NASA and Mamdani are proving that Americans are desperate to see their money spent in ways they feel good about.

This, however, is not the same thing as simply spending the money on things we would feel good about but never know happened. People need to be able to see it.

We have the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Now is the time to use it. It's past time for Trump to be removed from office. This is a global crisis. It's time for J.D. Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Any federal official who does not respond to Tuesday’s threat in a manner befitting their own constitutional obligations in light of Trump’s past actions will bear a part of the responsibility for what follows.

That’s my take.

Read all about it at Law Dork.

Would love more info about the games!

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form ...

“Flexible rhythm perception underpins human music, dance & speech. We show that bees form robust abstract rhythm representations. Results suggest an insect brain can encode & generalize arbitrary complex temporal patterns, pointing to deep evolutionary roots for domain‐general rhythm cognition.”😲
🐝🧪

You might want to take a closer look at what's going on here. The quoted post is directing quite a bit of counterproductive hostility toward the authors of the paper.

Broke: pack SCOTUS

Bespoke: randomly assign court of appeals judges to each case, meaning you can't know the composition of the court you're likely to face if you bring a ridiculous claim

Hostile interpolation rhetorical style in the attention economy. Or, It's not you, but it's them

Lots of people are misinterpreting my latest newsletter

tomstafford.substack.com/p/hostile-interpolation

(not really, but the newsletter discusses the particular rhetorical style which positions readers as stupid or misled)

Forced to choose the size of my cortado, 12oz or 16oz. The nightmare continues

Belltower House Artist Residency Belltower House Artist Residency is a gift of creative sanctuary in southern New Mexico.

I couldn't be more excited to announce something I've been working on for a long time -

Please welcome Belltower House Artist Residency, a multidisciplinary gift of time in my erstwhile home in southern New Mexico, now accepting applications for 2026.

belltowerhouse.org

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

Juergen Habermas Contradicts His Own Ideas When It Comes to Gaza One of the world’s most influential philosophers has weighed in on the war in Gaza. A Middle East scholar tells him why he’s wrong

Asef Bayat's open letter to Habermas regarding his uncritical support of the Gaza war

newlinesmag.com/argument/jue...

If you’re wondering what the big deal is about Jürgen Habermas (who died yesterday), or if you’ve never heard of him until now, you’re not going to learn much from the short newspaper obituaries, which are focusing on more on what he said about current events than his philosophy. 1/

Jürgen Habermas, influential German philosopher, dies at 96 German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has died at age 96. Habermas' work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figur...

RIP Jurgen Habermas - one of the five major social theorists of the past 60 years. Much to learn from his work. Many gaps, some errors, but he was so rigorous that he inspired some of the best simultaneously dissenting and generative thought of any postwar academic.

A circular web of sets, in four concentric circles, with spokes connecting them as well. Tom Johnsons drawing (Orbit of the Group of Z12-related pairs of length 5).

bringing back music theory graphs with mildly threatening auras

The 2014 Lantlôs album Melting Sun

Oren Ambarchi's Ghosted series

Every graduate student interpreting brief, oblique paper comments from their PI knows what it is like to be an LLM

Born #onthisday in 1868, the US sociologist + civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Celebrate with a look at the stunning hand-drawn "infographics" he made with his students, depicting conditions of African-American life in 1900: publicdomainreview.org/collection/w... #otd #BlackHistoryMonth

My essay 'After Orthogonality,' the culmination of 4 years of work on virtue-ethics, rationality, AI, decision-theory, and praxis is out on The Gradient

I will be hiring a full-time pre-doctoral Research Professional to work with me at Chicago Booth.

Know someone interested in studying conversation and connection? Please help spread the word!

More details, including application instructions, are here: www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/facu...

may we all know the joy of rotating the same cube around in your head until The Problem is Solved even if The Problem is Solved in disgraced obscurity

butterfly meme ME ANYTHING IS THIS A GAUSSIAN PROCESS

New gaussian process slides going well

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 09 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02371-7Vaziri et al. examined how humans detect changes in auditory pitch, revealing that listeners rely on correlations in sound intensity over frequency and time, processing that is reminiscent of visual motion detection.

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch

It’s the “we all” part that’s tricky here

“Gramsci used to say 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. What he meant is: understand how the bloody system works.” - Stuart Hall, born Feb. 3, 1932

"Shape packing" is a good search term

hcie.csail.mit.edu/research/fab...

github.com/DanielLiamAn...

WARN-D machine learning competition is live » Eiko Fried If you share one single thing of our team in 2026—on social media or per email with your colleagues—please let it be this machine learning competition. It was half a decade of work to get here, especi...

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.

If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.

eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Croissant kill:death ratio

behold, we found great variation in how people think! Many activities that we thought would be “gaming” weren't & vice versa, eg half of the participants interpreted ‘gambling’ to be ‘gaming’. Ergo: surveying ‘gaming’ without defining it creates data mess

PC games (are gaming). Arcade games, which require inserting money to start (are gaming). Football outdoors with friends (is gaming). Frisbee golf outdoors with friends (is gaming). Drones and similar remotely controllable physical machines (are gaming). Console games (are gaming). Esports (are gaming). Smartphone AR games outdoors like Pokemon GO (are gaming). Online slot machines with the possibility to win real money (are gaming). Offline slot machines in a casino with the possibility to win real money (are gaming). Traditional lotto with the possiblity to win a million dollars (is gaming). Casual mobile games (are gaming). Competitive mobile games (are gaming). Handheld console games (are gaming). Betting (on sports, esports, etc.) to win real money (is gaming). Betting (on sports, esports, etc.) to win skins or other digital items (is gaming). Online casino games that do not allow winning real money (is gaming). Online poker with digital cards, which allows winning real money (is gaming). Offline poker with real cards, which allows winning real money (is gaming). Fantasy football i.e. predicting winners in real football with the possibility to win valuable prizes (is gaming). Duolingo and similar language apps (are gaming). Tinder and similar dating apps (are gaming). Gamified loyalty programs where people collect points/rewards with airlines, online stores, etc. (are gaming). Watching online live-streams where other people play videogames (is gaming). Watching online videos where other people play videogames (is gaming). Buying randomised physical game packs like Magic: the Gathering cards or Pokemon cards with real money (is gaming). Buying lootboxes with virtual in-game currency, which allows winning

Considering how fun this research was, it would’ve been stupid to stop here. What people *really* think when they read ‘gaming’ or related terms? I had dreamt of this exploration for ages-- we created a list of 50 statements (EN+SK), asking how much participants agree diverse activities are gaming