excuse me?

Had a meeting this week where I asked detailed questions about a team's statistical plan and the response was "we'll just use AI for it".

Even if you used AI to help, you first have to know what you're asking it to do. You'd have to know what you expected to get, so that you could correct any errors.

It is really hard to emphasize how cooked that is, as a response. Like, it is TROUBLING

My PhD student will be finishing soon and is looking for a postdoc position to start in the fall semester. If you have a postdoc ad or opening and are looking for someone experienced especially in population/evolutionary genomics with a knack for coding and bioinformatics, let me know.

Grad school: to be successful in a future career you're going to need to focus on THIS ONE THING for the next 5 years.

The actual career in question: you can't focus on one thing for more than 30 minutes at a time and you have to keep switching between 1000 things endlessly

It isn't obscure in library circles, and it should be obvious, but it does seem to confuse a lot of people when I note that a bad economy always sees a spike in virtually every library use statistic.

The Catholic bishops have just made crystal clear the reason that the pope is right and JD Vance is wrong: A just war can't be a war of choice, which this one clearly is. This is a crucial theological, political, and moral argument, and the clarity here is needed and powerful

Common Gallinules Battling, George's take first and Vic second capture

#birdoftheday #CourtshiporConflict #LakeMartiinLA
#gallinule #commongallinule #nature #widlife #naturephotography

Wouldn't it be nice if you could say goodbye to TurboTax and file your taxes for free, online, and directly with the IRS?

I have a bill to get that done.

Going to show this to my dog next time she’s mad that I’ve gone to the store without her. “Yeah, well at least I didn’t go all the way to the MOON”.

Leo: "The message of the church, the message of the gospel -- blessed are the peacemakers. I do not look at my role as being political. I don't want to get into a debate with him. I don't think the message of the gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing."

In the foreground, the Orion propulsion module. In the background, home.

This view is STUNNING

A screenshot of the Youtube live stream of the Artemis Two mission, it shows the Artemis 2 craft on the far left lit by the sun, and in the middle of a completely black background is Earth, looming fairly large half shadowed, with the brightly lit part showing blue ocean interlaced white clouds

hey kids

you may want to tune into the NASA livestream for the Artemis 2 mission

it's rapidly approaching home and the earth is getting *big*

they're set to splashdown at 8:07 pm tonight

www.youtube.com/live/6RwfNBt...

AI Is Inventing Academic Papers That Don't Exist -- And They're Being Cited in Real Journals Academic articles from authors using large language model are creating an ecosystem of fake research that threatens human knowledge itself.

Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.

Schools are like "hey lock up your cell phones they're too damaging to the learning process. now please open up your lying plagiarism machine and start generating content"

Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

do not embarrass me in front of the people who flew around the moon

This is a really big deal.

(lol) oh dear

What ....eight?!?!???????

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

Two bison at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Shawnee National Forest

Shawnee Hills in the Shawnee National Forest

Here in Illinois, you might not think about the US Forest Service having much of a presence, but the agency manages important places like Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie and Shawnee National Forest - learn more about what they do from @extension.illinois.edu: aces.illinois.edu/news/illinoi...

yah, two desk rejects I can let roll of my back more easily

but two after revision.....is frustrating. Especially this second one where I really thought we had addressed the concerns, and we clearly didn't communicate that well enough for the reviewers :/

(sorry meant after revision, both times)

Rejection is just part of the process though, and we'll regroup

I've been tracking my paper rejections for over a decade now, and yah, its pretty common

aurielfournier.github.io/rejection/

Student led paper rejected. Which happens. This one has been rejected twice now, after review both times, at two different journals.

Its frustrating since we're clearly not communicating well with the reviewers/editors, and I can't quite seem how to crack why that is.

Captured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the Sun’s outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity’s return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth. [alt text from NASA]

The #Artemis II astronauts said they needed more superlatives to describe their view of the eclipse, when the Sun was behind the Moon and its near surface was faintly illuminated by Earthshine

The Artemis II crew – Mission Specialist Christina Koch (top left), Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen (bottom left), Commander Reid Wiseman (bottom right), and Pilot Victor Glover (top right) – uses eclipse viewers, identical to what NASA produced for the 2023 annular eclipse and 2024 total solar eclipse, to protect their eyes at key moments during the solar eclipse they experienced during their lunar flyby. This was the first use of eclipse glasses at the Moon to safely view a solar eclipse.

aptured by the Artemis II crew during their lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, this image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun. From the crew’s perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the Sun’s outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity’s return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth.

Solar eclipse viewing - IN SPACE!!!! 🤩 #Artemis

📷: NASA
ℹ️: images.nasa.gov/details/art0...

Every discussion on AI and higher ed is extremely depressing. ”Al for mentorship. AI for tutoring. AI for research and writing.”

Where is the, “AI for executive admin positions”

She’s correct! From the ISS, where women have been on board for some time, it’s only a partial view. This is a view from deep space, and it marks a first. And it’s lit by the moon’s reflective light, not by the sun which is on the other side of our planet in this shot. Amazing!

Y'all there is a woman and a black man circling the moon and NASA's mission control+ science teams are so diverse and people are nerding out about science and exploration this is all a gigantic middle finger to the stupid and hate and grotesque ghouls running our country