This Is Just To Say
I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update
and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize
Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying
Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.
NSF GRFPs and HMs just announced! Students who got an HM can apply for the EPSCoR GRFP (3 yrs of funding!). Plz spread the word about our EMERGE Program at Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. We're recruiting 10 PhD students for Fall 2026!
www.uaf.edu/cfos/academi...
Science is good. We should fund it.
"AI is garbage, bro, it gives you wrong answers like half the time and the other half the time makes you stupid."
Overheard a middle schooler chastising a fellow student for suggesting they use AI. Whole middle school herd started mocking the AI kid.
...We need to let these kids at the tech bros.
"If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me." defector.com/go-ahead-and...
As our university is undergoing restructuring, its partnership with the natural history museum where I work, the Academy of Natural Sciences, is in jeopardy. If you value the involvement of science museums in the community, please consider checking out this petition. c.org/Db5WKdZSQ8
It's looking like the public is skeptical of AI in museums' public-facing content. Good. They should be.
www.aam-us.org/2026/03/30/a...
Congress remains supine on a key issue: Trump doesn't need such a big room to hold his balls:
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...
BREAKING: Huge win for the Endangered Species Act! Today’s ruling restores the Endangered Species Act to the status it held for decades before the *first* Trump administration attacked the ESA.
Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities
Chickens with dinosaur heads
Be fair, they might get as far as a flock of these...
My favorite thing to come out of it was the Iceland tourism commercial:
www.adweek.com/brand-market...
"Internal" use at journals is unlikely something we as authors can affect, but at least let's preclude reviewers from returning us slop/BS that we have to shovel out of because they're incapable of providing honest peer review. Their laziness and incompetence (+AI) should not cost *us* our time.
I think it's time we encourage journals to require that reviewers agree to *not* upload our manuscripts to an LLM. Some already do. All should.
Another sunny spring day in Fairbanks. Sunglasses and my heavy coat.
Spring break. Might not head for the beach.
I keep telling people I recently had my first “AI-enabled” undergrad interns. It was worse than if they knew nothing. People who know nothing at least ask for help
I let them work for a few months because I was curious to see if some latent desire for help and instruction might kick in, but nope
Ouch. That's gonna leave a mark...
Hello, March.
An historic black and white illustration of a paper nautilus floating on the ocean. There are boats, a city and hills in the background.
🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more:
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran...
#BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪
A little crisp again this morning. The sun is bright, and the days are getting long again, but we've got a little winter left nipping at our heels.
An eloquent, knowledgeable, and heartfelt cry about the sorry state of public education in Alaska:
www.adn.com/opinions/202...
Spring is coming into view.
"The Trump Administration has begun the great public lands sell off in earnest."
Interior to Sell Off Millions of Acres of Public Lands in Alaska
open.substack.com/pub/morethan...
There goes any future progress on species concepts.
Trying to imagine my time at UT without discussions of parsimony vs. likelihood.
👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics.
"It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
We (as a society) are good and truly f*cked
