Ben Schulz

You are only temporarily abled.

Always good to remember.

Repetition of an utterance erases its semantic processing, allowing those already-existing pitch modulations and rhythms to be processed as non-speech. And so you hear the music that always existed within human language.

"Children deserve care, not cages, and no child should grow up in a prison cell"

"These are kids torn from their classrooms and communities, punished not for what they have done, but for being poor, homeless, or in care"

Government Alters Position on Gaza From “Gravely Concerned” To “Fuck, I Think We May Have Misjudged This” — The Shovel “Who knew so many people were against the idea of the Australian Government tacitly supporting the forced starvation and deportation of a marginalised population?”

“The Government thought that this was just some left-wing hippie niche issue on university campuses. But what they are quickly learning is that, surprisingly, quite a lot of Australians seem to be anti-genocide,” a senior staffer said.

theshovel.com.au/2025/08/04/g...

The NSW Police narrative is getting full airplay from the media, but is based on a falsehood. The protestors didn't try to turn back; the police blocked the march and forced everyone back the other way, for reasons that are difficult to understand.

Lucky there are so many flavours of alcohol!

Media Release: Jewish Council backs march across Sydney Harbour Bridge

We stand with – and join – those marching across the bridge and call for immediate action to stop the Gaza genocide and for a future where everyone is free, from the river to the sea.

Free Palestine protest across Sydney Harbour bridge. 50,000 maybe? more walking in the rain.

Aerial shot of Gaza City, burned and bombed into burned and shattered, unliveable wreckage as far as can be seen.

Whole area that used to be houses, shops, public transport routes, made into rubble and blackened, unliveable ruins. Aerial shot shows vast area entirely obliterated as habitable, attacked again and again by Israeli forces.

Several wrecked Gaza schools, shown from the air, pulverised by Israel's forces: windows all gaping, bombed out and covered in ash and dust. Some people are trying to live in makeshift camps amid the destruction, in former quadrangles and bomb sites.

Aerial shots of neighbourhoods with destroyed apartment buildings, houses, offices and shops, all bombed by Israel's government. Starving people are trying to live in tents and makeshift cubbies on the former roundabouts on a main road.

This what Israel has done to Gaza. Forbidden pics by a Washington Post photographer whose Jordanian air crew didn't pass on Israel's order to only photograph aid being dropped. City, suburbs, schools, people: bombed to rubble. People being starved in makeshift camps on road roundabouts. #Genocide

I'm so tired of hearing that we need to "teach our students how to use AI" when the thing they most need to use it is a critical-thinking skill set that can only be acquired by NOT using it. I'm tired of hearing that it's inevitable. I'm tired.

How AI is cheapening tertiary education at Sydney University As a student who has studied in the pre- and post-artificial intelligence era, I believe its unchecked use means higher education is devoid of any real learning.

LLMs can help students not learn anything at all by comprehending, synthesising and analysing course material for them. www.afr.com/policy/healt...

At PhD/post-PhD level, academia is fundamentally dialogical and unless you intend to hide behind a prompt your whole life, you are going to look like a fool when you open your mouth and don't have a working understanding of the things you profess to write about.

If you are applying to a PhD, don't use an LLM in composing your proposal.

If you are doing a PhD, don't use an LLM to do the writing and reading and thinking for you.

Sorry, I am going to die on this hill.

The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest When the Cascadia fault line ruptures, it could be North America’s worst natural disaster in recorded history.

In 2015, Kathryn Schulz wrote about how the question isn’t if an earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest, but when. Revisit the piece.

Wong is claiming Australia only sells Israel non-lethal parts of the F-35.

Non-lethal parts of the F-35....

'Gacy's right hand did all the killing - his left foot, and the other non-lethal parts of Gacy, should be exonerated.'

Argue it at the ICJ, Penny, you're digging a hole.

There are no words left for what the Israeli government and IDF are doing to Gazans.

And yet we must still keep finding the words to say it loudly: they are actively committing genocide and the our governments are letting them.

@nesrinemalik.bsky.social

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Ångström-resolution imaging of cell-surface glycans - Nature Nanotechnology By combining bioorthogonal metabolic labelling and resolution enhancement through sequential imaging of DNA barcodes, the molecular organization of individual sugars in the native glycocalyx has been ...

New paper online:

Ångström-resolution imaging of cell-surface glycans.

The molecular organization of sugars in the native #glycocalyx has been resolved at 9 ångström using bioorthogonal metabolic labeling and #superresolution imaging of DNA barcodes.

#Glycotime

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Sec. 2. Restoring Civil Commitment. (a) The Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shall take appropriate action to: (i) seek, in appropriate cases, the reversal of Federal or State judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees that impede the United States’ policy of encouraging civil commitment of individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public or are living on the streets and cannot care for themselves in appropriate facilities for appropriate periods of time; and

Note infinitely elastic phrasing:

Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.  Purpose and

This is an executive order that lays the groundwork for sending homeless people and people with mental illness to concentration camps to be "civilly committed." It was never going to stop with immigrants.

This is horrifying beyond words.

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Indeed and also any "research excellence", see for example 2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-i... in the UK, is gauged based on metrics that have *everything* to do with the (perceived/preconceived) prestige of sci journals, even if and when not stated explicitly

Why do we still publish in scientific journals ? We publish in scientific journals to disclose our discoveries, such that others can build upon them. But we now have preprint servers and we...

New blog post: Why do we still publish in scientific journals ? What is holding us back from letting go of traditional publishing? No major insight here but I am curious what others think. www.evocellnet.com/2025/07/why-...

Funding bodies are key. If they only acknowledge traditional publishing when assessing the track records of applicants, then only preprinting isn't an option.

Really badass graffiti spotted in town

Shocking satellite imagery of the total destruction of the town of Khuza'a, southern Gaza, by the Israeli army over the last few months.

Could AI slow science? Confronting the production-progress paradox

Fabulous post by @randomwalker.bsky.social & Sayash raising the same concern many of us have about whether we're on the right track with how we're using AI for science. Everyone should read it, take a deep breath & think through the implications.

www.aisnakeoil.com/p/could-ai-s...

Crimes against reality. You’ve probably noticed that I don’t write much about Israel or Palestine.

Crimes against reality.

And that is why people using chatbots to learn stuff, are legally allowed to be eaten.

This goes back to the thing of: it's massively helpful to do something you suck at. To experience the experience of not being good at something, starting it from scratch, struggling to improve at it over a long time.

People who don't do this, tend to suck shit.

Australia is quietly rolling out age checks for search engines like Google Just as Australians are adjusting to the idea of having their ages checked for social media, age assurance rules are being applied to search engines and many other corners of the internet.

Australia's decision to require age/identity verification, including facial scans, in order to do a Google search is dystopian.

We're watching the death of an open, anonymous internet, and the gradual takeover of information online by the state — under the guise of protecting children.