Greg Tucker-Kellogg

When marking a student assignment today, I mixed metaphors so badly that I reminded myself of Archie Bunker. I wrote "In this case, you left two low-hanging fruit on the table".

Apparently if you want to read it *really* slowly, you can follow @samuelpepys.bsky.social

Has anyone else noticed recent bugs with MyNCBI filters? There seems to be some pretty bad unexpected behaviour.

I have finally, after many months, finished the complete Diary of Samuel Pepys. Monumental. What a singular piece of work. It's impossible to compare against anything else.

But are you interested?

One of the dumbest self-owns of Google for researchers is this: paste a research paper title into the google search bar. The paper will be the top hit, and it will indicate the google scholar citation count, but will not provide a google scholar link to follow the citations.

Tom Lehrer's mastery of meter and rhyme was so good that he wrote an entire song shitting on Bob Dylan in 1965.

Well, yes, but the Latin is not the problem. The problem is that the kerning makes it appear as FR A NSCICVS. Much of the rest of the kerning is also bad, but that's the most egregious.

The replication of DNA in Escherichia coli* | PNAS The replication of DNA in Escherichia coli*

Happily, the original is available in all its elegance www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Franklin W. Stahl, 95, Dies; Helped Create a ‘Beautiful’ DNA Experiment

As an undergraduate who loved physical chemistry and was just starting biology, I thought the Meselson-Stahl experiment was the coolest thing ever. It was so simple in its application of physical theory and experiment to prove a biological truth that it was perfect. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/s...

You are inspiring. But don't be discouraged: the person who wrote that message comes across as heartsick about it. Change will come.

Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him. Unbelievable.

How can one efficiently simulate phylodynamics for populations with billions of individuals, as is typical in many applications, e.g., viral evolution and cancer genomics? In this work with M. Celentano, @wsdewitt.github.io , & S. Prillo, we provide a solution. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
1/n

Prasad said the FDA will ask all manufacturers to do new clinical trials in healthy people ages 50 to 64, randomly assigning them to get a vaccine or a placebo and tracking outcomes with special attention to severe disease, hospitalization or death. Companies might need to repeat that requirement for future vaccine approvals if there's a large virus mutation rather than the past year's incremental evolution. Companies are also free to test their vaccines for approval in younger adults and children, Prasad said, adding "this is a free country."

What Vinay Prasad is proposing is scientific misconduct that would violate legally-mandated institutional review board review in the United States. He has never conducted a randomized control trial. He is not a scientist. He is a fraud.

They are mandating this to block approval, not encourage study

a man wearing a music band shirt is carrying a skateboard and asking how do you do fellow kids ALT: a man wearing a music band shirt is carrying a skateboard and asking how do you do fellow kids

Today I'm taking the lab for a social outing on a boat, and have worked hard to fit in. Should be seamless.

You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President

From The Archives: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President theonion.com/you-peo...

Welcoming Inaugural Kellogg Endowed Chair Dr. Amanda Thomas to Earth and Planetary Sciences Imagine a catastrophic earthquake shaking California's coastline, followed by landslides that block vital roads. Or a rainstorm hitting a region devastated by wildfires, triggering debris flows of unr...

Dr. Amanda Thomas appointed inaugural Louise H. Kellogg Endowed Chair in Earth and Planetary Sciences at
@ucdavis.bsky.social eps.ucdavis.edu/news/welcomi...

Oh FFS

Wow, I know Pope Francis had his enemies, but ...

www.reddit.com/r/typography...

same

yeah man, please make my 85 year
old great aunt prove her citizenship to vote in rural georgia, this definitely isn’t reminiscent of anything in the american past

But in that case Ed saw it happen, and had the broken mirror in his possession. There wasn't another, much more plausible, explanation staring him in the face.

Improbable events do happen. I often think of a question posed by Ed Egelman when I was in grad school: "What's the probability of a runaway horse from the New Haven Police Dept. knocking the side view mirror off of my car when galloping down Whitney Avenue?" It's very low, but it happened. 4/

The scenario is an infected lab worker starting a lone super-spreader event at a non-crowded place on the other side of town in a city of 13M people, where that super-spreader location is *also* the place where a natural spillover would happen. It's an implausible scenario that demands evidence 3/

Not at their workplace, nor even on the same side of the river as their workplace, nor along public transit between their workplace and the market. No other lab worker not living near the market would have been infected and transmitted that infection elsewhere. 2/

It's not just a series of events for which there is no evidence (a lab worker living near the market). That lab worker would have to have been infected *and* to have transmitted that infection at (and only at) exactly the location where a natural spillover would be most likely to occur. 1/

My longer response is to your other reply bsky.app/profile/gtuc...

I should add that a universal counter-argument to this is that the HSM spillover also requires a Rube Goldberg chain of events because the intermediate host hasn't been identified. Unfortunately, most of what could have identified a host at the time was actively destroyed. /fin

I don't know if you've ever taken a subway or bus in a major Chinese city, but I can attest that doing so is a *crowded* experience. The scenario of #3 is not "excluded" as a possibility, but requires a chain of events that is a veritable Rube Goldberg machine 6/

Which brings us to your #3. The HSM was largely though not exclusively wholesale. It was not a crowded shopping centre. The #3 scenario involves *infected* WIV staff (none are known) travelling to HSM and triggering a super-spreader event at HSM and nowhere else. 5/