Josh Evans

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

no-context code snippet today, from the line before an exception
```
# helppppp
```

Gonna write an elemental magic system where people can control different states of matter.
Controlling gasses is pretty neat! Sucks if you get stuck being able to control quark-gluon plasma or bose-einstein condensates

It's really funny that the best explanation of the core ideas of statistics and uncertainty I've ever encountered comes from an animated Netflix show for eight-year-olds

love it when a line of my code that has a bug is preceeded by a line I wrote like ` # todo: verify that this behavior is correct!`

spent like 10 hours today on one of those problems that *seems* like it should be straightforward but *is not*

[Cueball sits at a table, eating a meal.] Cueball: Can you pass the salt? [Cueball pauses, a bite of food on his fork, silently.] [Cueball still has fork in mid-air.] Cueball: I said- Off-screen person: I know! I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments. Cueball: It's been 20 minutes! Off-screen person: It'll save time in the long run!

photo of Donald Knuth, next to white text on black background reading "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - [cursive] Donald Knuth -" the image is labelled "AZ QUOTES"

I've been working from home a lot this week (we've arrived at the time where the walk from the bus stop to office becomes.... difficult), which isn't a huge issue except that I'm not constantly looking at my Donald Knuth poster and I am beginning to forget his wisdom

If this is a browser issue / gets fixed fast I'm going to sound like a crazy person

Hey @science.org: LaTeX display appears to be broken on the webpage version of this paper
www.science.org/doi/full/10....?

There is no better feeling than "OH! I've been going about this all wrong! If I try it a different way it might work!"

In my professional opinion (views do not represent ASU) it's bad to burn down the strongest scientific research institutions on Earth for no reason

Wait who added Jeffrey Goldberg as a collaborator?

snippet of github website, showing two branches named "nightmare" and "horrible_mistake", which both have pushes within the last 20 minutes

amazing things happening over in my git repo

It's weird how often ChatGPT includes emoji in generated code

The Politics of Fake Documentaries This piece originally appeared on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not sure it’s fair to draw a straight line from Animal Planet’s “mermaids are real, and scientists and the government are lying to you, harass them” to everything we see now.

But they sure didn’t help.

Fuck Discovery Communications.

(By @drandrewthaler.bsky.social , a decade ago)

I'm doing actual math to optimize the complexity of an algorithm, that's never a good sign

Long letter from NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, available here: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Letter-to-the-Community.pdf

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you.

Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵

update: the ` # TODO: make sure this isn't a horrible mistake!!!` code was unjustly accused

every time some of my code ruins my life, I always find that the problem is right under a comment I had written saying "this code is going to ruin my life"

One of the funniest long-term trends in The Onion is their deeply impassioned, and surprisingly knowledgeable, gags about marine biology. @whysharksmatter.bsky.social

Hundreds join ‘Stand Up for Science’ protest at California Capitol Demonstrators converged at the Capitol in Sacramento on Friday as part of a nationwide day of action to “Stand Up for Science” and in opposition to early actions from President Donald Trump’s administ...

We did it!!!! ❤️💙❤️💙

www.kcra.com/article/stan...

That's unfair; I've actually been quite optimistic. I really didn't think RFK Jr. would be confirmed.
But he was, and now the guy in charge of food safety and healthcare eats roadkill and doesn't believe in medicine.

Set of tweets from July 2024, by me (@SynBioJosh) "I try (unsuccessfully) to avoid talking (nonstop) about politics in my capacity as a professional, but as someone who has worked with climate data in the past, I cannot express enough how much of a public good NOAA and NWS are and how harmful it would be to paywall and privatize" "NWS and NOAA serve the public good as a source for local weather forecasters, an invaluable source of data to plan and prepare for future natural disasters, and a vast data source for academic and private climate research." "This last one is vital for America as we move into the age of anthropocentric climate disruption, and is explicitly the reason that Project 2025 proposes to cut NOAA and NWS. Their goal - here as in so many other places- is to prevent research because they don't like the outcome."

I would like to start being wrong about things for a change
www.theverge.com/news/622990/...

This is not a statement of partisanship. It is a statement of observable fact based on the public statements and actions of a political party - a party that seems determined to dismantle the systems of research and funding that have made America the world capitol of innovation.

This is incredibly bad for American science. The Republican party is - through either malice or careless ineptitude - destroying the American scientific establishment. The story here isn't even the only one from today I could cite to support that statement.

when in doubt it's probably an off-by-one error

Had a "LaTeX formatting problems" nightmare last night

Colleagues who don't use C++ will never understand how bewildering it can be, when a part of the program explodes for no obvious reason, because a different part of the program accessed memory it wasn't supposed to.

[A single frame depicting a flowchart is shown. Many chaotic arrows are arranged between the items which are:] $PYTHONPATH EASY_INSTALL ANACONDA PYTHON HOMEBREW PYTHON (3.6) ANOTHER PIP?? HOMEBREW PYTHON (2.7) PYTHON.ORG BINARY (2.6) PIP EASY_INSTALL $PATH (MISC FOLDERS OWNED BY ROOT) ???? [The endpoints are:] /usr/local/Cellar /usr/local/opt /(A BUNCH OF PATHS WITH "FRAMEWORKS" IN THEM SOMEWHERE)/ ~/python/ ~/newenv/ /usr/local/lib/python3.6 /usr/local/lib/python2.7 [Caption below the panel:] My Python environment has become so degraded that my laptop has been declared a superfund site.