Julianne Dalcanton

If you see this post a Star Trek

"reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience...Reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape."

Astronomer Eric Wilcots to become interim chancellor of UW-Madison! 🔭

A friend summed it up as reverse Flowers for Algenon.

Hormone replacement therapy reinstalled my brain. After 5 years, I tried going off it for a bit to see how I did and NOPE. Not advisable for some medical histories, unfortunately, but life changing for me. Just tossing that out there in case anyone reading this was on the fence about trying it.

I'm still SHOCKED by the obscene rise in billionaire election spending since Citizens United in the NYT piece, despite already knowing that election corruption w/ $ was profound. (Recall that BCRA fought dangerous campaign $ in *2002*)

The article data didn't have a graph, so I made one to show it.

I worked really hard to find a set of Matplotlib scalings that that would do the images justice, and reproduce the vibe of the original. bsky.app/profile/mast...

I got a copy when Jerry Kristian (a real mensch) passed away, and had the same experience. It started a lifetime obsession that ended with this. bsky.app/profile/dalc...

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

Extremely good analogy. The endgame for AI companies is that everyone becomes dependent on their tech, and has to keep paying $2000 / year to write software.

High-quality software is not actually necessary to achieve that goal.

No kidding!
You use AI for your work just once, and for the rest of your life people will look at your work and wonder if you really did it, or if it was AI.
Not worth it.

The composers are straight out of the Severence waffle party.

The sheer joy I felt just now discovering that there is a new Dan Foreman Mackey video about JAX.

Highlighting the speaker who stood in front of the Surprise mayor and told him to consider what the Mayor of Ohrdruf must’ve thought before he died by suicide: “He might have thought ‘how is this my fault I had no jurisdiction over this’ maybe he said ‘this site was not subject to local zoning.’”

The lead author's position on using AI tools in research and writing can be summarized as: use them as you would use a colleague. They can help with brainstorming, literature review, and organizing ideas, but the core intellectual work, derivations, and writing should be done by the authors themselves. As such, this work made use of Claude (Anthropic) as a tool to help provide entrypoints into the relevant literature and to help brainstorm the scope and outline of this work. All text was written by the authors, all derivations were done by the authors, and the associated code was developed using GitHub copilot as an assistant.

Working on my first FA paper in the era of LLM, so it was important to me to develop a position on how I want to use them in my work. IMO it makes sense to acknowledge and state how these tools were used! But I suspect many are using without limits or a position on how...

At first I thought it might be this crew, but no. bsky.app/profile/dalc...

Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE 404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, which lets ICE bring up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.

A manual for ICE's immigrant-targeting computer system, Palantir ELITE, was leaked today.

Let's look at it, then step back to evaluate how far we've come along a dangerous road and where that road might take us. 🧵

These were the people who held the careers of female scholars in their hands . This is who was shaping or epistemological world

I get tired of saying it, but I’ll say it again: the nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people.

But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.

Bondi directed federal agents to arrest four journalists.

Georgia Fort, Don Lemon, Jamael Lundy, and Trahern Crews.

All Black. All doing their jobs.

The new (excellent) Sally Ride documentary covers that time period and its aftermath, and it was extra hard to watch after seeing so much footage of the people who were killed.

If you’re trans? The Trump Regime wants to redefine “gender affirming care” (which is healthcare) as “sex rejecting procedures” (which is not healthcare) — your real life, real world experience submitted as a comment is evidence that can be marshaled in the lawsuit that will challenge these rules

No Kings is hosting what is shaping up to be the largest ICE Watch training in history tonight.

Join here: www.mobilize.us/nokings/even...

YouTube video by Saturday Night Live Beyond the Headlines - SNL

SNL NAILED IT. A must watch about double standards, coverage, and who gets to be human. #blacksky

Going to yell at Chick Schumer is always a solid choice, if you need a little break after brunch. bsky.app/profile/chri...

Yeah, they’ve been showing up in Queens, Brooklyn, and occasional raids in lower Manhattan (both on the streets and in the courthouses). Not yet the level of saturation that Chicago and Minneapolis have been dealing with, but it’s just a matter of time.

The ability to readily take any kind of action, along with others, does so much to reduce my background rage and anxiety.

One thing about living in NYC at this moment is how straightforward it is to integrate community-based resistance into your daily life. Signal chat blows up? Put down your tea and run three blocks to intercept ICE. Scheduled protest? Jump in, express rage for an hour, then finish your errands.

The Senate may choose to vote together on the DHS and LHHS bills. Thus, a filibuster on DHS may mean no funding for NIH. What my colleagues are saying:

“Shut it down, public health will understand. I’ll work without pay again.”
- anonymous NIHer

If you're in New York, please take two minutes right now to call Governor Hochul and tell her to support and sign New York 4 All, which would prevent state and local agencies from collaborating with ICE.

518-474-8390.

This is important.