Damon May

Make "Disappear" Intransitive Again

l'accent aigu, no less!

Disease diagnostics using machine learning of B cell and T cell receptor sequences Clinical diagnosis typically incorporates physical examination, patient history, various laboratory tests, and imaging studies but makes limited use of the human immune system’s own record of antigen ...

The recent "Mal-ID" paper in Science diagnoses diseases from immune repertoires. But a powerful model like Mal-ID can learn differences between groups of immune repertoires that are unrelated to the diseases of interest. We explore these pitfalls in our eLetter response.

The Canadian "elbows up" thing is genuine and awesome... and because I'm not a hockey fan it just makes me think of the bonkers fight choreography in _Divergent_.

me holding a protest sign

There were a lot of inspiring words at the Seattle Stand Up for Science rally today, but the real inspiration was the energy in the crowd! American science won't just lie down and be destroyed. Stand up, fight back!
standupforscience2025.org

In her weekly email, my kid's principal referred to the school musical, Hadestown, as "set in a world not too different from our own".

Yep, that's 2025 for you.

Well, in a sense they are showing real expertise. I literally *couldn't* make plots that bad if I tried. At least not without a stupid amount of effort.

They’re firing NIH scientists and replacing them with people with this level of crappy chart-making?

Sounds like the DOGE kids would benefit from going through the NIH postbac program. 🧪

Wait... HOW did they make plots that bad? What cursed plotting package exposes an option to put tick labels on the X axis of a histogram that represent *ranges* of values?

Seriously, are they writing their own terrible plotting software to make their terrible plots?

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately The move halts a large slice of money for most universities and research institutions virtually overnight, imperiling vital research in everything from cancer to heart disease.

American science is under full-on assault. I'm an American scientist. I don't like being assaulted. What can I do? Anyone got ideas?

Oh, man, you're so lucky. My kid will sometimes cook, but only if I do a bunch of the prep and cleanup.
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(it's a trap!)

Bling

National Science Foundation suspends salary payments, leaving researchers unable to pay their bills An NSF online payment system remained down after the federal funding freeze was lifted, leaving early-career scientists scrambling to pay bills

Postdocs aren't getting paychecks, because Trump.
Postdocs are well-educated, but by and large they're *not* rich people. Pulling the rug out from under them like this hurts them badly, and it cripples science.

Buy 3 lemons.

See? I can write private notes to myself in a public forum, too!

I'm not, though, and you're one of the organizations I'm really looking to for ways I can act.

How can we organize in protest?

Coming up on 20 years in Seattle, and I just now got around to going up to the top of the Smith Tower. A++ would ascend again.

"Is it better for a man to have chosen Fight Club than to have good imposed upon him?"

"Dizzie was my friend. She was a soldier. But more than that, she was a citizen of the Fight Club."

ECOclusters: A T-Cell Biomarker Catalog of Humanity’s Shared Responses to Disease The T cells circulating in an individual’s blood represent a record of their prior immune exposures.

In this article, I take a step back from the nitty gritty immunology to describe how we can use T-cell repertoires from 10Ks of people to build a catalog of humanity's shared T-cell responses to diseases... without (initially) having any idea which groups of T cells respond to which diseases.

Thought 1: being a dungeon master involves a lot of extremely amateur architecture
Thought 2: I wonder if DMs who are actual architects spend all their time making the buildings look right
Thought 3: all wilderness adventures, all the time

<tweeet!>
Apocalypse foul: unnecessary connection.
No Adventure Time for a week.

Frontiers | Magnitude and dynamics of the T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2 infection at both individual and population levels

Back in 2020, we did a bunch of work on SARS-CoV-2-responding T cells and put it out there as a preprint. Then we got back to work. 4+ years later, here it is in print!

Congrats to everyone who worked on this, and particularly to those who went the extra mile to get it published, multo post facto!

And he was still hungry.

Same!