Matt Lewis

Total disaster for the #drosophila community if flybase disappears

Quote from a story on changes at the U of Chicago that notes they are "pausing" doctoral eduction in Classics, Comp Lit, Germanic studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Romance languages and literatures, and South Asian Studies.

Wow. The University of Chicago, a world-class institution whose humanities faculty in the past has included Homi Bhabha & Lauren Berlant & Ralph Ellison & Hannah freaking Arendt, is getting rid of basically every graduate department involving the acknowledgment that other cultures & languages exist.

BOOOOOOO

YouTube video by Eumir Deodato - Topic Also sprach Zarathustra

youtu.be/Ge0vaqnijB0?...

Very interesting

If I were the Atlantic, I’d simply not let a fascist Manhattan Institute weirdo keep writing the same article about how all cities (by which he clearly means Black Americans) are scary

GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter? How the fraught release of the most-hyped AI product yet clarifies the stakes.

GPT-5 has been hyped for years as the next step towards AGI. Sam Altman promised a "PhD-level intelligence on any topic." It's not even close.

On the terms OpenAI itself laid out for its own product, any fair assessment must conclude that GPT-5 is a failure.

Now the question is: Will it matter?

Extreme followers that have no ability to self-reflect without crumbling?

NPR did a whole podcast on Trump taking over DC, and threatening to do the same with Baltimore and Oakland without saying the word Black.

America's Top States for Business 2025: The full rankings CNBC unveils its 19th annual America's Top States for Business ranking, scoring all 50 states on 128 different metrics in 10 key categories of competitiveness.

CNBC recently ranked Indiana as the third best state in the country for "cost of doing business" and the third worst state in the country for "quality of life."

It's almost as if those two things are related...

Taste-Guided Isolation of Bitter Compounds from the Mushroom Amaropostia stiptica Activates a Subset of Human Bitter Taste Receptors Bitter taste perception cautions humans against the ingestion of potentially toxic compounds. However, current knowledge about natural bitter substances and their activation of human bitter taste rece...

Taste-Guided Isolation of Bitter Compounds from the Mushroom Amaropostia stiptica Activates a Subset of Human Bitter Taste Receptors pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Another segregated, independent city whose state government doesn't like local control. [Baltimore until recently had a state-run police department]

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Contrast with Beto O'Rourke, who said two days ago at Netroots Nation that Democrats should "use the awesome power of this country to establish an independent, sovereign state for the Palestinian people."

Bad answer, Pete

Why insurers worry the world could soon become uninsurable Günther Thallinger, a board member at Allianz, one of the world's biggest insurers, says the climate crisis could make adaptation economically unviable.

"“If this volume just grows even more, we simply have a societal situation that is not bearable anymore because it is just too much risk that is no longer covered,” Thallinger told CNBC..."

whatever politicians pretend to believe about climate, this is what they know

www.cnbc.com/2025/08/08/c...

YouTube video by Keith Jarrett - Topic Encore from Tokyo (Live)

youtu.be/_GFQW5dT8II?...

I am begging media outlets to actually try “making a movie from a prompt” for themselves before parroting the AI industry’s fantasy framing that “anyone can make a movie from a prompt.”

Nothing— and I mean nothing— about this decision is more than the bare desire to harm.

First summer in a long time where I've wished I was still in Upstate NY

Racial Differences in Suicide and Undetermined Deaths in Maryland This cohort study identifies demographic and health care utilization patterns among Black and White adult decedents who died by suicide based on clinical and administrative data.

Racial Differences in Suicide and Undetermined Deaths in Maryland.

doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2025.1907

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Added dynamic here is that Cornyn now has to out fash Paxton to keep his seat.

Let's bring Makaya McCraven to Baltimore.

yep, friends and family

I've only gone to one performance, and it was because a friend was playing one of the lead (non-swimming roles). It was better than I thought it would be but don't think you could get me to go again.

Distrust In US Inflation Data Threatens $2 Trillion Market The $2 trillion market for securities linked to US inflation data could be the first area of Treasuries to crack if the Bureau of Labor Statistics is politicized, according to bond investors.

"The $2 trillion market for securities linked to US inflation data could be the first area of Treasuries to crack if the Bureau of Labor Statistics is politicized, according to bond investors." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA WASHINGTON, DC—AUGUST 5, 2025—The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the beginning of a coordinated wind-down of its mRNA vaccine development activities under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), including the cancellation and de-scoping of various contracts and solicitations. The decision follows a comprehensive review of mRNA-related investments initiated during the COVID-19 public health emergency. “We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”

Release from HHS: HHS will wind down its development of the mRNA vaccine development activities under the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

Sankey diagram showing analysis steps for fNIRS. Snakes flow from left to right showing different design choices that many teams made during data analysis. Overall it looks like sort of a mess.

38 research teams analyzed the same fNIRS data...Really nice visualization of the variety of processing pipelines people use from Meryem Yücel, Rob Luke, et al.:

"fNIRS reproducibility varies with data quality, analysis pipelines, and researcher experience"

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

So you’re telling me the Wizard of Oz presented itself as a towering force of overwhelming technology, only to be unmasked as just some guy, off-screen?

How can we bring Donny Benet to Baltimore?