Ryan Comes

This entire article will make your skin crawl. The final line by the authors is perfect though.

Agreed. We ran one when I was at Auburn and it was a blast.

I'd wager it's related to universities feeling heat on DEI from DOJ/DOE. This takes the organizing and hosting duties off the schools, but there's no way APS can pull off regional events without using school facilities and staffing.

I have a few theories on why and they're all because of politics.

Deny time waivers and keep fighting this week. There are more cloture votes to come.

To really make this count, you should oppose time waivers. Draw this out and keep the pressure on your colleagues. Get amendment votes.

He got the retiring ones to do the dirty work instead.

To be clear, @coons.senate.gov @bluntrochester.senate.gov , the shutdown hurts me professionally through my work at UD. It hurts friends who work for the government. But it's the only tool available to rein in Trump's lawlessness. Capitulating now is not the answer.

+1. Same here @coons.senate.gov @bluntrochester.senate.gov

I actually think there's something to be said for just voting for the clean House CR and nothing else right now since it expires on the 21st. Open the government long enough for them to get a paycheck, fix ATC and SNAP for November, and make the House vote again on a new CR right away.

I don't think this one should count. Self-aware.

I opened the Post website a few minutes ago and saw this. Indistinguishable from Breitbart slop. Bad writing and incoherent garbage. The editorial board was to my left growing up, but I enjoyed learning from the articles and op-eds. There's nothing to learn here. So sad to see what Bezos has done.

We have a new pre-print out focusing on SrIrO3-SrCoO3 superlattices! Jibril Ahammad led this work as part of his PhD research at Auburn. Jibril is on the market for a postdoc and has expertise in MBE film growth, transport, and X-ray spectroscopy. Feel free to message me if you have a position! 🧪⚛️

While I agree that's the best outcome for competitiveness, I think the viable route to legislate this federally is compactness as the metric with districts drawn by computer. Compactness plays well with voters. You'll get some D+60 seats, but Dems would narrowly control the House now with this rule.

That wasn't my strategy, but it sort of worked out that way with my fall 2024 move. My startup gives me more flexibility than my colleagues and even I'm pinching pennies and anxious about money now.

I have more followers and generate more engagement when I tag the science feeds. But I can also attest that many of the people in my field I used to interact with on Twitter either haven't moved or use Bluesky a lot less. It's less useful for me as a result even if I get more likes.

Agreed. There was a healthy Twitter group for our generation (roughly grad students and postdocs when Twitter was taking off) who moved, but we're not drawing many current students or postdocs here on Bluesky. Very few of the senior folks made the move over here either.

I deleted Twitter earlier this year after leaving a goodbye post pinned for a few months in case anyone wanted to find me. Do like that idea for LinkedIn though.

I'm certainly guilty of being pretty political, while some of the others who moved here but aren't as active stay out of that arena. The algorithm does seem to be a common complaint. I don't find that sharing our papers here has any value because nobody notices.

LinkedIn can be pretty cringey. I share our papers there to get them noticed, but don't like the influencer side of things at all. Plus, there's nothing worse than a post about your own citation metrics.

Couldn't happen to a better pair. One of the last straws for me with Auburn was bringing Freeze in as a coach. Made me feel dirty to be associated with a school that would employ him.

I was also considering whether a hyper-specific condensed matter feed might be useful to curate our little community.

Not a full solution, but have you checked out the science and physics feeds and gotten approved to post? I get a good amount of engagement when I tag my posts with those emojis. A lot of it is from anonymous accounts though.

I think that's part of it. I definitely wasn't the life of the party on Twitter. Even with half or more of the same folks the fun parts that make you want to come back aren't there.

I could probably recruit a few more folks, but plenty of people, myself included, just aren't using it as much so I thought I'd ask why. Work-related stuff has wound up in LinkedIn, where most people take things more seriously.

The discussion on college football and the World Series last night reminded me that the good part of Twitter was shared experiences. It was fun. At times like that Bluesky is fun, but during the day it's largely news doom scrolling for me. I wind up just tuning out all day and checking at night.

Tagging a few folks who were in that LinkedIn discussion because I think one of the issues is the lack of an algorithm makes us miss posts more often. @shellystem.bsky.social @alexandrubg.bsky.social @jenf.bsky.social

There was a discussion on LinkedIn yesterday about the good days of Academic Twitter before everything went to crap and we left. I'm curious why we haven't been able to recreate that here. A lot of the same folks are here, but there's not as much engagement. What's Bluesky missing? ⚛️🧪

Fair on that. But he followed the crowd to the fringe like the rest of the leaders. The version of himself he presented in Hillbilly Elegy could easily have been a winning sales pitch in the post-Trump ruins of the party if anyone was willing to blow it up for a few years.

This undersells the agency that the GOPers had circa 2015-16. Rubio, Vance, Paul Ryan, etc easily could have changed the direction by sidelining the fringe that now control things. It might have split the party, but that would have been the better outcome long run. Everyone chose power instead.

This is for the head of the Office of Naval Research, which oversees university funding and the Naval Research Lab. I assume similar moves are planned at AFOSR/AFRL and ARO/ARL. Folks assumed DOD research would be safe, but that's definitely not a given. They're intent on breaking our government. 🧪⚛️