The fact that, every time I configure a Mac, I have to uncheck a box which says "Natural scrolling" to get the trackpad to work properly. *My* scrolling direction – the default in the pre-smartphone era – is the one that's natural!

Sanjay Srivastava@sanjaysrivastava.com · 7d ago

What is an extremely nerdy/obscure/specific thing you hate with a white-hot wrath?

If this NP were any heavier, it would have its own gravitational field.

Alastair Coote@alastair.is · last wk.

Am I having a stroke

Just ordered a new Mac for work and was quoted a delivery window of mid-October to early November (12.5-14.5 weeks). Ouch!

For neuroscience PhDs with a strong interest in teaching and mentoring: MIT is hiring a scientific program manager to support activities around a new NIH neuroscience PhD training grant. Salary range $91k - $129k #NeuroJobs careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/cl...

Scientific Program Manager

MIT - Scientific Program Manager - Cambridge MA 02139

careers.peopleclick.com

Contrast this with Michael Crichton’s unrealistic and shabby shorthand for “scientific genius” in The Andromeda Strain, in which a Very Intelligent Scientist publishes a paper so important that it’s printed in both Science *and* Nature.

samuel mehr@mehr.nz · 2w ago

the most realistic scene in Jurassic Park is when two scientists make a questionable decision — traveling to an undisclosed location with a strange man — on the promise of three years of modest funding

Just discovered that one of the iPhone’s emoji suggestions for “duck” is 🤬. This cracks me up because Apple auto-corrects a certain swear word to “duck”. Did their model learn a co-occurrence relationship between “duck” and 🤬??

Not a visual illusion, but looking at the images in this thread makes me feel like my brain is glitching.

c0nc0rdance@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 2w ago

Twice a year, Hawai'i experiences a strange moment where the sun appears to be exactly overhead & anything that is completely vertical casts no shadow. Let's learn about Lāhainā Noon, subsolar points & 'Kau ka lā i ka lolo', meaning "the sun rests on the brains."

Currently reading "The Score" by @add-hawk.bsky.social, a book about (many topics including) how we are prone to internalizing and pursuing goals based on metrics that are easy to measure. I'm only 1/3 of the way through the book, but I am already seeing this everywhere. 3 examples from *today*:

Back in my happy place. San Diego never gets old.

Jessica (@cantlonlab.bsky.social) lost her funding because she dared to include gender as a relevant variable in studying how people learn math. Only the enemies of truth seek to suppress the search for it. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/c...

She Studied Ways to Make People Smarter. Then Her Grant Was Cut. (Gift Article)

Jessica Cantlon had a grant with the U.S. Navy to explore whether people could improve spatial problem-solving skills through training. Then the program was cut.

nytimes.com

Do you know a motivated postbac looking for a RA position before grad school? They should apply to our job posting at Yale! Under Nicole Landi, they would join a team doing semiannual behavioral + EEG testing in schools to understand neurobiological bases of dyslexia. tinyurl.com/landilab2026

Bad: Seeing one’s research miscited by other scientists Much worse: Seeing one’s research cited as evidence for extraterrestrial life on the History Channel

Simon Fisher@profsimonfisher.bsky.social · last mo.

25 years ago, we implicated rare variants of the FOXP2 gene in a severe speech disorder. I’ve spent much time stressing that FOXP2, while interesting, is not the mythical “gene for language”. Weirdly, on occasion I also need to explain why it’s not “proof of aliens”. Full disclosure in this 🧵. 1/n 🧪

A nice demonstration of how controlling for predictors affects results, and why that is not always desirable. As I tell students: Before you even begin to interpret the answers you get from a model, make sure you’re asking the right questions!

Kristoffer Magnusson@rpsychologist.com · last mo.

New interactive blog! "Why Adjusted Regression Coefficients Are Less Descriptive Than They Look" rpsychologist.com/descriptive-...

One of the most interesting and unique job positions I’ve ever seen. A librarian/park ranger job (‽‽), with full-time hours and pay; duties (event programming) would be performed primarily in a field that currently has no structures apart from a bathroom. Must be comfortable with forests and ticks.

Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Metro NY Library Council is hiring a Library Field Ranger for our Library Field experimental outdoor library in Westchester County!

I never remember whether the {ggplot} parameter is "group" or "grouping". Is #AccidentalArt still a thing? #rstats

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

This is a very helpful resource from the former EiC of Science: a template for commenting on the proposed changes to OMB regulations that threaten the continued existence of US Science.

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Several people have asked for possible content and structure for comments regarding the proposed OMB regulations. With some suggestions from others, I have posted on example (as a Word document) for downloading). jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g... I hope this is helpful.

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

elizabethginexi.bsky.social@elizabethginexi.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

Can we add this as a cash advance/reimbursement option to Workday?

To explain this for my non-science followers. Such a proposal would be to create a black box around review of scientific proposals - this reduction in transparency is what you would do if you wanted to make political or partisan decisions about funding and not scientific ones

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I heard from several sources yesterday that NIH is planning to release a Request for Information (RFI) that apparently will include this: Scores and percentiles for NIH grant applications will not be shared with applicants although they will be provided to NIH program officers and staff. 1/3

Academia has its problems, but it’s also a place where I can send a collaborator a long email with questions about how to deal with collinearity in a set of statistical models, and receive a thoughtful reply that begins with “This is a very interesting topic” and know they actually mean it.

NEW: They Got the Best NIH Scores of Their Careers. A Year Later, They Still Don’t Have Funding. As the NIH bankrolls new research at a significantly slower-than-usual pace, I talked to scientists left in the lurch about the toll on their research and careers: www.chronicle.com/article/they...

They Got the Best NIH Scores of Their Careers. A Year Later, They Still Don’t Have Funding.

The NIH’s spending on new medical research is significantly slower than in previous years, leaving confused scientists in the lurch.

chronicle.com

The Supreme Court handed down a decision today concerning a convicted murderer who "introduced evidence of intellectual disability" by submitting multiple IQ scores close to a threshold below which courts have said it would be "cruel and unusual punishment" to execute them.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Wow, the Supreme Court's third and final decision is Hamm v. Smith, a case about the execution of mentally disabled people—but the court simply dismisses it as improvidently granted. Thomas and Alito dissent. Count this as a win—the 8th Amendment survives. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

the academic bargain has been this: you sacrifice $100k+ of lost income & savings to go to grad school to get a TT job making less than an avg. middle manager, if you're VERY lucky, but to counterbalance that you get job security forever. w\o that last part the ROI on academic labor makes no sense.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 3mo ago

In evaluating faculty appointments based on “return on investment,” the people running UNC-Chapel Hill (and let’s be honest most universities) show that they don’t understand the purpose of the university www.theassemblync.com/news/educati...

Friends don’t let friends use Teams. Every time I click on a Teams meeting link, my calendar misparses the password and I join several minutes late because I have to hunt around for it in the 2,000-character Notes field. If someone schedules a 1:1 Teams meeting with me, I make it a Zoom meeting.

Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 3mo ago

someone scheduled a teams meeting with me. i've never done this before. just hoping it's just a link i click. i've never seen an app that's more cryptic. yesterday during a meeting where i had to retrieve some files from teams, my laptop started ringing. it was a student calling me via teams wtaf?!!

One of the greatest headlines I've seen, courtesy of today's NYT.

Reviewing a resubmitted manuscript that puts me in mind of the old Mencken quote about democracy. A modest reformulation: "Peer review is the theory that readers know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

“The replication crisis, if there is one, cannot be established by the methods used to declare it.” Really interesting, thought-provoking stuff. (And the callback in the paper title is perfect).

Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 3mo ago

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

Me, to my RAs: “Before you run an experiment, it’s important to sit through the tasks yourself so you know what participants are going through.” A participant, giving me unsolicited feedback during an EEG task: “I should use this to put myself to sleep at night.” (Guess I didn’t actually know…!)

Years ago, I bought a cloud backup subscription (Backblaze) for several family members. About once a year, I get a panicked phone call – "I overwrote a file"; "Our hard drive died". Telling them they have a current backup and we can restore any/all of their files is the best feeling in the world.