Cedar Riener

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

These repeated attempts to "communicate" with AI left me feeling adrift from my own language. I thought of the opposite of poetry. Poetry sets you adrift from language in service of connection to meaning and other people; this is how it recreates language. This set me adrift in service of nothing.

First, I gave it a vignette I wrote for the test, some extra notes, and "teacher feedback" for revision. It returned something tonally bizarre, veering wildly between the tone of the feedback (brisk) and of the vignette (vivid, descriptive). It also hallucinated twice after being told not to.

As part of an AI committee at my university, I spent this weekend trying out Claude (Opus 4.6) for writing, and I have to say, far beyond its hallucinations and the usual complaints, it is a baffling experience cognitively. I want to be more precise in my evaluation here than I usually am about AI.

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

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Personal news update: I'm delighted to announce that as of today, I am an actual Bluesky employee! I'll be working to welcome indie media and local govt to Bsky—and supporting those already here.

I'll always want to hear your thoughts on how we can make Bsky the sort of social media we all want!

I am a scientist in new zealand, which is nearly antipodal to the middle east. when October 7 happened I had more than one colleague directly affected. right now I know of two students in our faculty of science who are not sure if their relatives in Iran are still alive, bc internet is spotty

science is very very international which is very very good for science and very very good for the world

it's worth remembering that this + the nature of networks means that when bad things happen in any single part of the world, all scientists are only 1-2 degrees separated from it

MPD body cam footage from DOGE raid on US Institute of Peace RECEIVED 😎

I'll be watching and sharing news and takeaways in the coming days. Stay tuned!

YouTube video by SeeingScience Do you know what a penny looks like? A Seeing #Science History Lesson in #psychology

Just put up a new YouTube short about a classic #cogsci experiment: Our poor memory for what a penny looks like! Given that the penny is retiring, I thought it was worth talking about this great piece of #psychology history. Enjoy!

Total Lunar Eclipse on March 2–3, 2026 – Where and When to See Total lunar eclipse on March 2–3, 2026: Where and when is the Blood Moon visible and what will it look like? Visibility map, animation, and local times.

🌕➡️🔴 Lunar eclipse alert!

Depending on where you are (mostly: Central/Eastern Asia, Oceania, most of North/Central America), you may be able to see a TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE ("blood moon") overnight!

You can find information about timing and viewing locations here: www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/luna...

can you teach something at Texas A&M? just follow this flowchart.

www.chronicle.com/article/insi... via @jasperjsmith.bsky.social and @mzahneis.bsky.social

pretty confident that if our own government bombed, say, Philadelphia, we'd just kind forget about it after a couple more Rocky movies

North Carolina historical plaque in Wilmington: “ WILMINGTON COUP Armed white mob met at armory here, Nov. 10, 1898. Marched six blocks and burned office of Daily Record. black-owned newspaper. Violence left untold numbers of African Americans dead. Led to overthrow of city government & installation of coup leader as mayor. Was part of a statewide political campaign based on calls for white supremacy and the exploitation of racial prejudice.”

I randomly read this one historical marker and it’s the only reason I know.

I grew up next to Wilmington, and I didn't hear about the 1898 massacre and coup until the early 00s.

There are paths to get popular support for an antiwar position.

Antiwar activists within labor here in Philly were able to get unions and labor institutions to take antiwar stances, despite and in fact I would argue BECAUSE of a strong veteran presence in labor.

Roughly 7% of the country has served in the military at some point.

Some of that population are chuds who enlisted to meet new people and kill them, some of them are from poor and marginalized communities who saw this as the only path out.

It's a mixed bag, but also a big one.

Like, I don't know what to tell you, the US is a country that has long popularly fetishized military service.

There really isn't a path to kicking out the fascists that doesn't involve a mass movement against them.

And you have to square those two realities somehow.

It’s 2026, and public policy is facilitating 19th century wonders like the multigrade ~one room schoolhouse and vaccine preventable infectious disease.

I get why/that people say this, but dont' underestimate this:

all other social networks are invested in making sure that posts that link to journalism remain buried, or at least never go viral.

BlueSky doesn't do that. That makes it very valuable to a ton of newsrooms righ tnow.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of STEM Education.

8/10

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025 for the Directorate of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

7/10

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

UNC-CH Will ‘Scrap’ New Recording Policy, Chancellor Says The move comes less than three weeks after the controversial rules were enacted.

Congrats to @ncaaup.bsky.social & all who fought against this surveillance policy that would've allowed admin to hijack microphones in the classroom for secret recordings.

This move would've chilled classroom discussion & suppressed students' willingness to ask questions & take intellectual risks.

OpenAI strikes deal with Pentagon after Trump orders government to stop using Anthropic On X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he had moved to label Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" and cancel Defense business with the company.

One way to read the AI/Pentagon news from last night (I covered it but didn't skeet) is that the Department of Defense wants AI to automate weapons and/or spy on Americans and that Anthropic would have the best AI to do that, but OpenAI is at least the second-best so they'll just use that instead.

Let's say I'm a researcher in a politically controversial topic: flu and hepatitis vaccines for children. I study interventions to increase vaccine uptake.

Would I be doing "activist science" given the anti-vaxx political movement & anti-vaxx govt actions here in the US?

(Inspired by #SPSP2026)

The passage reads: One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith's pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he first arrived in Chapel Hill. Seymour told me a story about how upset Smith was to learn that Chapel Hill's restaurants were still segregated. He and Seymour came up with an idea: Smith would walk into a restaurant with a black member of the church. "You have to remember," Reverend Seymour said. "Back then, he wasn't Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more." Smith agreed and went to a restaurant where management knew him. He and his companion sat down and were served. That was the beginning of desegregation in Chapel Hill.

The passage reads: When I circled back to Smith and asked him to tell me more about that night, he shot me an angry look. "Who told you about that?" he asked. "Reverend Seymour," I said. "I wish he hadn't done that." "Why? You should be proud of doing something like that." He leaned forward in his chair and in a very quiet voice said something I've never forgotten: "You should never be proud of doing what's right. You should just do what's right."

“You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.”

When Dean Smith comes up, this story is always the first thing I think of.

www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colle...

> Another of al-Jazari’s fantastical contraptions is of special interest to historians of science as it is regarded by many to be the first programmable “robot” in history.

www.nationalgeographic.com/history/hist...