spacegrep

N.J. just struck a blow against banning books It's called the "Freedom to Read Act."

NJ passes a law preventing cranky fucknuts from going apeshit on school libraries and librarians.
www.nj.com/politics/202...

Women faculty feel ‘pushed’ from academia by poor workplace climate The gender gap in faculty attrition worsens after tenure, according to a new study

This can and should be better.

There is huge variation in how this breaks down. But the overall message is clear!

www.science.org/content/arti...

That exhilarating feeling that *everything is possible* when you open an editor to code, it hopefully never goes away.

I keep reading that this is a place for kinder people, but gentle souls have always been among us. We just couldn’t hear them anymore. Perhaps our gathering here is proof that we missed those voices. What a wonderful thing to believe about ourselves. It can be a bold move to choose kindness.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but you don't need to justify your reading preferences and choices to anyone. Audiobooks count as reading. Also, you don't have to finish books you don't enjoy. Don't read to impress, read for yourself. Life's too short, love yourself, ok?

Signed, a librarian

David Baker chats with Rosetta folks

Nobel Laureates in Chemistry David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper

David Baker visits all the Rosetta folks after his Nobel lecture. And photo of all three Chemistry laureates - David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper. An honor to be here in Stockholm to see this.

Thoughts?

The replies to Brian Thompson’s last post on LinkedIn — all from before the shooting — are a horror show

Yes. This experiment will work if you make it your own. Customize your experience, build new ones, make a social network that can be controlled by the people who use it an idea we do not go back on.

This doctor’s letter to United Heathcare for denying nausea medication to a child on chemotherapy.

Revealed: the Operators Behind Four Major Neo-Nazi X Accounts Anonymity has long been a tactic used by extremists to spread their ideology while avoiding social consequences, from Klansmen hoods to online pseudonyms.

This is unsurprising but very important

www.texasobserver.org/revealed-ope...

Jasleen Kaur, 38, wins the Turner prize 2024 The competition’s youngest contestant scoops the award for animating everyday objects to reflect the pluralities of identity and community Jasleen Kaur has won the 2024 Turner prize for her work animating everyday objects to reflect the pluralities of…

Jasleen Kaur, 38, wins the Turner prize 2024

Ever wanted to see the world through someone else’s eyes?

3/ And if I may, that's not even something we'd wish for. Open source and open science mean people explore, test, and correct mistakes if there were any, taking responsibility for them in a very transparent way. We don't need the ethicist there to say what's right and what's wrong.

NeurIPS Test of Time Awards:

Generative Adversarial Nets
Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks
Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le

Hi, I’m God.

Keep your butt clean.

Love,

God

This moment in Bluesky is a great example of how joy itself can be defiance and resistance.

We are just hanging out, shitposting, being silly, happy, and normal. It is being treated as if it is transgressive, opting out of the endless negativity. Because in a way, it is.

Joy is my favorite weapon.

One of the things I still don’t understand is how these tech bros can be pro-technology and anti science.

Post: Freddy Mercury died of AIDS 33 years ago today. With modern medical technology, he likely would have lived. Never forget how much progress against major infectious disease has been made in a short time. We are at risk now of rolling back much of that progress.

We’re not going back.

Benefits of an open network

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network.

I blogged about it here:

My covid-related posts on X received pages and pages of sordid abuse, including, at least once, a credible death threat. Tell me again how bluesky is "an echo chamber"

My feed is full of paper recs and interesting thoughts from people I care about, which is pretty much all I wish in a social app.

Also the fact that I have connected with over 1k (mostly) researchers and academics here is awesome!

Can’t wait to start sharing my work. Stay Tuned!

Bluesky's firehose is a treasure trove of public data for researchers and developers, and it's completely free. Check out our developer docs: docs.bsky.app

Pretty excited by the recent uptick of science twitter migrating to blue sky. I haven’t been active here recently, but looking to change that!

It will take time, but it will happen