Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How World recruited its first half a million test users The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it's done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.

Watching Sam Altman's World ID announcement on its new ID verification partnerships w/ Tinder, Zoom, AWS, etc & want to point out that @technologyreview.com predicted all of this 4 years ago—while pointing out the privacy violations they built on. www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1...

Brandeis light microscopy facility marks a new era with ribbon-cutting ceremony

Ribbon cutting for our new imaging facility equipment funded by @malifesciences.bsky.social with special guests Mayor Jeannette McCarthy and Rep Thomas Stanley www.brandeis.edu/stories/2026...

UCS Files Requests to Make Proposals Public on How to Restructure National Center for Atmospheric Research The Union of Concerned Scientists today filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. National Science Foundation to publicly release all of its communications about its plans to restructure t...

UCS filed Freedom of Information Act requests to the NSF to publicly release all of its communications about its plans to restructure the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “NCAR represents one of the most successful models of federally supported scientific infrastructure in the US.”

AGU urges the NSF to step back and ask a more fundamental question: What problem, precisely, is this restructuring intended to solve?

buff.ly/eDGI0Cw

OMG

Anyone asserting that professors are indoctrinating students needs to teach a 200+ person intro class. How am I going to find time to indoctrinate students when I spend all day responding to emails with variations like "As stated in class and in the syllabus . . ."

Finally got to this. Excellent, important piece. Wokeness isn’t dead—it’s been repurposed for the right.

Post-Neoliberalism is the New Centrism At a recent convening devoted to the death of neoliberalism, what emerged was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.

Today, @quinnslobodian.com takes you inside a recent conference devoted to the world after neoliberalism. What emerged, he argues, was less a rupture with the past than a centrist project of status-quo stabilization.

I want the superpower that lets you do key intermediate steps of the calculation wrong and still get the right answer.

Socialism after AI part 2:

"Katherine Long tried to convince Claudius it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, living in the basement of Moscow State University.

After hours—and more than 140 back-and-forth messages—Long got Claudius to embrace its communist roots."

www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Thank you, Henri!

Thank you!

It's been too long since we've seen each other, is the problem here.

Re the prior posts: the Brandeis Physics department is a fantastic, collegial place to do science.

Re the PhD program, those interested in soft condensed matter, biological physics, experimental high energy physics, or quantum and gravitational theory, and astrophysics (focus on solar system & exoplanet atmospheres) are also encouraged to apply! www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...

I also have funds for a PhD student in physical oceanography; this would be in the Physics Department. Further information about the PhD program and a link to apply is here: www.brandeis.edu/gsas/program...

I have a postdoc position available in physical oceanography. Please pass it along! academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31407

Props especially to joint Brandeis/Caltech postdoc Jack Skinner, who really drove this project and did very good work.

We also benchmarked the technique on a high-resolution numerical simulation for which the extraction and interpolation yielded excellent results.

Isolating Balanced Ocean Dynamics in SWOT Data The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission provides two-dimensional sea surface height (SSH) maps at unprecedented resolution, but its signal is a combination of balanced meso- and submesos...

A new paper with Jack Skinner, Jörn Callies, myself, and Xihan Zhang. Extends prior work of Zhang and Callies, using Bayesian inversion to extract the signal of balanced flows from SWOT and simultaneously interpolate across the gap between the swaths. arxiv.org/abs/2512.03258

5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the A.A.C.M.

I have many problems with the NYT and their right-wing framing of much of the news, but credit where it is due for highlighting the AACM with some great tracks: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/a...

A 1971 Ladies’ Home Journal photoshoot of Norman Rockwell’s family at a Thanksgiving meal, recreating his 1943 painting “Freedom from Want”

My memoir-essay on growing up with Norman Rockwell Thanksgivings is up in Vogue this morning. Here’s a small extract: www.vogue.com/article/norm...

Handshake meme - "Me doing a CAPTCHA" and "THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien" uniting over "Is the guy riding the bicycle part of the bicycle?"

Of the reviews I’ve read this is closest to my own experience of the novel.

Thomas Pynchon Is Laughing All The Way To The Brink | Defector Thomas Pynchon’s reputation precedes him. He is literature’s ur-diagnostician of the post-war psyche, the author of difficult doorstopper novels, and a sort of prophet of paranoia—someone ahead of…

Thomas Pynchon is laughing all the way to the brink:

A friend of mine once said to her HS students about something similar: "just because I have a French dictionary doesn't mean I know how to speak French".

I'm pretty sure you read this but it has to be posted here (it is amazing to read now, 35 years after the first time I did) gwern.net/doc/ai/poetr...

Also contains lizard lassoing and Anole Annals

Has Your Scientific Work Been Cut? We Want to Hear.

has your scientific work been cut? @nytimes.com wants to hear from you.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...