Justin Blumenstiel

a cartoon of two men standing next to each other with the caption and now the winner of the first annual montgomery burns award for ALT: a cartoon of two men standing next to each other with the caption and now the winner of the first annual montgomery burns award for

The Simpsons already did this.

How to quit Spotify This Black Friday, here's a guide to finding the best Spotify alternative

I just read this today: www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-complete...

It's fun to see someone you see around (aka, the Merc Guy) in a different context (aka, strumming a guitar at the Replay)

Page from BRAINS First Panel: "An AI has no sense of anything. No context. No experience." Illustration of a little pink frog (he's playing a blood cell in this comic, though, which is why he's pink) Second panel: "It cannot touch" the pink frog bends down to pick a flower Third panel: "It cannot smell" 'sniff sniff' the frog smells the flower Fourth panel: "It cannot breathe" (the frog is now dark blue with bright pink lungs visible, as though the frog has been imaged in some way) Fifth panel: "It cannot think" (the frogs brain is now visible, similarly to the lungs in the previous panel) Sixth panel: "It cannot be" the frog is floating and his cute lil butt is visible Seventh panel: "*Stares directly at camera*" the pink frog stares directly at camera Eight panel: "It cannot be... YOU"

Two pages from a comic I'm working on Page 1 is a single panel 'It can feel like plucking fruit off a tree... and seeing what's inside' Illustration of a branch of a tree with peaches on it, and a cross section of a peach, instead of a pit, there is a brain Page 2 is 4 panels Panel 1: "...and sometimes" text over an illustration of a peach Panel 2: "it's a pit" (cross section of a peach, with the pit visible) Panel 3: "or a worm" (a fruit with a worm poking out of it) Panel 4: "but sometimes... it's a universe" the brain/pit in the peach from the previous page is zoomed in and now has rings around it like a planet in space

I have a new 40-page comic book out that is a love letter to the brain, a visual exploration of the joys of thinking and perceiving, and also giant middle finger to AI, on sale today, too, for $6 alexandragallant.itch.io/brains

complaining about everything but sipping boba while I do it

Neural posterior estimation for population genetics Simulation-based inference methods are increasingly being used in population genetics due to their flexibility and ability to be applied in settings where likelihood-based methods are intractable. Per...

Popgen folks, Jiseon, Nate, and Andy, along with Yuxin Ning and Franz Baumdicker, just released a really cool new method for simulation based inference (think ABC) using normalizing flows. It seems to work really well! full joint posteriors ftw!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, ..."

I'm not familiar with these TE classes. Apparently they are very old.

Gambling, Prediction Markets Create New Credit Risks, BofA Warns Bank of America is sounding the alarm over the explosive growth of prediction markets and sports gambling, warning it could lead consumers to take on too much debt and default on loans.

“Researchers at UCLA and the USC previously found in states that allow online betting, the average credit score drops almost 1% after ~4 years, while the likelihood of bankruptcy increases 28%..the amount of debt sent to collection agencies increases 8%” www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Headline: U-boat men to die for murder of Allied crews

After World War II, 3 German U-boat crewmen were sentenced to death for machine-gunning Allied sailors who were clinging to life rafts after their boat was sunk.
It's long been known in the military that this is a war crime. Pete Hegseth must be fired and prosecuted.

Wow! Fascinating! And that mistranslation system in general - really cool!

Mistranslation protects against lifespan reduction due to mating in Drosophila melanogaster females. Accurate translation of genes into proteins is critical to organism fitness, and errors in this process are usually detrimental and cause proteotoxic stress. Mistranslation occurs when the amino acid ...

Amazing work from the folks in my lab on the impact of making the wrong proteins (mistranslation) and how it INCREASES female lifespan, even when combined with reproduction! Of note, the lead author, Luana Branco, did this work as an undergrad (!!). Preprint here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

10 courses for my dream bioinformatics curriculum:

1. Unix Commands with Greg Wilson www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3i...
2. statistics and R with Rafael Irizarry rafalab.dfci.harvard.edu/pages/harva...

So, instead of a single parameter model (phones), you prefer to fit a two parameter model (phones + our inability to adapt to phones) to explain the data.

OK.

The Whole World is Getting Dumber (And the Smartphone Did It)

🧵The Whole World is Getting Dumber
(And the Smartphone Did It)

How’s this for a gut punch?

The entire developed world is getting dumber. open.substack.com/pub/thecycle...

I received an "F" on my dental school paper for writing "the tooth fairy takes 'em while you sleep" and now I'm suing the school for religious discrimination

A university or funding agency can say:

"We will only cover article processing charges (APCs) if they are paid to not-for-profit journals" and/or "We will only cover $_____ of the APCs."

Authors aren't banned, but they are strongly motivated to change behaviours. 2/4

Before, there was constraint on the number of journals, because few libraries would subscribe to new ones. But with Gold OA it's like: let a thousand flowers bloom, with few constraints. The libraries don't need to subscribe anymore (KU doesn't for Nature Evolution) Is that what you are getting at?

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.

#philsci
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Nazis were executed for killing survivors of a sunk vessel.

www.executedtoday.com/2009/11/30/1...

God have mercy on these souls –– and if any is left to spare, on ours

Thanks for putting this out there. I didn't know about this.

And also here, from the Second Geneva Convention:

www.un.org/en/genocidep...

Spelled out in this.

Article 12 of the Second Geneva Conventions:

"Members of the armed forces and other persons mentioned in the following Article , who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances."

www.un.org/en/genocidep...

This is part of the Geneva Conventions apparently:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hors_de...

The prohibition is rather specific.

"The DOD Manual is clear because the law here is clear: 'Persons who have been incapacitated by . . . shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.'"

Rapid compensatory evolution within a multiprotein complex preserves telomere integrity Intragenomic conflict with selfish genetic elements spurs adaptive changes in subunits of essential multiprotein complexes. Whether and how these adaptive changes disrupt interactions within such comp...

How to keep in step when your (protein) partner speeds up…

Here we investigated the adaptive remodeling of a protein-protein interaction surface essential for telomere protection.

Congrats to whole team!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Terrible. LOL.