Shan Kothari

If you thought Ben Lamm was a shithead, you underestimated him. He's worse. Genetically engineering any creatures, but dogs especially, to be weapons of war — it's unspeakable. www.forbes.com/sites/amyfel...

Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, a consultant class is raiding the Democratic Party and getting “generationally wealthy” along the way New from me and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

New approach. Here i take the # of votes remaining by each voting method (elxn day, advanced, mail-in, mobile) and used their % Yes share from votes cast to get a projected outcome. Because so many mail-in ballots are remaining and their %Yes is low, this flips Q6-9 to No and tightens Q1-5.

It looks like Danielle Smith gambled and (in the short term, at least) won. I have two main takeaways from that: 1) I don't appreciate that she gambled with our future for such high stakes. She didn't have to (except for her own political interests), and dodging the biggest bullet (for now)...

This finally out in www.internationaloaksociety.org society journal... message me if you want a pdf and aren't a member of International Oak Society (which you should be! It's one of the best societies ever!!!).

and once again it's up to Edmonton to save this province from itself...

For over a century, #HeatTolerance has been described by temperature thresholds that don’t reflect real-world heat regimes and vary with assay duration, or by temperature-time curves that don't consider causal mechanisms. New paper with @nicolebison.bsky.social changes this! tinyurl.com/5625y8sc 🧵

Devastating news for “what about Sudan” posters as Israel makes it state policy that they “consider friendly” the RSF

IMPORTANT!!! This is a PSA to check the status of your mail-in ballot!! If it has not been marked as “received and voted” then go vote in person tomorrow, you can find your nearest polling station at vote.albertandp.ca

New from me in the Edmonton Journal: All Edmontonians will pay the price for Smith's repeal of the zoning bylaw edmontonjournal.com/opinion/colu... #yeg #yegcc #yimby

We're once again soliciting nominations for @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social's Bazzaz-Pickett Award for mid/late-career scientists who've advanced diversity, inclusion, and belonging through their mentorship. Nominations due Nov 19. More info here! esa.org/about/awards/

We're once again soliciting nominations for @ecologicalsociety.bsky.social's Bazzaz-Pickett Award for mid/late-career scientists who've advanced diversity, inclusion, and belonging through their mentorship. Nominations due Nov 19. More info here! esa.org/about/awards/

"The rule of law is under vicious attack in this province and I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to call this out. When an institution is silent in the face of what is happening in this province, that silence is complicity." Another resignation at the Law Society.

I expect disagreements in politics, but what’s frustrating is seeing the Province continue to share blatantly false information when the City has already provided the facts. This morning, I sat down with Ryan Jespersen to address these claims directly. @ryanjespersen.bsky.social

amen @doniveson.bsky.social

I liked when danielle talked about eight-plexes with two units and eight-plexes with ten units, really good stuff

Alberta’s UCP government — also known for randomly turning into a semi-separatist party — is crushing and stomping on what was easily the most exciting city in Canada for housing reform.

Hey. Let me know when the Alberta NDP put out a statement forcefully defending Edmonton’s autonomy over zoning and speaking up for housing-friendly policy. Haven’t see it yet. @albertandp.ca ?

🌳We are hiring a PhD student in Forest Ecophysiology and Remote Sensing at EPFL and WSL in Lausanne! @vallicrosah.bsky.social @wslresearch.bsky.social Start: April-May 27 Applications: Open until filled careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...

In this week’s opinion column, Senator Paula Simons writes about anti-separation Albertans who genuinely believe the best form of protest is to boycott the referendum. While she understands their motives, she warns that staying home will backfire. #ableg #canpoli forwardweekly.ca/simons-cant-...

I keep meeting smart informed Albertans who tell me they do not intend to vote, because they don’t want to legitimize the process, or because they know the premier is not bound by the results. But what if making us give up on voting is the whole point? My argument to vote - no matter the absurdity.

The current state of Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta. On Alumni Weekend. Behind it sits a Memorial Organ honoring the lives of 238 dead Canadian soldiers. Soon it will be dismantled and placed in crates, its future unknown. How soon we forget.

‪ 🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪

This is one of the most core war crimes available.

#Diversity affects #microclimate #temperature and humidity: an overview of the evidence and major unanswered questions #TansleyInsight by Alexandra J. Wright, J. English, and C. Guimaraes-Steinicke 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Good news everyone! You can now analyze your own posts for semantic novelty from the famous Sichu post, ‘analyze the semantic novelty’ mino.mobi/novelty The consequences of my most offbrand post wondering how to relate to people are left to the reader for evaluation

Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan. darksky.org/news/two-sat...

The phrase “preemptive strike” is as insulting as when we were sold “humanitarian pauses” in the middle of a live-streamed genocide. The powerful looking you straight in the face and telling you your common sense simply doesn’t matter.

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

They were going to pass rules to phase out gas stoves, until they received 20,000 public comments against the regulations. Except, oops, it turns out the comments were generated by AI.

ecology and evolution folks! what are your favorite recent-ish, accessible papers on trait evolution?

AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.

LLMs make statistical metascience easier. LLMs don't increase the validity of statistical metascience. www.argmin.net/p/devezers-urn

NEW POST: Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/danielle-s...

None of Smith's referendum questions are likely to result in actual policy change. Because they require constitutional amendments (federal veto) or are plainly unconstitutional. Assuming "yes" votes carry, what then? Kenney's equalization referendum didn't soothe separatists. It emboldened them.

Smith kicked off the sovereignty referendum campaign tonight. The fight for the future of Alberta starts now.

friends don't let friends use X

A lot of AI rollouts assume that humans or other AIs won't interact adversarially with the product, when "any system deployed in the real world with real stakes will eventually get attacked" is one of the few real constants in life

More from the University of Alberta today. Faculty & students are fighting back against repeated capitulations of senior administrators to blackmail and threats from the UCP government. Read this powerful statement from the Indigenous Graduate Students Association. www.facebook.com/share/p/1EPk...

Let me explain why I think these are interesting to look at. There are two dominant perspectives on LLMs: Boosters and Haters. They are both wrong. Boosterism says this kind of thing is of the past and simply doesn’t happen if you’re using the latest SOTA model on super smart mode. That’s wrong.

and people say Alberta has no culture!

Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

"... the trees are innumerable / Marumbi, taraṭī, and hivara / hiṅgaṇa, pācunda, and bābara / ṭākaḷī, and vehaṅkaḷī are abundant... Such is this thorny forest / it is highly frightening / this forest is empty / peacocks scream here" besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

obviously I would prefer that my employer not be defunded, but reading someone say "show some courage, would you please?" to Bill Flanagan is cathartic

Not long before seeing this tweet, I asked Gemini 3 (thinking) whether Hausfather & Peters (2020)'s argument was widely accepted or contested. It said the former, citing (among other sources) the American Enterprise Institute. This sort of thing is imo much more of a danger than "hallucination"