Alia Valentine

A three panel comic. In panel 1, two people are facing each other. The first person asks "Hey, do you want to drive really far and spend hours staring at distant, rapidly moving gray-brown objects while trying to find subtle differences between them?" and the second says "No." In panel 2, the first person says "What if they're bird-shaped?" and the second person says "Then absolutely, yes." In panel 3, the two people are standing and looking through binoculars at distant shorebirds on a beach. The first person says "Yay shorebirds season!" and the second says "Woo!"

It's that time again :>

people more pro-AI than me? gullible nerds. people more anti-AI than me? fear-addled clowns. and me? perfect, as per usual

one of the most heartbreaking things i have learned in my career as an educator is that our country's disinvestment in children is not just neglect -- it crosses over to antipathy

It’s worse than “Gaza is being starved and destroyed and no one cares.” It’s that hundreds of millions *do* care and are powerless to stop it. We need a world where that can never happen, where the masses actually have political power.

How far can you compress a complex system?

🚨 In our latest paper we collapse high-dim compartmental models (from epidemics to ecosystems) into a single 1-D equation using quantum-inspired math, exposing universal phase transitions #ComplexSystems ‪👇👇👇

journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

When using computer vision to identify organisms in a image, it helps to know what the model was trained on. To a shark ID AI, everything is a shark.

An ink and watercolor illustration of a strawberry finch, seen from a side.

The Red Avadavat, also called Red Munia or Strawberry Finch 🪶
#BirdArt #AnimalArt #SciArt #Sketchbook

C³ Group @ Cornell We are a team of interdisciplinary researchers at Cornell University. We study how nonlinear dynamics and distributed control shape collective intelligence in natural and engineered systems, drawing o...

My research group at Cornell finally has a dedicated website ☺️ Still very minimal, but we will populate it soon with the cool projects we are getting off the ground! Stay tuned! sites.google.com/cornell.edu/...

Transgender US Passport Holders Granted Temporary Relief in Challenge to Trump Gender Marker Policy | American Civil Liberties Union BOSTON – A federal judge today expanded a preliminary injunction to two newly certified classes of passport holders in Orr v. Trump, a challenge to...

I got my passport in the mail today and despite this ruling it has incorrect information

www.aclu.org/press-releas...

some kind of flow chart of mathematicians and theorems in non-metrizable manifold theory

diagrams of weird non-paracompact manifolds decorate the boundary; a terrifying and impenetrable Venn diagram inhabits the middle

words cannot capture how busy and overlapping this diagram is

What if a diagram contained multiple periodic table-ish things and a bunch of beach balls and there's one spot near the middle of the figure that says "10 big eggs".

Just discovered the motherlode of wildly incomprehensible unhinged mathematical diagrams.

6 beers deep, vehemently nodding along to my friend’s story, yelling “exaaaactly” at every point they make.

*** Academic BFD alert ***

We just published a new global bird phylogeny. It synthesizes the work of thousands of researchers before us, and it will grow and improve over time. @snacktavish.bsky.social @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hi! I work in mathbio and mathematical ecology and am a trans woman

Most say gender is determined at birth - AP-NORC More people approve of Trump’s handling of transgender issues than his job performance overall. People are more likely to oppose than support public health insurance programs like Medicare or Medicaid...

"Most say gender is determined at birth"

New poll determines that most of society is incorrect.

apnorc.org/projects/mos...

This poll is fucking horrifying.

hey thats me!

Movies you’ve watched more than 6 times, gifs only.

(No Star Wars, LoTR, Star Trek)

happy Emmy Noether's birthday to all who celebrate

In abstract algebra, a rng is an algebraic structure satisfying the same properties as a ring, but without assuming the existence of a multiplicative identity. The term rng, pronounced like rung), is meant to suggest that it is a ring without i, that is, without the requirement for an identity element

democrats talking to trans people always sounds like "we're totally not throwing you under the bus but could you crawl down there pretty please"

Rewriting the rules of locust swarms Classical models of collective behavior fail to explain the mechanisms driving desert locust swarms

#Swarm science just got a shake-up! 🦗🦗🦗For decades, #locusts were thought to move like particles but new research indicates they actually use sensory & cognitive mechanisms, not simple alignment @icouzin.bsky.social @mpi-animalbehav.bsky.social @sercansayin.bsky.social

In which I argue we need to do:
BIG. PUBLIC. SHIT.

danny.hellmo.space/posts/doing-...

#academia #edusky #organizing #highereducation #astrosky #physicssky #solidarity

WHEEL OF CRAB

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unbearable Headlines

Illustration on a hard to photograph orange paper of an Alexander horned sphere (a pathological topological space, where a torus keeps getting dividing into interlocking links) in front a night sky with stars and the moon surrounded by flowing water with finger waves. Black and white with hatch shading

A portrait of an Alexander Horned Sphere I drew for a professor’s birthday

screenshot of a post from me. It features my handle as well as the post content itself, which is not important for this example. The key important factor is that right below my name is a little label that says "he/him" on it and it is circled with a red, drawn on rectangle to draw attention to it.

Profile of the 'Pronouns' account that shows the header image, avatar, and instructions on how to add the label service to your account. The subscribe button and post button on the profile have had a red circle drawn around them to draw attention to them.

BlueSky has some neat tools.

I really like this one - it labels your pronouns at the post level, so it saves folks having to click through to people's profiles to see what pronouns they prefer.

To see/use it:

1. subscribe to: bsky.app/profile/pron...

2. Go to 'Posts' tab and 'like' your pronoun

Gender-affirming care isn’t new. An upcoming book sheds light on its history. More than 40 authors contributed to “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States,” which took its expert editors more than a decade to compile.

19th News [Jan 19] -- New 592-page anthology, “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States,” took its 40 editors more than a decade to compile. It documents how GAC is not experimental, not new, and not even confined to trans people. Available Feb 1.

[HT @denisenorris.bsky.social]

Bubble Sort in C

Speak up, even if your voice shakes when you do it

Spent a few hours on this this evening. Current progress: we have a physics engine!

sidenote: GAME DEVELOPMENT IS SO HARD