffed.org/project/1132...

Announcing myloasm, a new long-read (ONT R10/PacBio) metagenome assembler that I've been working on during my postdoc in the Heng Li lab (@lh3lh3.bsky.social).

myloasm-docs.github.io

Toilets have historically always been used to restrict access to public spaces. c19th WOMEN cld not travel far from home. It was ideology manifested. For me this isn’t about being inconvenienced when you need the loo. It’s says who belongs where&when. The fact GC women are doing this is infuriating.

realizing they won’t get this call tonight is rather heartbreaking

1/ BREAKING: So - it turns out deeply-religious Lord Hodge, the Judge in yesterday’s UK Supreme Court Case that destroyed trans rights, headed a ‘Commission On Same-Sex Relationships’ for the Church of Scotland published in 2011.

This enshrines patriarchy as 'natural', sex as immutable, and misogynistic oppression as inevitable.

If I can be so bold as to go there, it's a reification of womanhood as an innate and *disabling* category, with misogyny flowing from "biology", not patriarchal oppression.

Okay. Not-a-lawyer-butt.

This to me is the tell. Women's oppression defined explicitly as a "shared disadvantage" resulting from "shared biology".

These are steps to formalize womanhood as a reproductive role, synonymizing it with certain features of anatomy that are "naturally" disadvantaged.

I am mashing my temples in sheer frustration because a ruling that is obsessed with legalizing discrimination against trans women on the basis of our "birth sex" also explicitly carves in recognition of the sociality of sexing, almost surely to make "perceived sex" something to be challenged.

Let's be clear: you knowingly work with a transphobic piece of shit, you are a transphobic piece of shit. With the wealth of information available, there is absolutely no room for any of these actors to feign ignorance and we should not let any of them forget their cupidity for as long as they live.

Really digging the crinoid lamp and ammonite frieze at the Danish Natural History Museum in Copenhagen

A flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, inflorescence, with a cluster of tiny green flowers surrounded by four large, white bracts. Copyright Tom Kimmerer

The center of a dogwood inflorescence showing a cluster of tiny green flowers. One is labelled "A flower." Copyright Tom Kimmerer

It's the time of year when we all look at flowers, but perhaps not carefully enough. This dogwood is not a flower but an inflorescence - a bunch of little flowers. The white things are bracts, not petals. Now look at the cluster of tiny flowers at the center. Let's resolve to really look at nature.

The whole exploitative business model of universities relies on academics not connecting the actual time they spend labouring (ie. producing value for the university) with the amount of time they are actually getting paid for. Knowing how long you actually worked is the first step in resisting this

Home A tool for generating consensus long-read assemblies for bacterial genomes - rrwick/Autocycler

New year, new assemblies!
I'm excited to announce Autocycler, my new tool for consensus assembly of long-read bacterial genomes!
It's the successor to Trycycler, designed to be faster and less reliant on user intervention.
Check it out: github.com/rrwick/Autoc...
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Cross-pavement solutions for charging electric vehicles

Government guidance published on providing cross-pavement, on-street EV charging.

This feels like creeping privatisation of the public realm and if the charging connects to a particular home creates unhelpful assumptions about who stores their car where. 🧵

www.gov.uk/government/p...

Scotland’s 4 year degree does help with this - the first year is to catch everyone up and slow people to take elective courses. In the first year of my plant science degree, I was able to take a course on meteorology and astronomy, one of the introductory physics courses, and basic algebra.

I have no conceptual issue owning a “Christmassy” jumper, i.e. a general purpose jumper that might happen to have some shapes that could be associated with Christmas, like stars, but would be equally wearable on a cold April morning. But I’ll never own a “Christmas” jumper.

watch me as i write code that estimates gc content in a slightly-complicated one liner