Very much relate to this.

Hadas Weiss@hadas.bsky.social · 2d ago

nothing makes you question your beliefs more than seeing those who share them

Want to learn more about the women of the Odyssey? This is where to start! From ancient epics to Buffy and Beyoncé, meet the women of Greek myth and discover how their stories have been shaped over time. Pandora’s Jar is 99p on Kindle.

Programming tip: never type out a 10-character command when you could instead press the up arrow for 5 minutes until you find that command in your history

There's a real risk the loony vote will be split in this election.

Tan G.@tangandhara.bsky.social · 2w ago

Under the rules of the Electoral Commission, broadcasters who report on an election in a constituency have to also broadcast the names of all the candidates. I’ve picked out some lesser known candidates who Farage will face (other than @countbinface.bsky.social)

Under a Binface government, anyone who doesn’t accept human-made climate change as fact will be sent back to school, from Year 1 right the way to A Levels, to see if anything goes in the second time round. #VoteBinface

U.S. science is once again subject to a basic confusion between the *observation* of how values shape science versus the *improper influence* of values on science. Federal grant agencies have banned research mentioning gender, equity, and many other politicized topics... 1/ #philsci #scicomm 🧪

Awareness of Our Biases Is Essential to Good Science

Ideological, social and political values have always influenced research

scientificamerican.com

No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be. "The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money."

With the climate change emergency gathering pace, the only thing history will remember about this moment is our failure to avert, mitigate and prepare. Future historians, if they exist, are likely to care about little else.

James Ball@jamesrball.com · 3w ago

Contrary to whst the 20 remaining ultras on here think: no, history will not remember Keir Starmer's premiership kindly. The best he can hope for – and the likeliest outcome by far – is that history will barely remember his premiership at all.

The curse of underfunded academic research has struck again - my position has been made redundant. Hit me up if you are looking for a passionate and enthusiastic biostatistician.

I’ve met Binface, broken bread with him, and though his views on Christopher Nolan films are wrong, he is a good man and would have my vote if I lived in Clacton.

Scientists, especially younger ones, are going to have to come to terms with the idea that “doing science” is no longer enough. We all have to fight for science: what it means, what are its values, and why it matters.

Bethany Brookshire@beebrookshire.bsky.social · last mo.

Scientific research in the United States might not collapse with a bang, or with a whimper, but with a rule change. And it's not just Science. This rule change hits DOE, DOT, VA, HUD. ALL federal grants are at risk. www.theverge.com/science/9576...

This probably applies to scientific papers as well.

Tom Cox@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · last mo.

Note from my notebook (2017). Still true.

Ok, so please stop using false-discovery rate corrections in social science papers as though it's some new Boneferroni. a) It doesn't make sense, especially when you have a couple of unrelated outcomes on different scales with different power. b) You're misinterpreting the q-values.

“Scientists should stop trying to be neutral and instead embrace their values,”says a group of top climate scientists, including @katharinehayhoe.com. The neutrality myth is harming the reputation of science right when we need it most.” #ClimateCrisis Science isn’t neutral. It’s science.

Prominent climate scientist argues it's time to ditch the 'myth of neutrality' | CBC Radio

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe talks to Bob McDonald about the polarization of science and why she thinks scientists should stop pretending to be neutral when it's our planet at risk.

cbc.ca

UK politics and #rstats visualizations. This is brilliant.

Peter Ellis@freerangestats.info · last mo.

Like many people I am interested in the rate of UK prime ministerial churn, so I wrote an #rstats blog on it and experimenting with various visualisation approaches. I quite like this Gantt-like chart showing the terms of all PMs since 1721. freerangestats.info/blog/2026/06...

This. Alas, I've double checked everything I'm going to say in the literature. Don't you want to hear about it?

Peter Tennant@pwgtennant.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I HATE CITATION LIMITS! I do not understand why scientists should be forced to choose which statements to soften or leave unsupported in order to meet antiquated rules based on reducing physical pages!

What is up with #copilot in outlook sitting in the cursor on every line!? Begging me to press Alt+i. I already write short concise emails! What could #copilot do but waste my time? Even not using it, it's distracting me. Stupidest thing.

One of the good things about the AI co-scientist brouhaha is that it makes us discuss what science *is*, and how to measure its value, impact, quality. — Questions that have been there all along, but many preferred to gloss over.

Data Management Wisdom

Social media platforms and how academics use them change, but one thing doesn't

Excited to share that my 2025 collection of science-inspired drawings is now live on the Protein Data Bank (PDB) website. Thank you @rcsbpdb.bsky.social! It is free to explore and download. I’d love to hear what you think! pdb101.rcsb.org/sci-art/bezs...

PDB101: Irina Bezsonova Gallery

PDB-101: Training, Outreach, and Education portal of RCSB PDB

pdb101.rcsb.org

I always imagined that papers would become quicker to write as I got more experienced with research, but the opposite has happened instead because now I better understand how papers can be improved and spend much more time tweaking and rewriting

AI is pushing a crisis of meaning. What makes graduation meaningful? Sitting in a robe and a silly hat and waiting your turn to get a piece of paper? Or participating in a ritual that signals your membership into a new kind of person? Too bad so many unis shut down anthropology departments.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 4mo ago

“It really sunk in how wild this decision was… There is such a distinct human factor to having somebody who knows you and contributed to your education say your name while you walk.”

The shared excitement over NASA’s recent mission compared to the general indifference to SpaceX missions speaks to the power of something seen as the product of communal human effort rather than just the ego and avarice of one obnoxious dork.

The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.

M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray.bsky.social · 4mo ago

What's something that experts/practitioners in your field universally agree upon, but that remains a "hot take" among the general public?

Very much this. My personal process with #proteomics data is gnu-make with comand line tools to get the data as far as #R, then quarto documents to describe reproducable analysis and figure generation.

Darren Dahly@statsepi.bsky.social · 4mo ago

As I progressed (hopefully) from data novice to data competent, one of the most impactful practices I adopted was to never* rely on saved intermediate datasets (etc) in my workflow. All projects are designed so that ["raw" data -> analysis data -> analysis] is 100% reproduced in every session.

First I've heard of this. Really interesting for bioinformatics actually. Little R code wigets to turn one table into another could be very useful.

Posit@posit.co · 5mo ago

Announcing Rapp 0.3.0: Turn your #RStats scripts into polished command-line tools. 🛠️ 💻 Rapp turns R scripts into polished command-line tools. New in 0.3.0: R expressions for CLI options & switches, support for switch() blocks, help menu from comments. Read more: tidyverse.org/blog/2026/02...

So, BlueSky, one of my passions is the study of tea in WW2. I need you to watch this oral history from three ex-tea ladies from the Bermondsey WVS. Because you could guess for ONE THOUSAND YEARS and you would not guess where it is going... #skystorians #history #tea

"How could this not be your life goal to work on? To reduce how awful maladies, and the awful solutions to those maladies, are? What else is there really? Better prediction markets? What are we talking about?"

Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn't you?

1.9k words, 9 minutes reading time

owlposting.com