Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦

And if you choose to do those things, then I’m sorry, but you are not “permitting free speech” you are *helping Nazis*. I mean, come the fuck on! It’s not hard! Just don’t help the f***ing Nazis! Their free speech remains intact without your help! Stop helping the f***ing Nazis!

This extends to the ways you can choose to promote or publicize or platform them! It just does! You don’t have a right to stop them speaking but you are also not required to put Nazis on your television network, or your radio network, or publish their books, or publish their newsletters.

chatgpt insists you can't wire this toggle to behave like an sp3t switch... I haven't felt this useful in the lab in months.

American politics is a seesaw driven by the biggest dipshits you’ve ever met

it’s just this comic over and over and over again, forever

Canada solved this problem by making the funding for 8 years and making a program targeted at people who will mostly retire by then. It's called Winning.

You get so used to hearing from professional opinion-havers that "everyone hates and distrusts academics and they fail to demonstrate their value" that sometimes you forget it's not true.

New paper alert! 🚨

We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales

1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks
2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit

This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps.

Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

this is a level of complicity that had not occurred to me

Yue, Taylor, and Maggie solved it today. Either that or the weird gas leak is back.

They could not care less what happens after that. If there is ever any attempt to assess the success of a program, it's buried in an expert panel's report they will dutifully ignore while announcing the next meaningless ribbon cutting. Total disconnect between goals, allocation, and outcome.

One thing I've slowly learned about Cdn science policy is that, from the government perspective, the announcement is the only point of the exercise. They allocate $, announce it with great fanfare and chest thumping (no matter the scale), then it's forgotten.

They came to Massachusetts to cure disease. Now they’re packing up their labs. - The Boston Globe In a first-of-its-kind survey, the Globe asked hundreds of scientists about the impact of federal funding cuts.

One Boston Children’s Hospital researcher said, “This is like asking, how do you think dropping an atomic bomb on New York City will affect the future of Broadway musicals? This is a generational loss of innovation, technology, and economic power.” www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/m...

In our new poll with the Boston Globe of NIH funded scientists in Mass ...
- 72% say they have delayed or cancelled projects
- 66% reduced research scope
- 56% paused experiments or students.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/m...

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

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Stanford University discontinued. It’s enhancing diversity and graduate education. Dr. old Fellowship, a graduate program aimed at diversifying at student body. The Stanford daily report reported. The university also will no longer offer housing and dining support for students from outside the Bay Area who participate in summer undergraduate research fellowship. The Fellowship House in Sanford school of engineering offered an immersive research and graduate school preparation experience for first generation students and student students from historically underrepresented communities.”

Stanford is doing this because it wants to

I'm kind of depressed to see countries like Canada frame this as an opportunity. No one benefits from the collapse of US science. And you certainly don't benefit anyone by poaching a few big names while doing no other meaningful increased investment in your own research ecosystem.

Bridge Owner Lobbied Administration Before Trump Blasted Competing Span to Canada

Pure corruption of the crudest sort. And Lutnick and Trump are in on it. A Detroit billionaire met with Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, hours before President Trump said he would block the opening of a new bridge connecting Detroit to Canada, officials said.

McGill's self study on campus expression is an interesing document...through a scholarly and analytic approach it demonstrates how the last couple years of administrative conduct around protest and politics is a pretty comprehensive lesson in what not to do.

www.mcgill.ca/president/si...

Rep. Delia Ramirez to DHS officials: "I have as much respect for you as I do for the last white men who put on masks to terrorize communities of color. I have no respect for the inheritors of the Klanhood and the slave patrol. Those activities were criminal and so are yours."

I doubt this will lead to Weiss' ouster (though who knows?)

but...like, there's value in showing that MAGA is unpopular. it weakens the movement and makes them look ridiculous and out of touch. all good things.

What the f is the point of having a system status page if it says everything is fine when no trains are running on the Orange line for the last 20 minutes? @stm-nouvelles.bsky.social

Crockett: "The US is falling apart, partially bc he's allowing for killings in the street, but also bc we have a 34 count convicted felon being shielded from any type of accountability as it relates to a child sex trafficking ring. I don't understand why we're pretending any of this is normal."

After "this out of touch liberal multiculturalism will fail" didn't pan out - BB's show set ratings records and is the most talked-about part of the super bowl - they are desperately pivoting to a blatant lie that "it was successful because it wasn't political"

U.K. might lose a prime minister because a guy who worked for him knew another guy who hung out with Epstein. Meanwhile the U.S. opposition party is telling our President, who was Epstein's best friend, that his secret police should get better training so their public street murders look less messy.

you read about the German, Austrian, and Polish social democratic parties being like "we can just wait these fascists out" and you shake your head, wondering how anyone could possibly be so obtuse. then you take a sip of coffee and read about what Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are up to in 2026

This is what firing 30% of your staff does.

people who say that all creative endeavor can be replaced with AI probably need to reckon with the fact that all televised sports events with human athletes could easily be replicated by high-definition computer-animated simulations….and yet we don’t do this and no one seems to want to.

It's long past time to stop indulging people who think you can meaningfully defend science without also defending democracy and academic freedom and opposing authoritarianism. It's the same fight, otherwise all you're defending is your own status.

Every major success came from directly opposing Trump policies, not negotiating with fascists.

The misunderstanding is that the inside and outside game were the same people: faculty, AAUP, Democratic AGs, grassroots. Unis and associations largely cowered and tried to appease by cutting DEI programs, allowing political control of science, and kissing the ring, all of which got them nothing.