Bird account

A thread of structural biology figures I've slowly been collecting 🧶

So we all agree that all this "AI is going to kill us all, we must slow the pace!" stuff coming from Altman/Musk/Amodei is just their way of lobbying for the ban open source LLMs, right?

Logan Roy explaining Brownian motion

There's this cute doublespeak race realists do where, on one hand, universities must be the most ELITE MERITOCRACY (so no Blacks!). But when their favourite phrenologist gets suspended for being bad at their job, suddenly it's all "universities should be an adult kindergarten for free expression"

Me, a US-based academic: I don’t care what any scholar believes, we all need to stand up publicly whenever someone’s academic freedom is threatened Me, continuing: also, the first time this has happened, motivating me to sign my first ever open letter, is in late 2026, to a race scientist, in Ghent

Here is the full suspension letter from UGent that was sent to Nathan Cofnas, it shows ample reason for his suspension and potential termination. Including breach of contract, using the University of Ghent’s name and legitimacy to promote his racial supremacist views and causing reputational damage.

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

Been seeing quite a lot of AI generated infographics recently, and they all have the aesthetic of labels you see printed on tubs of protein powder

Everyone is talking about some "cool" new Linux distro that you've got to try called Omarchy. Look inside: it's 6GB (enormous for an Arch-based distro)... it's all slop coded... and the creator is some kind of Nazi... Why do tech bros have no taste?

If you're a biologist, especially one in a field that has a history of eugenics and racism (which absolutely includes my own field of evolutionary biology) and you choose to remain "neutral" as race science once again crawls out from under its rock, you are not in fact neutral.

Finally watched 'Backrooms' and I can say it was pretty good and I enjoyed it. In a different timeline Fisher would've written a banger blog post about

RIP Mark Fisher, you probably would've loved 'Backrooms' (2026) (I don't know, haven't seen it yet)

Marcus Feldman and Jessica Riskin review 'The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture' by Dalton Conley. www.nybooks.com/articles/202... (it's a scathing critique)

Jorge Luis Borges did the "tears in rain" spiel before Blade Runner did

Rainbow lorikeets got published in Science. Big congrats to all rainbow lorikeets and bird lovers in general www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

"[Edge's] male members were preaching master-race ideology. Citing their work, Brockman predicted in 2005 that the “dangerous idea of the next decade” would be that “groups of people differ genetically in their average talents”." www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...

There are so many fucked up things with the current administration that it's hard to focus on one but this recent move is basically a death sentence for the planet. I've been involved with more boots on the ground actions over the years than I can count and this really bums me out.

A story of how science should work: an issue with methodology is picked up in this paper, authors agree they made a mistake and retract: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Meanwhile, many papers using Richard Lynn's fraudulent National IQ data are still unretracted www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/r...

More Invisible Cities (my comfort book)

Steven Pinker in 2019: “I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time. And no, I was not paid for the letter" www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete... Epstein files: [shows Pinker was paid $10,000 for the letter] www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Still processing how so many of the worst happenings of the past 15+ years -- the resurgence of Nazism + race pseudoscience, the anti-feminist culture war bullshit, crypto, the Uber-fication of the economy, etc. -- can all be traced back to Epstein and his rapist pals

It's also one of the world's most famous scientists sending up the balloon to his fellow powerful men that a young woman with no institutional affiliation or financial clout dared to speak out about their raping habits. *She* is organising a conspiracy; *he* is merely giving a friend the heads-up.