Question for #AcademicSky: does anyone have a lab wiki alternative to Confluence that they like?

I believe papers about extinct charismatic vertebrates should be held to the same publishing standards and norms as other taxonomic groups. It's objectively bizarre that papers describing a single species gets published in Science/Nature as if that's considered of broad paleobiological significance

Timezones don't include Arizona time. AZ doesn't use daylight savings time, so what "timezone" I'm in varies during the year. Right now, it's Mountain, but in the summer, it'll be Pacific.

Signing up for the first time!

Alright scientists! It's that time again!

Time to sign up for Skype a Scientist's spring semester.

Want to get matched with a classroom in 2026?

Sign up now 🥰

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I named my fists AUG and UGA because one starts it and the other finishes it.

It's not imposter syndrome if you make no claim to have any business being there

At @materials-mrs.bsky.social Fall 2025 Conference in Boston, if anyone wants to say hi!

[A graph of "Productivity when a major internet service goes down" over time] [The productivity line starts at average. A point in time is labelled 'outage begins'] [After that, the line splits into two lines: one labelled "People whose work relies on the service". It goes down over time.] [The second line is labelled "People whose work doesn't rely on the service". It jumps a little and stays roughly constant after.] [The second line is illustrated by Cueball seated at a desk, using a laptop computer. A thought bubble says: "Aw man, the outage took down the Star Wars Legends wiki."]

guilty as charged

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

no-context code snippet today, from the line before an exception
```
# helppppp
```

Gonna write an elemental magic system where people can control different states of matter.
Controlling gasses is pretty neat! Sucks if you get stuck being able to control quark-gluon plasma or bose-einstein condensates

It's really funny that the best explanation of the core ideas of statistics and uncertainty I've ever encountered comes from an animated Netflix show for eight-year-olds

love it when a line of my code that has a bug is preceeded by a line I wrote like ` # todo: verify that this behavior is correct!`

spent like 10 hours today on one of those problems that *seems* like it should be straightforward but *is not*

[Cueball sits at a table, eating a meal.] Cueball: Can you pass the salt? [Cueball pauses, a bite of food on his fork, silently.] [Cueball still has fork in mid-air.] Cueball: I said- Off-screen person: I know! I'm developing a system to pass you arbitrary condiments. Cueball: It's been 20 minutes! Off-screen person: It'll save time in the long run!

photo of Donald Knuth, next to white text on black background reading "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. - [cursive] Donald Knuth -" the image is labelled "AZ QUOTES"

I've been working from home a lot this week (we've arrived at the time where the walk from the bus stop to office becomes.... difficult), which isn't a huge issue except that I'm not constantly looking at my Donald Knuth poster and I am beginning to forget his wisdom

If this is a browser issue / gets fixed fast I'm going to sound like a crazy person

Hey @science.org: LaTeX display appears to be broken on the webpage version of this paper
www.science.org/doi/full/10....?

There is no better feeling than "OH! I've been going about this all wrong! If I try it a different way it might work!"

In my professional opinion (views do not represent ASU) it's bad to burn down the strongest scientific research institutions on Earth for no reason

Wait who added Jeffrey Goldberg as a collaborator?

snippet of github website, showing two branches named "nightmare" and "horrible_mistake", which both have pushes within the last 20 minutes

amazing things happening over in my git repo

It's weird how often ChatGPT includes emoji in generated code

The Politics of Fake Documentaries This piece originally appeared on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not sure it’s fair to draw a straight line from Animal Planet’s “mermaids are real, and scientists and the government are lying to you, harass them” to everything we see now.

But they sure didn’t help.

Fuck Discovery Communications.

(By @drandrewthaler.bsky.social , a decade ago)

I'm doing actual math to optimize the complexity of an algorithm, that's never a good sign

Long letter from NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, available here: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Letter-to-the-Community.pdf

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you.

Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵

update: the ` # TODO: make sure this isn't a horrible mistake!!!` code was unjustly accused

every time some of my code ruins my life, I always find that the problem is right under a comment I had written saying "this code is going to ruin my life"

One of the funniest long-term trends in The Onion is their deeply impassioned, and surprisingly knowledgeable, gags about marine biology. @whysharksmatter.bsky.social