Kevin Mitchell

this is your mission. our pedophile president needs you to bomb this elementary school full of kids because he thinks it makes him look cool. also his scheming viziers will be betting money on it for fun. good luck soldier

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

When will the UK government wake up to the wholesale destruction of HE that's happening?
This affects towns and cites across the UK, our businesses, the NHS, schools, young people, our global standing, everything! Higher Education, Universities, contribute over £265 BILLION to the economy.

Trump Has No Plan for the Iranian People The mere act of bombing Iran will not by itself create a stable regime.

The American bombardment of Iran has been launched without explanation, without Congress, without public support. Above all it has been launched without a coherent strategy for the Iranian people, and without a plan to let them build a legitimate Iranian state.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

‘Viruses don’t know borders’: US anti-vaccine rhetoric could impact global measles crisis Experts say global measles vaccination rates are falling as Trump officials signal a deprioritization of the virus

The Trump administration’s global havoc is unending.

My latest story is about how the Trump admin is amplifying anti vaxx conspiracies just as measles outbreaks are spreading across the globe; many countries have just lost elimination status, and others are on the brink.

Many Minds: Seven metaphors for AI If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better than the world of AI. We talk about AI systems variously as c...

I enjoyed talking with @kensycoop.bsky.social on the Many Minds podcast about the metaphors we use to conceptualize AI.

manyminds.libsyn.com/seven-metaph...

Oh man - I was really having an off day when I did the proofs!

Five GOP representatives could switch sides and start ending this today. Five people.

Color Game — How Well Can You Remember Colors? We show you colors. You recreate them from memory. Challenge friends to beat your score. It's harder than you think. Play free at dialed.gg.

45.43 / 50 😉

Now published in Perception (@pec-ipe.bsky.social)!

Schulz-Hildebrandt, H. (2026). When purple perceived only at fixation: A fixation- and distance-dependent color illusion. Perception, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/0301...

There's possible reverse causality, there's potential reverse causality, and then there's the fear that young people living with their parents will hurt their job prospects.

What’s wrong, Congress? You’ve barely even touched your checks and balances

Exhorting the citizenry of an authoritarian regime to rise up against their despotic rulers, are we? 🤔

New paper: The origins of meaning: From pragmatic control signals to semantic representations
philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

I already need a change of subjects from politics so here it is, Clingy Dogs.

Tony

James Franco being executed by hanging. "First time?" he asks, as though he's been hanged before.

hey gen z welcome to republican governance

Congress must return immediately and vote to put an end to this war.

Every Senator should be on the record—the American people deserve to know which of their leaders supports another potentially bloody and costly war in the Middle East.

No war with Iran.

I have thought about this column a LOT over the last 25 years. I was 17 when it was written.

The imperial presidency was a mistake. It has led to destruction of clean air and water, mass death abroad, destruction of cancer research, and now illegal war.

We must re-empower Congress, the most democratic branch, and a strong civil service. We can. But that will require Supreme Court reform.

It would be cool to have a legislature that acted to defend its own constitutional prerogatives and, maybe as a treat, the interests of the people it represents too.

Well, it wasn't only that the administration was demanding that they be able to use the AI models to autonomously kill people; they also want to use AI to assemble and deploy a comprehensive surveillance database on the behavior of all Americans. What's to worry about?

This is basically Mike Johnson’s whole reason for being for instance

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

Part of a special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences @phimisci.bsky.social on Representations in the Neurosciences and AI philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... - with a host of interesting papers!

Tim Kaine: "Has Pres. Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East? Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up during his first term?"

A great explanation of how meaning that can be thought about, not just acted on, can evolve out of reflex-like behavior control mechanisms.

I think the bigger security risk is the gestapo she runs that murders people for standing in the street and kidnaps children to put them in concentration camps. But sure, if the shoe thing gets her shitcanned, do what you gotta do.

Finally a bit of sunshine in 2026! ☀️😎 #NorthDublinRiviera

Oh yes, I liked that one too! bsky.app/profile/wiri... Just trying to tie the symbols into the same thread, @davidgunkel.bsky.social - LLMs are constrained offset models of humans at play in their environment?