Chris Miller

Always love seeing more educational content on a topic that helped launch my academic career!

When I read dystopian scifi, it was always a superintelligent villain taking over. What's shocking about our current dystopia is how stupid and inept the architects are. This wasn't a masterful plot to fleece the public. It was just willingness to tap into the cruelty and fear that was already there

Candy corn mixed with peanuts at an approximately 1:4 ratio is basically a PayDay bar. It is also the only acceptable way to eat candy corn.

The first two dozen of these are pretty darn good as a set of guiding principles for an academic scientist (whether tenure-track or not)

A cri de cœur from a emeritus professor of biochemistry at Yale. inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-re...

From a discussion of updating a department website...

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

Is there a sequence data repository that will accept ONT POD5 files? We've shared the bams from our study in dbGaP, and would like to do the same for raw data. It's easy for me to imagine that folks working on things like base modifications might want to dig into that data in the future.

Here's hoping! We've put too much effort into creating rich supplementary files for them to sit hidden forever. (There's a whole other conversation about what 100+ page supplements mean, in terms of the sky-high benchmark for a publishable unit, but we'll save that for another thread!)

Curious if there's a nimble manufacturing partner who could make personalized mRNA for 20-50 patients in a ph1 oncology trial, ideally for <$100k/pt & in <=2 months each. If you can encapsulate in LNPs, even better (otherwise we'll do it) (seems good to check more before building everything at UNC)

"What really bothers me about these stories about how AI will design killer viruses is that they are pure fear mongering, and more importantly they divert attention from the things that matter". Indeed 🎯.

I am delighted to announce that The Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah is continuing a multi-year recruiting initiative for multiple tenure-track faculty positions at the rank of Assistant Professor. Please share and consider applying! utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/208...

I really need to get one of the sandbox wrappers set up. I've noticed an uptick in Claude reaching outside the working directory too, and it makes me increasingly uncomfortable. Would love suggestions from anyone who's happy with their sandboxing strategy.

Extremely cool. Some Scientists Have ‘Magic Hands’ in the Lab. This A.I. Is Learning Why: www.nytimes.com/2026/08/27/s...

While backpacking in Colorado, a buckle broke on my nearly 30 year-old Kelty pack. Contacted them to ask about buying a replacement, and they're shipping out a part for free. That's pretty great customer service! Here's hoping I get another 30 years out of this pack!

We've been banging this drum for 20 years. Will the need to feed the gaping maw of AI change funding priorities?

The Turner Lab at WashU is looking for a postdoc to work on chromosome 9p deletion and duplication syndromes. Feel free to share with anyone who might be interested: wustl.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern... #9p #genetics

Thoughts on the various Trump administration proposals to revamp US science funding - and what they all have in common:

Application portal is open for travel and registration scholarships from the @jxtxfoundation.bsky.social to the CSHL Biological Data Science conference. Applications are due by Aug 5 #cshldata26 #methodsmatter Apply here: jxtxfoundation.org/news/2026-06... Learn more: bit.ly/cshl-biodata26

I've noticed that without the very basics, higher level R becomes sorcery: yelling incantations to the machine and trying to get it right.

I pushed a package to bioconda 2 weeks ago and it's still waiting for review. Anyone here a maintainer that could help get it unstuck? github.com/bioconda/bio... (We have a paper in review that mentions an option for bioconda install - would like to make that aspirational sentence reality!)

Like I said in Scientific American last month, this is the military-industrial, for-profit approach to research funding. It presupposes an ability to guess at (and fund) successful research, and most scholarship on it says it generates neither new knowledge *nor* higher productivity.

Hi everyone! I'm excited to announce that our lab at UW will soon be recruiting a postdoc to work on DNA methylation signatures in rare disease. This will be a mostly computational position. Please share and reach out if interested! millerlaboratory.com

It‘s just insane to me that a sitting president has made MORE THAN A BILLION DOLLARS peddling fucking fairy dust with no intrinsic value beyond his stature and power AS president, and it’s not treated as the biggest corruption scandal in American history.

tired of the "#1 dad" nonsense. if you're a dad, stop treating it like a joke and post your actual national dad ranking. i'm # 492,018, which is actually really high up there, but more importantly it lets me enter ranked dad lobbies where i can get matched up for fistfights with dads of my caliber

“A single Tomahawk cruise missile runs about $3.6 million, roughly what it takes to fund one scientist’s multiyear grant. The entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...

Minibwa is a hybrid of bwa-mem and minimap2 and the successor of bwa-mem for short-read mapping. ~4X/2.5X as fast as bwa-mem/bwa-mem2 for WGS reads at comparable accuracy. Native support of directional bisulfite-seq. Applicable to long reads. Preprint at arxiv.org/abs/2606.15357

Someone help me with time management please my family is starving * 40 hours working * 20 hours cooking and cleaning * 10 hours childcare * 30 hours email * 50 hours 2-factor authentication

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

Pleased to see our preprint on expanding the transcriptome of AML go live. Includes splicing factor-mutants, healthy BM populations, and 170k+ new transcripts Explore the long-read data here: leylab.org/isoforms Look up your favorite gene, and see which transcripts are actually being expressed!

This would constitute one of the most brazen, most appalling acts of corruption in U.S. history. I know we’re numb to all of this but this is a seven-alarm fire. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/b...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but to have any hope of creating a "Virtual Cell", we'd have to have the foggiest idea what the hell was happening in the real ones first

Future researchers will never be able to determine which commit messages I wrote and which were written by Claude

For me, it was the fact that I misred and misunderstood this ad...

scRNA-seq has partly ruined murmurations for me...