petschge

Just realized one reason the right wing went so far into the anti-vax direction is that the covid vaccine, more than pretty much anything else of late, showed what can happen when government works hard on something. Govts delivered a vaccine to a new disease in, what, a year?
A frickin miracle 1/2

Depressing when @zachweinersmith.bsky.social 's jokes become true.

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-1...

Starlink and Astronomers Are in a Light Pollution Standoff Explore the escalating conflict between Starlink satellite megaconstellations and astronomers over light pollution, with insights into solutions, impacts, and the future of sky observation. Focus keyphrase: Starlink light pollution.

Starlink and Astronomers Are in a Light Pollution Standoff The Night Sky is Changing — and Not Everyone is Thrilled The expansion of SpaceX’s.... @cosmicmeta.ai #Starlink

https://u2m.io/zBCbe6FV

The White House is taking new steps to undermine every international student at our universities.

It has approved a new rule restricting student visas to 4 years max. That's not long enough for PhD students, or about half of undergrads, to finish their degree.

Likely to enter force within days.

I see the first articles in the UK press giving space to the claim that 3I/ATLAS is an alien spacecraft. Briefly:

It’s a comet that formed billions of years ago, passing through our Solar System.

It’s behaving like a comet.

There is no evidence it’s artificial.

So much this. Letter counting and state names are gimmicks, not primary use cases. Frontier models are already remarkably capable for many quite difficult tasks despite still, of course, failing in important ways. We should be able to recognize this fact without uncritically accepting industry hype.

So many researchers, myself included, work many more hours than what we are funded (i.e. it's not uncommon to work 10hrs/week on a project that we're only getting 10% salary support). Rest-assured--NIH grants are NOT lining ANYONE's pocketbooks. Dumbass. #academicsky

A shitty map created by ChatGPT5. it purports to be US States with an R in their name, but it's wrong and dumb and worthless just like LLMs.

My goto is to ask LLMs how many states have R in their name. They always fail. GPT 5 included Indiana, Illinois, and Texas in its list. It then asked me if I wanted an alphabetical highlighted map. Sure, why not.

This is about more than research. These grants are the lifeblood of one of the country’s biggest industries. They determine promotions and professional success. More than 1m educated, high-status people will change their daily, personal, private behavior to avoid angering these commissars.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Funding Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Funding

For anyone who hasn’t seen it:

So lemme see… ~4% odds of success & could be yanked at any moment on the whim of a very stable genius… or any one of his minions?

Every day, this administration brings me closer to trying the SMBC cartoon model of lab funding… 😭

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

Further consolidating control over federal research funding under Russell Vought and a cadre of apparatchiks.

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Commissars deciding whether and how federal research funds are distributed.

The people who are so ready to call others "communists" institute one of the hallmarks of the Soviet Communist regime: political officers.

So someone has FOIA’ed all the syllabi for my campus (all, apparently). I haven’t gotten the email yet, but my colleagues have. It’s not clear who requested it (likely someone trying to target programs, classes and profs for ‘dei’).

I am so embarrassed for humanity.

We had this disease eradicated. The process of keeping it that way was SO SIMPLE.

And because of a bunch of idiots, and bunch of grifters making public health into an ideological football, here we are.

Just a faceplant. A completely unforced error.

More Avi and 3I/ATLAS Following up on this and this: Today images from the Hubble Space Telescope were published by Jewitt et al., and they show the coma of 3I/ATLAS very well: Would this be enough to convince Avi that it’...

It gets worse and worse.

If you're interested in the slow-motion train wreck that is Avi's sci-comm on this, here are some of the latest (it's very hard to keep up!)

In which spacecraft can have comae, 3I/ATLAS has a 60% chance of being alien, and new papers validate and adopt his calculations.

The answer is an errant XML tag: bsky.app/profile/libr...

It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website. We’ve learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and expect it to be resolved soon.

Possibility of hundreds of job cuts 'unsettling' for CSIRO staff The CSIRO is facing hundreds more cuts to staff, after more than 400 jobs were slashed last year, the union has warned.

It really would be nice to see the #Australian government genuinely support #science. Cutting jobs at CSIRO is madness. Research in the university sector is also critically underfunded. If only there were some tax loopholes that could be closed... #academicsky
www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

CCC zu Palantir-Einsatz - Deutschland bräuchte Hoheit über die eingesetzte Software

Hervorragendes Interview mit Constanze Kurz vom #CCC zur #Rasterfahndung und nicht(!) vorhandenen Konformität von #Palantir zur #Verfassung 🔥🔥🔥

CCC zu Palantir-Einsatz: Deutschland bräuchte Hoheit über die eingesetzte Software
www.deutschlandfunk.de/streit-um-ei...

👋 Hi! Time Perception researcher here. Emotional time dilation has been studied pretty extensively with some neat findings. (I recognize OP was meant as joke but this is what I do). Check out my recent Psyche article if curious psyche.co/guides/how-t...

As a physicist I can easily calculate time dilation from relativistic motion (time slows when you're moving fast) or proximity to a massive object (time slows in gravity) but I have yet to find a solution for emotional time dilation (the task takes five minutes to complete but six weeks to start) 🫠

Women shouldn’t hold office, says GOP woman now running for office “I don’t know if I would vote for any female,” said state senate hopeful Mylie Biggs, the daughter of GOP Rep. Andy Biggs.

This is a real article. No, really. www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/female-...

Headline and first 2 paragraphs Migrants can use rights laws to evade deportation Loopholes could undermine treaty with France Matt Dathan Home Affairs Editor Small boat migrants will be able to frustrate attempts to deport them to France under Sir Keir Starmer's returns deal by exploiting human rights laws, according to the treaty's terms. Under the terms of the agreement with France, migrants will be ineligible for deportation if they have outstanding human rights claims or other legal challenges or claim they are under 18. These are among potential loopholes that threaten to undermine Labour's attempt to end Channel crossings. The treaty also gives France and other European Union member states an effective veto over which individuals are returned.

Just the supposed ‘paper of record’ bemoaning the fact that asylum seekers have *human* rights and may be able to enforce them. Accompanied - ultra cynically - by a photo of Human Rights lawyer, Amal Clooney, at a glamorous fundraiser. What a sly and deeply unpleasant rag The Times now is.

Looking east towards the Sandia Mountains, which are reflecting the setting sun light. The Petroglyph National Monument is in the foreground. Between the Sandia Mountains and the Petroglyphs is the Rio Grande river valley and Albuquerque.

With all that is going on in the world, New Mexico sunsets soldier on. 🌞

Looking east towards the Sandia Mountains, which are reflecting the setting sun light. The Petroglyph National Monument is in the foreground. Between the Sandia Mountains and the Petroglyphs is the Rio Grande and Albuquerque.

Swipe right: When and why conservatives are more accepting of AI recommendations Six studies (N = 1548) and a single ad study on Facebook examine the influence of political ideology on the likelihood of accepting AI-generated recommendations in categories such as movie streaming,....

🧠 Do conservatives trust AI more?

A new study finds conservatives are more likely than liberals to accept AI-generated recommendations, especially when AI appears to know their past preferences.

🔗 doi.org/10.1002/jcpy...

#SciComm #AI 🧪 #GenAI

Here's the letter that NSF sent UCLA last week about cutting its research funding

NSF says UCLA is doing affirmative action by asking applicants' their zip codes, family income and what HS they went to, and that they can discuss race in personal statements

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

In case you're wondering how scientists can say that many shark populations are threatened with extinction while some US fishermen report that they've never seen so many sharks, the answer is shifting baselines: how much things have changed depends on when you start counting.