This quote highlights why the major questions doctrine is bullshit: $480 billion dollars of costs is burdensome, but no one would argue that if there were only $4.80 of costs that it would be burdensome. Somewhere between $4.80 and $480 billion there is a line that has been crossed, but…
Impeach him.
NSF LTER program “archived”.
LTER=“Long Term Ecological Research”.
This program has been incredibly successful, incredibly frugal for what they accomplish, and…of course…targeted by evil know-nothings.
My heart is breaking.
NYTImes calls NATO the “North American treaty organization”
It’s a real problem that our elite institutions are just much stupider now than they used to be
Here is the Cornell Chronicle article about our PNAS paper on the evolution of milkweed toxins (N,S-cardenolides), to which the monarch butterfly is sensitive, despite being co-evolved with milkweeds!
@cornellentomology.bsky.social
news.cornell.edu/stories/2026...
Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302
The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.
What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.
Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.
New preprint on the limits of detecting higher-order interactions in microbial communities.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
We find that the dominance of additive and pairwise interactions on community function may not reflect biological simplicity, but fundamental limits of statistical detection.
🌿 Postdoc opportunity in plant evolutionary ecology/genetics!
My lab in the Dept. of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan is recruiting a postdoctoral researcher to start Fall 2026.
We study plant adaptation, using weeds as model systems.
#Postdoc #EcoEvo
Pls RT!
When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities #academicsky www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
We have turned Tehran into hell.
It will consume us too, soon enough.
![Diff of a change the 'Getting Started in R - Tinyverse Edition' manuscript with a nice data.table improvement: inside a pair of ( ) we can place each chained operation on its own line improving readability.
I.e. we have
cw21 <- ( # use '(' to keep ops on separate lines
cw[Time %in% c(0,21)] # i: select rows
[, weight := Weight] # j: mutate
[, Group := factor(Group)]
[, .(Chick,Group,Time,weight)] # j: arrange
[order(Chick,Time)] # i: order
[1:5] # i: subset
)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:hdbguwort62mhodqy7vjspud/bafkreibbmwqmfe2wuvlsvy2f7v5eegui6lwocren4lvy2hc4kmn7kuvnjm)
Diff of a change the 'Getting Started in R - Tinyverse Edition' manuscript with a nice data.table improvement: inside a pair of ( ) we can place each chained operation on its own line improving readability. I.e. we have cw21 <- ( # use '(' to keep ops on separate lines cw[Time %in% c(0,21)] # i: select rows [, weight := Weight] # j: mutate [, Group := factor(Group)] [, .(Chick,Group,Time,weight)] # j: arrange [order(Chick,Time)] # i: order [1:5] # i: subset )
Josh Goldstein emailed me a nice tip for @rdatatable.bsky.social chaining: if we start a chained `data.table` operation inside a set of parens, we are no longer subject to the 'REPL constraint' and can keep each operation on a line. See ALT text. #rstats
Now in the pdf at github.com/eddelbuettel...
This is a genuinely huge, sweeping victory today for the University of California—or rather, for us, its faculty, acting through our faculty associations, while the UC itself maintained a strict policy of deer-in-headlights silence.
The Trump admin has given up its appeal of a powerful injunction:
All things considered, this is a relatively close race between an establishment Democrat who loves ICE and Israel (Krishamoorthi) and a progressive black woman in Julian Stratton who supports abolition and doesn't take PAC money
"for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States"
Has anyone seen even one editorial anywhere? I've seen a small handful of opinion columns, but that's it. Let me know.
CHICAGOANS!!!!
Voting is open for the annual snowplow naming contest. And “Abolish Ice” is one of the options.
You know what to do (vote): chicagoshovels.org
Rubbish paper "Is Pee Stored in the Balls" with broken diagram, broken, table, and bullshit text.
So initial experiments with Open AI's vibe-coding science tool Prism are going about as well as expected.
1. The thing about science that these jokers don't understand is that science cannot be vibe-coded.
Whatever its flaws, the point with vibe coding is that you're trying to quickly make something that sorta works, where you can immediately sorta see if it sorta works and then sorta use it.
Trusted friends in Minneapolis tell me that this fund is supporting many people but does not have enough money. If you can give, please do: chuffed.org/project/1671...
Trump is sending Tom Homan into Minneapolis.
Homan is the guy who appears to have taken a $50,000 bribe in a federal undercover law-enforcement sting.
www.cnn.com/2026/01/26/m...
A lot more people should know about the bravery Marimar Martinez displayed in the midst of Chicago’s occupation and the murder of two observers in MSP. They tried to kill her, shooting her 5 times, and it’s a miracle she’s alive to push for transparency like this after being persecuted by the DOJ.
A Statement From Tom — 1/26/26 "I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis. I hear the anger from many of my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE's unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that. The senseless and tragic murder of Alex Pretti underscores what happens when untrained federal agents operate without accountability. President Trump must immediately end "Operation Metro Surge" and ICE's occupation of Minneapolis that has sown chaos, led to tragedy, and undermined experienced local law enforcement." —Congressman Tom Suozzi (NY-3)
Rep. Tom Suozzi(D-NY), getting raked over the coals for his vote for more ICE funding, says in a campaign email that he didn’t understand what he was doing
“The shooting of Porter, who leaves behind daughters aged 10 and 20, was not caught on camera”
How convenient for ICE
White lily with purple and creamy center bits and a fly on one petal
Calochortus gunnisonii, our Gunnison's Mariposa Lily, blooming in Lower McCollough Gulch with pollinator fly #nativeplants
#FallBackFlowers #FallBack to July 25 🌿
Good afternoon from downtown Chicago, where despite heavy snowfall, thousands have gathered for an anti-ICE/CBP demonstration in solidarity with the Twin Cities. More are still streaming in.
Lt. Illinois Gov. Juliana Stratton just addressed the crowd, and called for ICE to be abolished.
The key to the far right’s recent ascendence is the realization that if they simply go on traditional or social media and describe things that are completely false but they’d prefer to be true, many people will treat this fictitious reality as, at least, a competing theory that must be dignified.
Henry Cuellar Contributors 2001-2024 Top contributors GEO Group Total $164,990. Individual $100,800. PACs $64,390
Henry Cuellar is the concentration-camp contractor GEO Group's Man in Congress
