Eloquent Séance (Prof. David Skulltz) 💀

NEW: The DOGE operative who gutted USAID -- firing thousands of employees and canceling lifesaving programs -- never actually signed the paperwork that's legally required for him to be employed by the agency.

As Halloween is round the corner we thought we’d share some medieval skeletons. A thread… 🧵 💀

Eight digits after the decimal place?

Is that an ammonite in my mother's brain, or is she wearing Princess Leia's hairbuns? Can't tell. #AI

Also for what it is worth, it DIDN'T actually label them as illustrative — and the deception was only apparent because I know the data well. That's scary, because if you use AI for everything, you wouldn't know the data well enough to catch its deceptions.

Your monthly reminder that if you're using ChatGPT to do your science, you're failing your colleagues, community, and all of us. Here, ChatGPT makes up data and presents it as the real thing — then apologizes when confronted.

Kronick, D. A. (1990). Peer Review in 18th-Century Scientific Journalism. JAMA, 263(10), 1321. doi.org/10.1001/jama... #ICanHazPDF

Quite the cold-frontal passage at the Whitworth Observatory. whitworth.cas.manchester.ac.uk/live/whitwor... #StormBoelo

Likely the most important thing I've ever written — if you're an academic and the AI mania unsettles you, here's my best shot at presenting some intellectual tools that might help you articulate why. arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251

On Colossal Biosciences, it gets shadier: The original thoroughly deceptive hoopla when reporting 'de-extinction' of Dire Wolves was associated with a pre-print article to justify the science. What happened next? 1/x www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I was wondering how publishing meteorologists were dealing with the Gulf of Mexico/America thing. Eighteen so far in the AMS journals. journals.ametsoc.org/search?acces... Usage: Gulf of America Gulf of America/Gulf of Mexico (formerly Gulf of Mexico) (also known as the Gulf of Mexico)

This means that the increased price of RAM and consumer electronics was a result of an artificial "supply chain crisis" created by Jensen Huang pushing NVIDIA's customers to take early delivery of GPUs. Jensen Huang is responsible for making life worse for everyone.

When will this Labour Government stop tinkering? Thames Water is a busted flush. It's worthless. Cheer up the nation. Nationalise it now. Not a penny compensation. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Trump administration's cuts to next generation weather satellite program could set back forecasting by a decade, experts warn. Note the lack of the lightning mapper on the new GeoXO constellation... www.cnn.com/2026/10/19/w...

Springer Nature uses a combination of screening tools, AI-enabled approaches and expert human oversight to identify and assess unethical or fraudulent content, according to director of research integrity Chris Graf. www.medpagetoday.com/special-repo... AND THEN WE PUBLISH ANYWAYS LOL XD

Together with other scientists I’m suing the 🇺🇸 US National Institutes of Health for violating our 1st Amendment rights & censoring our health science. I’m ready to shine a light on the darkest days. Buckle up, read on. This gets pretty wild… THREAD

I am sorry, which company is this? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

This is the scariest thing I've seen this Halloween season.

Manchester's Art Treasures Exhibition in Old Trafford closed on this day 1857, one of the most impressive collections of art works ever assembled. More than 1.3 million visitors attended. The Hallé is a legacy: Charles Hallé formed an orchestra that performed there daily.

Brendan Larsen from Ngāmotu in Aotearoa and a member of the New Plymouth Astronomical Society took this stack over a couple of hours and estimates 14000 satellite trails. This is how bad it is now, it's set to get much much much worse - and then we lose Low […] [Original post on river.geek.nz]

No matter where you shop, you're getting screwed by Amazon. Amazon has found a way to make everything you buy - at Target, at a mom-and-pop shop, even direct from the manufacturer - more expensive. And they're not the only one: Expedia's done the same thing, but for hotel rooms.

For this Indigenous Peoples Day, your astonishing artifact is the earliest known Indigenous depiction of a European — a wood carving from Nunavut dated to 1350. 🧪🏺

A real-life example of "mind your p's and q's" from the meteorological literature. "An observer to the right of the path will perceive the passage of both lines of convergence, the steering line and From p. 6, Bjerknes, J., 1919: On the structure of moving cyclones. Geofys. Publ., 1 (2), 1–8.

I asked ChatGPT to create a cover for a course catalogue of a "university for people who have given up thinking due to AI over-reliance". To be fair, this is a pretty good take -- and more subtle than I expected... #aislop #criticalthinking #deskillling #chatGPT #philsky

Was reminded of this song from the Bush era. Still as powerful as then as now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfMM... genius.com/Chuck-brodsk...

I found Microsoft Outlook "autocorrecting" my hyphens to en dashes and em dashes. WTF? This is opening a new front in the war.

Four-byline alert: “.. Meta claimed that $4.1 billion of stock options exercised by Mr. Zuckerberg counted as a research expense ..” @nytimes.com $META www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/t...

I investigated whether Times Higher Education's commercial partnership with the Hungarian government has influenced its editorial decisions. Read @bylinetimes.bsky.social bylinetimes.com/2026/09/30/t...

Newcastle University has discovered a new model of sustainability Take an oil-and-gas fortune, add a 3500-acre private zoo & award it a professorship Academic credentials are an optional extra when the family fortune is large enough 😉 www.theguardian.com/education/20...

the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background

I do think you basically charge a few of them with the cybercrimes they're committing and the "alignment" problem does suddenly start to disappear.

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

Tornado forecasting had to start somewhere. In the 1880s, US Army Signal Corps meteorologist John Park Finley studied tornado patterns, built a network of observers and pioneered experimental tornado forecasts. Meet America’s first tornado forecaster: www.noaa.gov/heritage/sto... #NOAAHeritageWeek

Rediscovered this screenshot I took of a satellite image over Texas with a real Texas longhorn made of low clouds and fog. 1945 UTC 9 December 1999. #TXwx

Stand by for "Updates from the NSF Directorate for Geosciences" Webinar.... Where we find out more 'bout our Doom.

One way to look at this is that regents/boards that make the final decisions about universities are effectively political appointees or private moneyed interests determined to impose their ideological views on higher education. Attacking faculty governance is one way to do it.

NEW INVESTIGATION – this summer saw temperature records smashed around the UK. We asked NHS trusts in England and Wales how many operations they were forced to cancel due to overheating surgical theatres They provided details of 1,110 operations that were called off in the May and June heatwaves

NSF is consolidating its geoscience research grants into a new program, GEOcore and reducing annual grants to $110 million total in 200-350 awards. Typical was about $300 million in 1,200 awards. Not including institutional grants ($1.3 billion/yr) and those may be gone. www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

Wow. No sense of responsibility here.... OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has called for "extreme caution" over AI's runaway progress and warned more intervention may be needed to ensure "humans remain in control of the future". www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Yeah--this is a joke. A funny, funny joke. What are you going to do fundamental science on here? Ways to cheaply pump water over a mountain range out of another drought stressed basin?

🚨Update: Our analysis of global APC expenditure has now been expanded to cover more publishers (7 -> 14) and more years (2019-2025). We estimate $15B in APCs paid over seven years, $3.7B in 2025 alone. Elsevier crosses the $1B threshold by itself in 2025. arxiv.org/abs/2608.16322 #ScholComm

The honor I've been waiting for since January.

Source: @osint613 on X WILD FOOTAGE: Devastating flash floods have struck the China-Nepal border. Nepal reports at least 8-16 dead and hundreds missing, including 291 foreigners. Roads, power, and communications on the Chinese side were cut.

This article has way too few citations, people. Keller, D., and B. Vonnegut, 1976: Wind Speeds Required to Drive Straws and Splinters into Wood. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 15, 899–901, doi.org/10.1175/1520....

Note from my notebook (2017). Still true.

SCOOP: 404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it. What did we find? It ended up at an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. Yes. This is literally the logo outside the Amazon warehouse door. Read now: