Ary Shalizi

When I TA’d intro neurobiology I always enjoyed dropping the fact that skin and brain derive from the same layer of the embryo, but this is taking that trivia to some next level weird.

Going to try this approach next time I coach my daughter’s team.

If memory serves, Trivers was married to at least one Jamaican woman, and did fieldwork on Jamaican lizards?

I think it was the great philosopher Skeletor who said “Punishable by fine means legal for a price.”

And “an LLM remixed and regurgitated famous scientists at me” makes a mockery of the concept of mentoring and advising.

I dunno, I am making fun of it because all three named individuals wrote books that can reasonably be construed as falling in the “advice or mentoring” category, and you know, you could just read those and come up with your own thoughts? The LLM is some unnecessary intermediation.

Tell me you’re too lazy to read, and think very little of your colleagues, without saying “I’m too lazy to read, and think very little of my colleagues.”

Wait, which Jon Favreau?

It's truly an evergreen idea...

This proposal is short and manages to get biology so, so wrong.

Keeping some cells and biometric data isn't "backing up" a person, any more than keeping a recipe, some tasting notes, and a slice in the freezer, is "backing up" a cake.

Curious about how scientists at Bay Area universities and biotech companies are using high-content imaging to better understand health and disease? Join me at the @revvity.bsky.social High-Content Imaging Symposium on 11/12 at The Hangar in South San Francisco.

Details at the link!

It really feels like there were obvious, relatable ways to drum up support for continuing the shutdown.

I remember seeing Watson talk as a postbac at the NIH. I’ll never forget him saying how “stupid” the triplet code was, compared to the hypothetical codes other people proposed, and that it was deciphered by l “inelegant, brute-force methods.”

Marshall Nirenberg was sitting in the front row.

Text I received from a former labmate last night. Roughly sums up the vibe among molecular biologists I know.

Jeff Goldblum plays JD Watson! One of my grad school roommates had it on VHS.

Wife once asked our 10yo if she would be interested in taking an improv class:

Daughter: “No thanks.”

Mom: “Well, do you know what improv is?”

Daughter, narrowing her eyes for emphasis: “Yes AND, I don’t want to take the class.”

despite spending all this money” feels like a super simplistic framing that elides a lot of other contingent factors.

Fair enough.I was thinking more of the fact that African countries have had comparatively more exploitative relationships with donor countries than, say, pacific rim nations (Malaysia, Thailand, Korea) that also received substantial development aid. My point is more that “no progress was made

If we spent a trillion on cigarettes, we’d really constrain the space of diseases we needed to work on…

I’m curious as to which examples she uses? My father was a development economist (overlapped with both Sachs and Moyo at the World Bank), and my impression is that the relationship between development spending and poverty reduction is contingent on a lot more than just “we gave this many dollars.”

It’s possible Africa would be worse off if it was still a playground for extractive industries AND received no development aid.

Also, it feels a bit like saying “we spent nearly a trillion dollars on the NIH in the last 30 yeara, but we haven’t ended disease.”

Can she provide a counterfactual? Like “here’s a group of countries that received no development aid, and is doing great?”

Are you a time traveler?! I haven’t even finished October!!

I initially read the title as “Don of the Dead”, and mentally swapped in a cadaverous Richard Dawkins in the thumbnail…

As a scientist, I am immensely pleased that my 8yo says “dad, I have a hypothesis about the next Kpop Demon Hunters movie”, and not “dad, I have a theory about the next Kpop Demon Hunters movie.”

Yeah, that was the point.

“Correct” word meaning, or “mutually agreed upon” meaning?

Came to say the same thing.

Man, whenever tech bros wax speculative about the latest work in biology, I really want to bring them to the lab to see how hard most things are to do, and how poorly any of it scales.

Could have reasonably followed up with something about Buddhism, coming from nothing and going to nothing, maybe some Bhagavad Gita for good measure?