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...

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.

technologyreview.com

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...

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

brandeis.edu

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.”

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.org

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

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.

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.

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.

lpeproject.org

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...

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

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

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...

arxiv.org

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...

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

nytimes.com

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...

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

Defector@defector.com · 9mo ago

Why is this Great American Novelist's swan song stuffed with so much goofball nonsense? Because Thomas Pynchon is funny. defector.com/thomas-pynch...

Thomas Pynchon is laughing all the way to the brink:

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…

defector.com

Also contains lizard lassoing and Anole Annals

Defector@defector.com · 9mo ago

Fat AND sassy? A three-legged lizard really can have it all! defector.com/fat-and-sass...

has your scientific work been cut? @nytimes.com wants to hear from you. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

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

nytimes.com

I'm sad to report that Rainer (Rai) Weiss passed away yesterday at age 92. Rai developed the design for LIGO, he and Kip got it funded, trained countless researchers, and received the 2017 Nobel Prize. Rai always had time for students and treated us as equals. May his memory be a blessing

If you put the DOGE guys on a desert island where the only way out was to say the magic words “I’m not sure what the answer is, let me consult someone who has worked on this problem for a long time” they would all starve to death

Mary K Gaillard, a theorist who had a knack for telling experimental physicists where to look, died in her home on May 23 at 86. Dr. Gaillard was an unpaid scientist at CERN for more than a decade, & the first woman physicist hired & tenured at Berkeley: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/s...

Mary K. Gaillard, 86, Physicist Who Probed the Subatomic Universe, Dies

nytimes.com

"In the absence of strong and principled leadership from Columbia’s Board of Trustees and Acting President, it falls to the faculty, above all, to defend the values and norms that have defined the university and allowed it to flourish." academeblog.org/2025/07/29/a...

An Agreement That Settles Nothing

BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AAUP The Agreement between the federal government and Columbia University announced on July 24, 2025, has been presented as a settlement of Title VI violat…

academeblog.org

Inspiring! www.science.org/content/arti...

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’ Odd animals arose at least 12 separate times

Findings speak to the dramatic impact ants and termites can have on mammalian evolution

science.org

www.programmablemutter.com/p/this-simpl...

This Simple Chart Explains Why Columbia Caved To Trump

The Muppets Who Actually Run the University

programmablemutter.com

The cited cost of this putative center ranges from $500m to $1b. Meanwhile, over at Harvard’s School of Public Health, a $200m budget gap due to the Trump admin breaking hundreds of NIH and NSF research contracts has already produced hundreds of layoffs, including of TT faculty. Priorities.

The Wall Street Journal@wsj.com · last yr.

Exclusive: Harvard leaders have discussed creating a center for conservative scholarship as the school fights the Trump administration’s accusations that it is too liberal.