Marjan Rafat

Knowledge is Worth Your Time Folks who hang out on Bluesky/Twitter may have caught bits and pieces of the discussions amongst academics about what to do about today's university students...

NEW WRITING:

It's aimed at students, with some specific examples for astro/physics folks, but I think other people may find it useful too. 🔭⚛️🧪

"Knowledge is worth your time because of how it shapes your mind. And the authoritarians may take many things from us, but they cannot take our minds."

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To Fight Misinformation, We Need to Teach That Science Is Dynamic Science is a social process, and teaching students how researchers work in tandem to develop facts will make them less likely to be duped by falsehoods

8. This has been a short and honestly rather peevish thread, so if you want read more that has been written in a more equanimous tone, here's a short piece that I coauthored a few years ago, precisely about how we deal with this kind of duplicity.

So true!!

YouTube video by Mission Of Burma - Topic Trem Two

A nice intersection of fields (physics vs. immunosuppression): youtu.be/4KKfH_MraCg?...

YouTube video by Deltron 3030 - Topic 3030

Revisiting. Love a good concept album. #mood
youtu.be/WjSVYKMk-Zk?...

YouTube video by Neil Halloran Defeating a Virus That Killed Half a Billion People – The Plea

What a horror show to have put that man in charge of anything. The documentary is very short and very good. You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybVZ...

"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

How to Not Get Poisoned in America The minute I saw that Robert Kennedy Jr., a notorious disease-loving health crank, was going to be responsible for the nation’s health—and the health of its...

Today: I talked to one of my absolute heroes, @deborahb.bsky.social, about RFK Jr., how the US got food purity laws, the wild west of American food in the 19th century... and how to avoid going back to the days of formaldehyde milk and brick-dust spices.
buttondown.com/theswordandt...

How Universities Became So Dependent on the Federal Government For decades, universities got billions in federal dollars for research. The relationship was mutually beneficial, until President Trump decided it wasn’t.

There are so many ways one could provide context for this data.

For example, in the last five years universities have received 52-55% of their research funding from the federal government. That's the lowest percentage since the 1950s. 1/x ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/high...

The federally-funded research university is almost surely the single greatest American invention ever.

And it probably has some of the best ROR in federal spending, both in its contribution to the US specifically, but also to the greater world overall.

I doubt anything comes close.

If you track the history since the 90s, it's actually really clear what happened. Corporate labs (Bell Labs, IBM, etc) closed up shop or dramatically scaled back because the labs weren't profitable. The scientists who worked there went to universities, where research is much cheaper. 1/3 ⚛️🧪

This framing is disingenuous. The government became dependent on universities to produce science, social science & technology. This was never a charity relationship. Government invest in what is useful to it. It’s not mysterious & govt has frankly gotten a good deal.

First, Steves finds a way to talk about institutions and oligarchy that is dirt simple:

1. Institutions are PUBLIC WEALTH. They are our shared wealth, dammit.
2. Billionaires can't stand wealth they don't control.
3. So they are going to dismantle our public wealth to better bleed us dry

YouTube video by Green Day - Topic Road to Acceptance

#mood youtu.be/oUcbZKruvRQ?...
except change adolescence to matrescence 😆

being an indie bookseller in the helltimes has felt both very stable and very stabilizing, and part of me wishes everyone could be on my side of the counter for a little while, because I think it would help some of you be a little less cynical and doomy right now. so here is my VERY anecdotal data:

Wow

Why I Wrote “The Crucible,” by Arthur Miller From 1996: The McCarthy era, the Salem witch trials, and the story behind the play.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/199...

Séamas O'Reilly: We need to stop lying about what makes lost boys such easy marks for cons Economically depressed young men are aggressively targeted with the oldest, most seductive pitch there is — money for nothing — by bad faith actors with enormous wealth

I wrote this on young men, and why we need to stop lying about why they're easy prey for reptiles like Andrew Tate.

www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

YouTube video by Peter Gabriel Peter Gabriel - Games Without Frontiers

and youtu.be/3xZmlUV8muY?...

YouTube video by The Stranglers - Topic No More Heroes (1996 Remaster)

#mood youtu.be/dbV16XOk404?...

Thanks! Was a bit stressful but so important to explain the importance of NIH funded research!

‘Stop these crazy bills’: Republicans join Democrats to defeat anti-trans legislation in Montana One bill would remove trans children from their parents, and the other would ban drag shows and Pride marches

Montana is extremely lucky to have Zooey Zephyr and SJ Howell standing up in front of openly transphobic lawmakers who wanted to pass a bill that would /take trans kids away from their parents./

Thank you to them, and to the Republicans who crossed the aisle. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

It is your patriotic duty to listen to this speech. Every single word. An essential guide to the deep, unfathomable corruption the new Trump administration is carrying out on a daily basis.

At the Capitol in NASHVILLE today…

“I love being a socialist. I like things that are built to help people instead of to make a buck. I like libraries, they like book burning. I like affordable transportation. I like airports to have safety workers. I like cancer research. I like rockets that don’t explode.”

Aside from the obvious direct harm, what's so irritating is that a handful of spoiled ignorant assholes are breaking things that we all built together. They weren't content to own almost everything, they had to wreck what little they didn't own. It's vandalism on a mass scale and has to be punished