Rod Van Meter

National Academies - Statement on CDC’s Updated Vaccine Guidance National Academies respond to CDC’s updated vaccine guidance, offering scientific context and clarity on vaccine safety.

From the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine:

“based on our body of work on this topic and the overwhelming scientific consensus, we support the statement that vaccines do not cause autism.”

🧪
www.nationalacademies.org/news/stateme...

Interior of a retro rustic restaurant, seen through a window pane

Mabo tofu with green onions and white rice. Yum.

Really fantastic mabo tofu for dinner tonight. The depth of flavor is hard to describe. Not over the top hot, just... thoughtful depth.

Ok so.

"The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection ... — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

Significant earthquake down in Kyushu about 100 minutes ago. Hope there was no major damage or casualties.

Shrek caused my friend to slide out of his chair and onto the theater floor, and me to have an asthma attack. Have not laughed that hard before or since. On sheer intensity and duration of laughter, nothing in my life has come close.

I love how outraged everybody is by this list -- me included. Want a meaningless but cathartic rant? Join in!

(#77 and #78 are travesties!)

BREAKING: This is huge news, the EU's equivalent of the 🇺🇸Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.

🇪🇺Court of Justice just ruled all 🇪🇺countries must recognise same-sex marriages granted in other member states.

This effectively legalises gay marriage across 🇪🇺

Review: Hobson's Translation of Dumas' Three Musketeers is the Best ⋆ Fiction for Vampires Will Hobson's brilliant new translation brings Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers to life...

This website really is amazing. I could use a reread of the musketeers about now, I think I will get the Hobson.
fictionforvampires.com/review-hobso...

Review: Dumas' Three Musketeers was Censored in Barrow's Translation Translations of Dumas' Three Musketeers can be said to fall into three levels of accuracy: faithful, unfaithful or written by William Barrow.

In another conversation I mentioned translations of The Three Musketeers, but this website deserves an even bigger plug. This is an *amazing* analysis of the many translations! Love it.
fictionforvampires.com/review-dumas...

Review: Dumas' Three Musketeers was Censored in Barrow's Translation Translations of Dumas' Three Musketeers can be said to fall into three levels of accuracy: faithful, unfaithful or written by William Barrow.

My recollection may not be accurate, but here's a detailed account of how the most famous early translation...got it wrong, rather deliberately.
fictionforvampires.com/review-dumas...

(At least, that's my recollection, based on the Pevear's translator's foreword to his translation. I should pull that off the shelf and check.)

Whoa. I'd be pretty unhappy about that, for sure. There's a famous "translation" of The Three Musketeers into English that added an entire character as a comedic foil. Sounds like that's next for DeepL.

That, too.

In the second act of the AI revolution, the humanities fight back.

3 infant #pertussis deaths this year in Kentucky. "Of the three infant deaths reported over the past 12 months, all three were not vaccinated, nor were their mothers."

We first tested maternal vaccination for whooping cough over 80 years ago. It's safe & effective & might have saved these babies.

Fantastic work by Ariel Graykowski and our @setiinstitute.bsky.social citizen scientists.
Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) is breaking apart — and some of you caught it live. After passing 0.3 AU from the Sun, it erupted, and three days later a third appeared.

K1 is now officially in pieces.

$7M grant from NASA, Schmidt Sciences to upgrade arXiv | Cornell Chronicle The funding will help arXiv – which is maintained and operated by Cornell Tech – finish migrating to cloud infrastructure and modernizing its code.

Many people don't know this but arXiv is maintained and operated by @cornelltech.bsky.social (that does NOT mean you can send me complaints or feature requests!)

Everyone in the community should be excited that arXiv got $7M to upgrade from Schmidt Sciences, NASA

news.cornell.edu/stories/2025...

Tbf it's partly a tragedy of the commons thanks to SEO and the flooding of the web with garbage clickbait, but Google deserves their share of the criticism, for sure.

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea

Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/

Reposting for the Americas time zones.

Books We Love Here are 380+ great reads from 2025 handpicked just for you by NPR staffers and trusted critics.

Books We Love is back with a brand new batch of hand-picked titles. Mix and match tags like “Book Club Ideas” and “Eye-Opening Reads.” Find 380+ new 2025 reads, and stick around to browse more than 4,000 books from the last 13 years.

I'm seeing a trend in our students at UBC as well. STEM students, but particularly CS students, looking to the humanities to provide more depth and meaning to their studies. Lean in and stay strong, humanities. Your time is here!

do you have any idea how much you have to piss somebody off to make them change their gauge

As someone who has worked in HIV for 35+ years, I can tell you Carl is a consummate scientific leader. We’ve been lucky to have him at head of DAIDS. The only thing that wins here is the virus.

Quantum Thinking Can Help You Solve Complex Strategy Challenges Many of today’s toughest strategic challenges are “wicked problems”—issues shaped by tangled variables, shifting outcomes, and stakeholder complexity that overwhelm traditional analytics. Quantum mode...

Graham & Pogrebna, Quantum Thinking Can Help You Solve Complex Strategy Challenges hbr.org/2025/11/quan...
How does anyone take @hbr.org & @harvard.edu Business School seriously?!

Sounds funny today, but not long ago, the use of bicycles by women was considered *extremely* radical & dangerous--to be discouraged, even by supporters of women's right to vote.
All bc bicycles allowed women a tiny bit of freedom & mobility, without needing things a male guardian could withhold.

Don't take it from me, take it from Susan B. Anthony herself:

"I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.” Anthony described the image of a woman on a bicycle as “the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

I'm looking for readings for well prepared first year university students on international socialism and/or anarchism before 1914. Please and thank you!

(I missed whatever all of this Charlie Brown stuff is, but I always empathized with him. I was, and am, about as earnest as him, and about as successful at sports. And as consternated by people.)