That look you make when you avoid being eaten by a Barred Owl only to be captured by an unidentified bipedal mammal.
Auriel Fournier
@rallidaerule.bsky.social
Forbes Bio Station Director Wetland Bird/Waterfowl @ Illinois Natural Hist Survey Posts do not represent my employer President @wilsonornithsoc.bsky.social Gardening she/her aurielfournier.github.io forbes-bio-station.inhs.illinois.edu
To the person noting there is not enough money in the world to license every piece of intellectual property stolen for "AI" training: you're sooooo close to the point, friend, keep going, you'll get there if you try
In the last couple of years, we've seen multiple critical collections (museums, herbaria) close. The IUCN--the global authority on the status of biodiversity--recently published on how important these kinds of facilities are in conservation. Every day, the dead are working to protect the living.
From collections to conservation: the indispensable role of natural history museums
The IUCN Species Survival Commission has published a Position Statement on the vital role of biological collections in biodiversity conservation: a formal acknowledgement that natural history museums,...
iucn.org
The Pope reminds me of a version of Catholicism I knew growing up as a young man attending anti-war and anti-death penalty protests, where I met elderly Catholics who shared their version of faith with me. I learned that Catholicism was about love and mercy for the weak, the condemned, and the poor.
Christopher Hale@christopherjhale.bsky.social · 2w agoPope Leo XIV celebrated Mass with an estimated 800,000 people in Paris on Saturday, after spending the morning with migrants, the poor, and adults newly entering the Catholic Church. “For Christians,” he added, “the poor are not a sociological category, but the very ‘flesh’ of Christ.”
In my field there has been an uptick in ai article submissions (not at the huge individual level like this), it strains labor and timeline b/c editors have to manage the first level review before anything goes to peer review. Editors are def collectively working on best practices around this…
It appears that chatGPT has decided to make a lot of academic CVs very, very hard to read. I don't need status bars and gamifications on your resumes!
Still patiently waiting to be "left behind" by AI rather than it chasing me across every damn space like a slasher in a low budget flick.
IMO, the solution should not be to browbeat people into an old standard, but rather allow people to wear whatever they want. If someone can wear ducky pajamas in public, you can wear tailoring in any cut, color, and material. As options open up, dress can then be a source of pleasure.
BIRD FRIENDS! I need someone who knows Malta and its birds. I am pulling my hair out looking for a reviewer (I think I've tried about a dozen). If that's you (not "someone I know" please), make yourself known! #ornithology
Here's the official announcement of Parton's passing from her reps, along with the request that in lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library at www.imaginationlibrary.com
Alex Zalben@azalben.bsky.social · 2mo agoDolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com
Remember that if you got the Moderna Covid vaccine, you have Dolly Parton to thank, she gave the largest individual contribution toward their research to make it possible.
The best of us. Much love to everyone who loved her - which means everyone. May each of us try to do a fraction of the good she chose to do for her neighbors everywhere.
People Magazine @people.com · 2mo ago🔗: bit.ly/4qC1fWV Legendary singer-songwriter and country music icon Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80. Her nephew revealed the news in a Aug. 25 Instagram video. 📷: Getty
it is really important to be loud about this stuff because it's typically kept very quiet to enable people to go "See? Nothing happened, it was just people being dramatic"
🌈Wally ~ Meditating in her Cave🌈@wallyaurora.bsky.social · 4mo agooh yeah, in terms of good news- I haven't seen anyone talking about this??? In short- worst case scenario of 4C warming by 2100 is no longer possible, new worst-case is 2.8C now DOES NOT MEAN we just relax- the only way we got here is through hard work- but it means THE HARD WORK IS WORKING
One bean to rule them all One bean to find them One bean to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
my main issue with ai is that i would personally see a larger ROI if those trillions of dollars were spent on healthcare or public transit or schools or road repairs or SNAP or free childcare or free school lunches or EV charging stations or public libraries or housing or clean energy or broadband
seeing "ChatGPT/Claude/Anthropic would make your life better if you tried it in good faith" takes yes, I could do some things *faster* I'm sure but I'm more interested in the *process* of learning to do it myself (building skills!), knowing the biases of information production, and the environment
Do we have a "made without genAI" badge or digital sticker that science communicators and artists can use so people know that our work is for humans by humans?
Things I and friends have done to calm an angry abusive man from further escalating and killing us or our children: -Smiled -Kept normal schedules in order not to trigger a fight -Appeased with kind acts (cooking, cleaning, favors) -Forced friendly tones and words
The Bulwark@thebulwark.com · 2mo agoRep. Max Miller: "My former wife has claimed that during a custody exchange at my home that day, I assaulted her…If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?"
If this is what happens to a scientific field as a whole when LLMs dominate the workflows of researchers, I can only imagine that the outlook is even worse for any individual researcher who is soldiering on without using them. 😞
Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3mo ago13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.
To put it in a way that may get at people's slowness to realize or reluctance to accept this: the past was not simpler than the present in any general sense, nor were people in the past less complex. They did not all think similarly. Assuming otherwise is not historical thinking, merely nostalgia.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 2mo agoone tendency that comes out about period films is the insistence that XYZ moral thought would not have occurred to anyone in the ancient world. to be sure there are moral innovations and changes but the existence of thorough dissatisfaction with the present moral order is not a modern phenomenon
Somewhere a university academic is being told to "do more with less" by someone whose job title didn't exist two reorgs ago.
Reminder: When fires ravaged southern California, Canada sent firefighting crews to help battle the blazes.
MeidasTouch@meidastouch.com · 3mo agoTrump says he is going to increase tariffs on Canada due to the wildfires
“What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years. That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”
Canada’s Forests Will Burn and Burn
Once a wildfire starts, it can spread to an area too massive to control.
theatlantic.com