pmags

Useful graphics in this NY Times article on the numbers and geography of the outbreak:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/well/us-measles-record-ou...

Your comment suggests that you fundamentally misunderstand the process of scientific discovery and innovation, how the American scientific ecosystem works, or how the economic and technological return on scientific investment has helped to propel the US for the last 70 years.

If you have any doubts that Trump 2.0 will destroy the American scientific workforce for years to come, this summary of cuts at NSF makes the case very strongly.

Engineering: -57%

Math, Physics, Chemistry: -67%

STEM Education: -80%

... and the list goes on...

I already had "deny access to life saving medicines and public health improvements" on my Trump 2.0 bingo card.

What do I win besides greater probability of serious viral infection?

This is a real and important challenge, which is even further exacerbated if you work on microbial organisms. I can easily think of a half dozen times in my own research where we tracked down differences in phenotype between ostensibly isogenic strains from different labs that turned out to be the result of in lab evolution.

See also:

"World Health Organization scales back work after funding cuts"

• https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

You mean like this?

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/politics/trump-sharpie-hurric...

The US government is playing "hide the data".

And a related piece on this article in the NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/science/covid-coronavirus...

That's a bizarre interpretation if you bother to take a few minutes to look at the flagged/dead posts on 'newest' of late.

Almost anything policy-adjacent gets shut down almost immediately even if it has a strong tech or science angle.

The synth company SOMA has an interesting new theremin-like synth called Flux, that uses magnetic "bows". See:

https://somasynths.com/flux/

The journal in question, Environmental Health Perspectives, doesn't charge submission fees and is open access (articles are freely available to everyone to read). Its impact factor puts it among the top journals in the fields of toxicology and Public and Environmental Health (https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/journal/ehp/journal-impact-factor).

The article notes that two other open access journals, published by the CDC are also potentially on the chopping block at HHS:

• Emerging Infectious Diseases • Preventing Chronic Disease

This is an odd interpretation if the details cited in the NY Times articles are correct:

When he informed Ted of his marriage plans, Ted, who had never met Ms. Patrik, fumed, and warned him, in what David called a “vicious” letter, that he was making the biggest mistake of his life. Ted then severed virtually all communication with him.

From this quote it seems like Ted Kaczynski had already cut off most communication with his brother w/out ever meeting the wife.

I wonder how similar / different this to the Filipino martial art known as Arnis, which is also bladed weapon + stick based?

Perhaps an interesting cultural example of convergence or parallelism (depending on how you think about the shared influence of Spanish colonialism w/respect to the development of these martial arts in Columbia and the Phillipines).

Note that admissions for MSc admissions usually differ quite a lot from PhD admissions, and the criteria can be very different across fields. Things have changed significantly since 2010 as well, and are likely to change even more radically in the next admissions cycle as a result of massive funding cuts to the sciences that the US is currently experiencing. Couple this with radically restricted foreign student visas resulting from new federal policy...

So this should probably be read as "Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process for MSc programs in CS in the 2010s".

What are the limits of Federal liability when ICE, the FBI, or some other random federal agency mistakenly raids your home?

This very question is currently before the Supreme Court for an FBI raid of a wrong house:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/supreme-court...

Sadly, Douglas Prasher, who actually cloned GFP, couldn't get his work funded at the time and ended up leaving science:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

Arguably, he should have shared the Nobel. Makes one wonder what the rationale is for the Nobel only allowing up to three shared winners.

Nothing scary at all about a 7 ft goat-headed centaur robot with a chainsaw in its hands!

I'm guessing from the domain name this is "satyr"! ;-) Regardless, I for one welcome our mythical woodland AI-robot overlords!

This is a classic middle school science outreach activity, or something older elementary age kids might do at a summer science camp.

Lovely! I wish they had featured even more photos in the article.

It's been about 10 years since I last dipped my toes in the D waters.

At the time (v 2.067) I stumbled across some surprisingly bad warts in the standard library that prevented me from using it for my intended purposes which writing software tools for bioinformatics.

As other posters have noted, language elegance is secondary to the ecosystem when you want to get things done.

For anyone who has been using D for an extended period, has the D ecosystem improved / expanded considerably in the last 5-10 years?

I had no idea the information avoidance was an area of study!

I'm curious to dig into this paper a bit more, because I've been wondering if the same phenomenon relates to:

1) the generally low quality of public discourse on a wide variety of topics -- many people seem to hate discussion based on evidence and would rather "go with their gut" or appeal to some vague notion of "common sense".

2) the popularity of AI -- there seems to be a common sentiment that AI is capable of taking care of the messy, yet important, details of the world around us so that we don't have to. i.e. AI is a information avoidance black box which gives us the liberty of ignoring what's actually in the box.

Related news:

USDA eliminates two food safety advisory committees -- https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

"The USDA eliminated the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and the National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, a spokesperson said."

EDIT: It's so hard to keep track up with the seesaw decision making in DC. Here's some positive news re: food safety that just came out this afternoon:

• F.D.A. Scientists Are Reinstated at Agency Food Safety Labs -- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/health/fda-food-safety-tr...

-- This is another case of "inadvertent firing" like several others the federal workforce has been subjected to earlier. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097709

Quite nice preservation! The images in the original article are definitely worth checking out:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.023

Discover and Science news have some images if you can't access Current Biology directly:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/113-million-ye...

https://www.science.org/content/article/oldest-ant-fossil-ev...

I mean, why should tech be any different when we're driving other scientists and engineers out of the country?! /s

Larger context: Congressional Republicans are trying to "add $150 billion to the already approved $886 billion national security budget for 2025." this $27B referenced in the title is a subset of this add on to bring defense spending above $1T.

For anyone baffled by the link, this is a send up of Teenage Engineering, a Swedish design house / manufacturer known for their very expensive synths and audio gear: https://teenage.engineering/

I had no idea that the scale of their DOGE meddling was so large with respect to the SSA DMF files -- according to the article, as many of 4,000,000 were consigned to his file by Musk and his DOGies.

Pitohui birds are endemic to Papua New Guinea, which is definitively NOT in South America!

https://maps.app.goo.gl/qVvK2WYjjfgSp825A

If you're trying to understand the context of this and other EOs, see here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/us/politics/trump-executi...