yesterday it was 70 degrees & sunny, so my classes ran an "experiment": everyone brought a physical book or printed article related to their research projects, & we read outside in the main quad for 35 minutes. I think there's a lot of motivation to reclaim our attention spans
One thing about writing that chatbots can't replace is that when you write you think and when you think you change and sometimes grow. (including new synapses in your brain - not everything is metaphor ya know). But that takes time.
Very early to know if it works in humans and no negative side issues, but hopeful. We NEED science and we need expert Scientists to be held up with great esteem! www.theguardian.com/environment/...
"All students should have the right to mask. All students should have the right to clean classroom air. All students should have a right to participate in college without risking Long COVID. "
I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives:
www.404media.co/teachers-are...
As @adambecker.bsky.social makes clear in his new book, More Everything Forever, we’re not going to colonize Mars. What’s underneath the desire of tech oligarchs to take us there is deeply disturbing. open.substack.com/pub/bibliora...
Sure, AI may be an environmental disaster and produce mid outcomes in cases where it doesn't straight up lie, but at least it's extremely unprofitable.
new from me: The House Republicans Budget Bill Guts Basic Needs Programs for the Most Vulnerable Americans to Give Tax Breaks to the Rich
you have to read it because i've been working 15-hour days :')
Thank you. Like all the other anti-public health screeds, it plays into this deep fatalism: nothing we can do, so don't bother trying to mitigate against disease or death. It's deeply nihilistic & anti-human. And tends to come from people who were lucky enough to not have to risk their own health
Of course, it was also hard to compartmentalize the devastation to those neighborhoods if you happened to be living in one. In the first five days of April, 2020, the Times reported, “1,125 people were pronounced dead in their homes or on the street in New York City, more than eight times the deaths recorded during the same period in 2019.” Thirty-three transit workers died in the span of eleven days. By mid-April, the city estimated that around ten thousand of its residents had died of COVID. My family, in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, lived in one of the worst-hit Zip Codes in the national epicenter of a lethal epidemic. Our apartment building was more or less equidistant from two large hospitals, and the sirens never stopped. Hundreds of our neighbors died. Children lost their parents. Zweig remains angry about what his kids lost, too, during the era of remote and hybrid school. His anger is valid; it’s the gas in the tank of his book. But the fathomless horror inscribed in those Brooklyn sirens, the unseen and screaming certainty of what was happening all around us, is something that I am not sure I will ever entirely comprehend or metabolize. It is also something that is utterly absent from “An Abundance of Caution”—any palpable recognition of where all the caution was coming from.
As someone who taught in-person and in great fear most all of 2020-2021 despite recent cancer and open heart surgery, I'm grateful for these paragraphs in @winterjessica.bsky.social's piece on pandemic school building closures.
www.newyorker.com/books/under-...
A message from my sister that says OMG 😩😂 Becky you’re getting a shipment of crickets for my frogs by accident. Somehow at some point your card and address info was assisted with a shop app I used. I highly recommend posting on a neighborhood forum that you’ll have a couple hundred pinhead size crickets to give away. They’re great for feeding small reptiles and amphibians”
Does anyone near Palo Alto need some crickets???
You may be fearing your 401k is no longer enough for you to retire. But with all the cuts to NIH and Medicare you also won't live as long. So the policies are integrated.
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/b.... Quotable quote: “A top Goldman Sachs executive summed up the frustration with Mr. Trump succinctly: Someone has to stop him.” Yeah, that “someone” used to be called the government and regulation. Til you all destroyed it.
A bleak time when I’m pinning all my hope on Goldman fucking Sachs saving us from Trump further destroying the economy
Image of poster, "Kill the cuts Stanford," with details: "Save lifesaving research, healthcare, and education. By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Join research, healthcare, and education workers across the country to demand NO cuts to education and research." April 8, 2025, 2-3pm, White Plaza, Stanford University. More info at killthecuts.org
Keeping the momentum going, this Tuesday, April 8, the Kill the Cuts rally at Stanford, White Plaza, 2-3pm
sgwu.us/s/kill-the-c...
"The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep public support, adding state capacity to build+maintain a home for everyone. Something analogous goes for health care+food clean air+water parks schools transit news universities science museums+worthwhile art"
thebaffler.com/latest/whats...
Trump says he’ll use revenue from tariffs to “offset” more big tax cuts.
Those tax cuts will disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans and big corporations.
But revenue raised from tariffs will be coming disproportionately from average working people.
It's another scam.
All cats are of course good cats but Dickens just seems *especially* good!
Interesting -- thank you for the breakdown of this! It's making me wish I had taken more science classes. (And I'm hoping this is good news for sunflower lecithin which seems to be in so many of the chocolate chips I've stocked up on for baking!)
From Naimi, S., Viennois, E., Gewirtz, A.T. et al. Direct impact of commonly used dietary emulsifiers on human gut microbiota. Microbiome 9, 66 (2021)
"While one might presume that any compound with detergent-like chemical properties, i.e., all emulsifiers, would significantly impact a complex microbial community, in fact, we observed that some of the emulsifiers we tested [soy lecithin & mono- and diglycerides] did not drive microbiota dysbiosis"
Yep similarly the reason I started looking into this was linking some of my symptoms to an almond milk w/ the usual emulsifier/ gum ingredients. And yes! One of the things I'm most confused by, as I've been poking around in this research, is how similar ingredients seem to have different effects
Speaking of, the WSJ quotes some research in this area, & this is one that made me especially question the use of xantham gum (which is in a surprising array of products...our favorite salad dressing, stir fry sauces, etc., all marketed as natural and/or organic). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37940266/
Agree, it's like he's just continually throwing half-baked -- or more accurately, entirely raw -- "ideas" at the wall and seeing what lands with his audience
mRNA is at the forefront of cancer research, as well as vaccines
National Institutes of Health officials have now told scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccines from their grant applications.
This means that all research in the field will be stopped and abandoned.
I also loathe RFK Jr. but there's good reason to question the use of some of these, including emulsifiers. I started paying attention to carrageenan, for ex., after realizing it's an ingredient my body was, well, poorly reacting to, to put it euphemistically.
I've realized this is the perfect thing to have on in the background while grading. It's like the eagle pomodoro method -- a long spell of quiet forest, then every once in a while it's time to eat some leftovers or chase off some ravens: www.friendsofbigbearvalley.org/eagles/
We have got to figure out a way to break the cycle of “humans find ways to prevent bad things from happening, bad things stop happening for so long that humans forget they’re possible and remove the mechanisms of prevention, and bad things start happening again”
