PhD brain and genomic scientist. Ocean junkie. Computer wrangler. Open data believer. Geek. Punk. Not that kind of doctor. Views only my own. She/her
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Ethics, social studies, and history should all be mandatory learning. "But I'm an engineer" or "but I'm a scientist," they'll say, " those are humanities subjects "... Yes, that is literally the point. Everything you do affects humanity, and that impact needs to be understood by everyone involved.
That is SO profoundly out of line. If that was through some kind of mentoring program, they need to have better standards and some serious conversations with the mentees about how and why anything like that is NOT OKAY before unleashing them on people.
It was SO wtf that I was honestly questioning whether I’d forgotten to bring it for a minute, but I *had* been reading it right before that.
The only time I’ve ever had someone steal something from my stuff at the beach was a copy of some trashy secondhand book about Anne Boleyn. They stole it out of the seat of my beach chair. Do I still have a grudge against New Jersey for that? Yes I do.
If I’m setting up a spot on the beach (chair, towel, whatever), I’ll carry my shoes down and put them there. If I intend to walk the beach, though - especially if I’m beachcombing - I’ll leave my shoes where I came on, both because I need my hands for shells and to remind me where I came on.
Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):
Someone please kill me right now.
Was history a learning elective for that person? 🤦🏼♀️
But acknowledging that would mean treating teachers as valuable, and worse, treating educating kids as *more* valuable than the work calls that were “disturbed” by having kids at home. We couldn’t do that! [sarcastic]
How much of this is just “weird artist”, though? I’ve seen houses that had a lot of this vibe for sale, and it always turns out to be “weird artist owned this”. Or even something like Meow Wolf.
Someone followed me with the bio “politics in your posts and you’ll be blocked”. I’ll just take care of that now for you, shall I?
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
It’s a very chicken and egg problem - the US rail network is terrible because no one takes it, and no one takes it because it’s terrible. (And it’s terrible for a host of reasons, including enormous distances, old/slow trains, car culture/car company lobbying, etc., etc.)
It is “veeeery American”, because sometimes we want to go places other than where these lines are.
Much like "crab", industrial music is constantly re-evolving from first principles basically anywhere where there's a bunch of metal and plastic laying about
Somehow I’ve never thought to go check it out, although I’ve biked up to the light past it a zillion times. Clearly, I need to change that!
Wow, that is very orange - and that Crane statue is pretty cool all on its own!
It looks like there might be some in the Woods Hole Village cemetery - these aren’t my pics, but look pretty orange.
Oooh, is there?
Requisite artsy Nobska Light.
All I need is this.
Meet the chocolate chip sea cucumber. It has no true brain. Instead, a complex system of neurons helps it interact with its environment through touch & the ability to feel the presence of light. DYK? There are 1,000+ species of sea cucumbers! Photo: Matteo Cassella, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist
You probably shouldn’t - the taste is the formaldehyde. You can smell it, too, and more if you rub it between your hands to warm up a little.
That I could know it has a TASTE before I knew how to say it is deeply weird.
SO many tourists today, but it’s good to be here again.
It has what? No way!
Actually, Frankenstein is a doctor success at the Venice film festival
Some people in small beach towns get very small, is all I can say.
In this case, townies who think they have some kind of right to decide who’s “local enough” to be on a non-town beach. (Joke’s on them, I’ve been going to that beach my whole life.)
*stares in “moving home to Massachusetts”*
Anyway at least the City of Edmonton Shelterbuddy links are validated and live now! edmontonacccpets.shelterbuddy.com/animal/anima... edmontonacccpets.shelterbuddy.com/animal/anima...
EDMONTON: HELP Mayday mayday SOS: both Fiasco and Franca have gotten out of the house through a busted window screen and the back gate was found open by my catsitter I am VERY FAR AWAY! If you are in the Highlands region can you keep your eye out
The kind of people who’ve self-appointed themselves as Beach Scolds can fuck right off to fucksville, and take their entitlement with them.
I’ve said before and I’ll say again: when I die, if I’ve been very good, I would like to be reincarnated as someone’s much-beloved dog on the cape.
NEWS ALERT: THERE IS A BLACK LAB PUPPY AT THE BEACH STICKER HUT. SHE GIVES KISSES.
Finally, the excellent postdoc work of Emmanuel Haillot is out, where he dissected the integration of Wnt, MAPK and Notch signaling in defining mesoderm and endoderm identities in the diploblast Nematostella. Strikingly similar to sea urchins. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We almost lost papayas to ringspot disease before an immune cultivar was developed via genetic manipulation. And we DID lose the Gros Michel banana. This is a skeet about the USDA mass layoffs.
This is why I still love the internet.
three flamingos, golden dragon golf, north myrtle beach, south carolina, 1985
This IS awesome, and I have no idea why they’re like this either. They’re like the opposite of mantis shrimp pseudopupils. @bwjones.bsky.social , do you know anything about this?
What if leaf + muppet + bug From overhead it looks like a leaf, but every other angle 100% muppet. This is a boxwood leaftier moth, found on my shower curtain, which is not made of boxwood. It's found in the eastern US, but the larvae feed on dead leaves from the genus Buxus... #InverteFest
I stupidly didn’t take a good picture the year I saw so many they looked like the beach was cobblestoned, but the eggs are SUPER cool. The whole sand changes color, there’s so many.
Horseshoe crabs have those too - the three medial eyes are much more light/dark and UV!
I’ve always been partial to the unusual ways to see - evolution has resulted in so very many ways to deal with light!
In addition to the big compound eyes there in the middle, where you’d think eyes would be, they have several more - a little pair just in back of the big ones, three(!) in the middle in front, and two underneath, near the mouth. They *also* have light-sensing structures down the telson (the tail).
For #invertefest, a spectacular specimen of one of my favorite invertebrates, the horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus. These blue-blooded marvels have some of the coolest compound eyes in nature, *and* they produce compounds in their blood used to test for the presence of gram-negative bacteria. 🧪
Horseshoe crabs are *absolutely* S-tier.
It *does* make it more plausible that the prof got accidentally needlestuck, though…. 🤣
This is all I want out of life: my book, my beach chair, my partner snoring beside me on the sand, the slow roll of the surf…
SAME. The sound, the scent, the lovely little things to poke at… all much superior.
Absolutely!
This will fix me.
There seem to be increasing numbers of people here that want to make Bluesky into Twitter, and I really hope that trend doesn’t continue. (I got my first spammer trying to sell me followers recently, but I nuke-blocked them and now they don’t exist for me.)
I was a Twitter early adopter too - at the time, I was actually freelancing as a tech writer - and Bluesky’s early culture of “be nice or fuck off” and the nuclear block really produced a radically different site.
I have *way* more followers here than I did on Twitter (a fact I admit I am not fully happy about) - but more importantly, the interactions here have been overwhelmingly more positive than they were on late-stage Twitter, even with heavy curation.
This story has it all: aquaculture, Black Flag, Bernie Sanders, Star Trek as policy, John Hodgman, male tears, and a candidate citing Luthen’s monologue from Andor. Meet Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman trying to crack the senate. @grahamformaine.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/1996...
I’m just making it from book preorder to book preorder these days.
Bone.
Trump take LEGO www.404media.co/lego-stops-s...
I wrote about how Hurricane Katrina helped spur pretty remarkable improvements in hurricane forecasts since 20 years ago and how current and planned budget cuts by the Trump administration to research could set us back.
BANANAPHONE
It’s not that I always have to be doing something, it’s that if I let my brain idle, it starts playing me twenty-year-old videos about magical liopleurodons.
Well, yeah - they’re trying, and they know just how much people *don’t* do the smart thing…
I haaaaate that I know you’re likely right.
And went riiiiiiight back to 0 as soon as they had half a chance.
I have this amazing mental image of tubing blooping its way into a cabinet like an inchworm now, with loops of diminishing size down its length.
I saw an article about a COVID-related school closure in Kansas (!), and one of the recommendations was “people should consider some pandemic-era precautions, like hand hygiene”. Oh my god, people, WASH YOUR FUCKING HANDS. That’s not a “pandemic precaution”; that’s just common fucking sense. 🤮
The maddening thing is that we know EXACTLY how to prevent this. Yes, kids should get vaccinated, test, stay home when sick, mask as much as possible. But even without any of that: Better ventilation and filtration in schools can MASSIVELY reduce viral spread, for all sorts of respiratory diseases.
LLMs have their uses, and can have incredible impacts when trained wisely and ethically, but they’re not “conscious” or “intelligent” or “alive” or any of those buzzwords the boosters would love to use.
I have spent a significant portion of my career picking apart the neural circuits that underlie even SIMPLE behaviors, and I tell you as an expert that we can’t even do that 100% of the time. Consciousness is not something we know how to convert into code.
I’d read that.
I sighed again. I was having a lot of opportunities to do it and I think I was getting good at it.
The current regional EPA head in charge of cleanup is Scott Mason, a former Oklahoma energy official who "was also an author of the Project 2025 plan that called for ending certain pollution regulations, toxic chemical clean-up programs, and research on the impact of pollution on human health."
We’re on our way to the cape and it’s fucking HAILING, ayFkm.
I have GOT to listen to that podcast.
I used to work adjacent to a lab whose actual research was in blowing stuff up on purpose. You’d hear the noise from down the hall, pause to make sure it wasn’t followed by shouting/screaming/bad noises, then carry on. Freaked the heck out of new people, though.
www.euronews.com/culture/2025...
NEW: The NIH just started requiring NIH-funded research to be made freely, immediately available. In response, some journals are forcing scientists to pay thousands in open-access fees to publish. The result: chaos. The fees, one scholar says, are “out of control.” www.chronicle.com/article/maki...
…the what now?
….I was that grad student. 🤷🏼♀️
“different colors of lab tape and people who prefer individual colors” I resemble this remark. (I have a System, okay? 🤣)
We mostly have those clear plastic sheet protectors taped to things, with the log sheets in them. They go in a binder eventually? I guess?
YOINK!
The Tubing AND The Cable, *very* high end!
*bleak stare*
Hahahah, the name tags. One of my favorite parts of getting a new instrument is always coming up with a new name in the theme.
This checks out. I’ve ordered a LOT of lab supplies for a LOT of labs and people, and *never* have I ordered tubing.
The TUBING. Unknown length, size, provenance, and previous use… can’t throw any of it out, might need it. Some of it has been pinched with an ancient clip so long that the tubing has fused to the clip.
Ledger wet. Pen missing. At least one entry appears to have been written in highlighter.
“Jernigan…said over the last several months he was asked to review & revise long-established findings about vaccine safety data at the behest of Lyn Redwood & David Geier, anti-vaccine activists who promote a debunked link with autism.” www.reuters.com/business/hea...
As a multipipette user, that hatred is *completely* justified.
- someone got tired of the timer and turned it off/put it somewhere else and now it’s war
Not to mention some kind of serious consequences for the saboteur, for breaking GFE if nothing else.
Yeah - that’s not a “forgive and forget” thing.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #academicsky
officially adding "public health civil servants" to the list of professions giving a good account of themselves under authoritarianism in the US www.msnbc.com/top-stories/...
I’ve only worked in one lab that regularly cleaned and rotated *all* their frozen reagents and samples, and as much of a drag as it was on some Friday afternoons, it was PARADISE.
IIRC, there was a season finale where some of them sabotaged the fourth guy’s NSF grant out of spite - and they were still all “haha, just quirky science friends” afterwards. Boggling.
