They finally fixed that sign at Union Square
Congress has appropriated the funds to NSF but OMB is delaying the release. When funds are released, NSF, which has lost almost 1/5 of its staff, will struggle to evaluate proposals. Since they have to award the funds, big projects with established PIs will benefit. This is how US science dies.
Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.
team pig til I die
The recent days have been horrific. We can't become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies. It's even worse when public officials are blatantly lying in ways that contradict dozens of pieces of video evidence.
![Excerpt reads: "Prioritize your neighborhood
Neighborhoods drive our happiness (or unhappiness) more than we think.
When Lina Martinez, director of POLIS, the Center for Wellbeing Studies at Universidad Icesi in Colombia, studied the happiness of households in the city of Cali, she couldn’t find much difference between poorer and richer areas. “Their happiness is pretty much the same,” she said. But that changed when she isolated neighborhood conditions, such as access to transit, health care and parks. “The conditions of the neighborhood affect happiness,” she said. “I can’t link that to the space where [people] live.”
That aligns with findings from a 2023 study of the Vancouver metro area: Researchers found no significant differences in well-being between people living in single detached homes, duplexes, townhouses, laneway houses and apartment buildings (basement units smaller than 300 square feet were the only negative exception). What did people say they missed most in their neighborhood? Affordability, proximity to family and friends, and a sense of community. Home design was eighth on the list."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ks3gpa6ftoyaq7hmf6c4qx4c/bafkreicapfknasylzk2lqzaxxeb5mchgnru75obggn45dusda6j5zogvuu)
A Washington Post article suggests that, beyond a certain threshold, larger homes don't make people happier. Instead, well-being is correlated with affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods where they feel socially connected.
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...
Day 3 of me, a known tech bro, defending the honor and good name of career government officials.
Part of the reason we're in the mess we're in, is that too many of y'all believe the lies that government officials are less smart or less motivated, than the private sector.
That's complete nonsense.
I was walking down a street in New York and I thought how lovely it was, with the trees and the light. Tried to take a photo and this came out. It’s incredible how blind we become to the ugliness of cars. They really do mess things up. Yet somehow we manage to filter them out.
Only surprised it's just 1100
AI may bring many benefits to humanity, but none of them justify the slander of one of our greatest punctuation marks. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...
My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.
I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.
This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.
It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.
Nature reports on how live-animal markets are a natural laboratory for viruses to evolve and spark deadly outbreaks, and how scientists lack support to study the risks these markets pose. #medsky 🧪
People really will get freaked out by the ingredients list on a jug of oat milk and then think they're only eating one chemical when they grill a steak.
Enjoy your heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons!! Worse than anything in oat milk, but still not that bad.
I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.
Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing:
- Complaints about car-honking are down 70%
- The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour; time to get thru it is down 48%
- 6 million fewer cars
- Half as many traffic-related injuries
- 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year
Thank you I had to scroll down much too far to find this. Absolute treasure of a story
My (perhaps naive) understanding is that selling it to someone who doesn't care increases supply, reducing the price Tesla can sell new cars for (downwards pressure from surplus cars). The net effect should be similar to a boycott: one less new car they can sell.
conventional wisdom is that travel times haven't fallen in the congestion relief zone, according to readings from congestion-pricing-tracker.com. but it's not true anymore, and it was only ever true because google maps interpolates historical data.
After 9 great years in Google Cloud, I'm very excited to start a new role as Head of Engineering for the Responsibility organization at Google DeepMind. Although new beginnings are always difficult, I'm comforted knowing it will be a very chill and normal time to begin this challenge.
God I needed this
Making LLMs run efficiently can feel scary, but scaling isn’t magic, it’s math! We wanted to demystify the “systems view” of LLMs and wrote a little textbook called “How To Scale Your Model” which we’re releasing today. 1/n
Research in Cell Genomics led by @danafarber.bsky.social's Bradley Bernstein, MD, PhD, presents an AI transformer model developed in collaboration with Google Advanced Sciences which can predict gene expression. https://bit.ly/42zNVsj
By pre-training on a multi-modal input combining sequence and ATAC data, our model can generalize to unobserved cell states to predict gene expression, chromatin accessibility quantitative trait loci (caQTLs), regulatory motifs, and enhancer-gene links.
Excited to present the results of my 20% project in collaboration with @broadinstitute.org and @danafarber.bsky.social . In our new paper we demonstrate a long-range model capable of detecting regulatory elements at distances beyond a million base pairs.
This is actually super-helpful and a huge relief. www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/28/h...
New Bleecker St Breakfast at chloe is phenomenal
