Academic Mixtape 31

good stuff to read

It’s been two months since one of these posts! Oh, my. How time flies when you’re paralyzed by the rise of the authoritarian state.

I’m doing my best here to avoid the temptation of sharing with you the litany of bad news that’s come down the way that y’all will have heard about anyway. Here’s some things that I hope are a combination of useful and interesting.

This is wild. This is argyably the first fault rupture caught on video as it is forming:

The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a well-researched report from Sonoma State (a sister campus to my own in the California State University system) which is going through catastrophic cuts. What this piece doesn’t say is that we can expect several other campuses to undergo similar things in the coming months, and when you see those headlines, maybe you heard it here first. Some of the campuses that have perennially been underfunded are more likely to absorb the blow of declining budgets and declining enrollments, which involves campuses having to develop a new trajectories and narrowed priorities. We can’t prevent harm from being done, and who gets to decide where that happens. Ugh.

Is most harm in academia done unintentionally? I thought this raised a matter worth understanding. Of course impact»intent, though if you’re trying to fix things, it helps to know how things are broken. I think a lot of the garden-variety bad stuff comes from people who are untrained and have the wrong priorities.

In a completely unnecessary and wrong-thinking move, the American Chemcial Society dropped a scholarship program targeting students with ethnicities underrepresented in the field. Instead of taking it to court, they settled and gave in. Shame on them. I realize that there are a lot of complexities and subtleties on letting your organization survive a battle to fight another day, but also, there’s this:

credit: Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Wrestling Ants: How We Score Insect Aggression Like WWE Moves

The story of Rose Ferreria’s career in NASA to date. A lot of science people who spend too much time on the internet are well aware of Rose from her strong scicomm game on twitter and such, from back in the day. She’s an inspirational human, and is just one example of how immigrants are what America needs to live up to its potential.

The new reality for American academia: “At a time when forces are trying to distract and disrupt the scientific enterprise, doing the important work of finding and sharing the truth is now a great act of resistance.”

Speaking of which, in the category of “We keep learning very basic things because so much of the world is unexplored and mysterious,” we just figured out that mites are not one thing. They are all teensy tiny and look like they’re all from a common ancestor, but Nope.

Even more from “Wow, the world is weirder than we can ever imagine,” it turns out that one particular song from Janet Jackson generates a resonant frequency that was well known for crashing hard drives. Whaaaaat?

Have you seen SaveNSF yet? Please visit, please sign up with them, please follow through on their action alerts.

Again, the website is SaveNSF.

I think here is a great explainer for why “AI” hallucinates things that are straight up not true.

Thinking of you. I feel seen.

If you ever do want to understand how they’re implementing Project 2025, ProPublica watched all the instructional videos that most of us could not bear to. Here’s their upshot.

Science goes into some depth on the dismissal of Thomas Crowther (the three trillion trees guy whose lab hired its own PR consultant) after charges of misconduct. What I see here is that the entire research community that interacts with him is not surprised at all.

And yet another installment of, “Nature, you keep coming up with wild stuff!” Predatory caterpillars aren’t new to science but this one that hangs out on the spider webs inside treeholes and camouflages itself with the leftovers of the spider is pretty cool. How do you get this one in the papers? You call it The Bone Collector.

The Menswear Guy (Derek Guy) writes about the aesthetic of the toxic manosphere and how it’s evolved. If you’re not a former twitter or current bluesky guy, then you might not know about this menswear guy, who might be far more interesting than you might expect.

I had no idea how cool Margaret Wise Brown was. Huh.

The most important thing you do this week might be to register a formal comment on this Federal Register entry that will convert career jobs in federal agencies to at-will status. If this goes through as is, then those teenagers working for Musk will be able to follow any federal scientist on trumped up charges of whatever. And CALL your reps. Did I mention Save NSF?

I only just learned that screwworms have made their way past the barrier zone in the Panama Canal? Yikes. This is a really interesting story where the USDA has for decades kept screwworms at bay by releasing millions of sterile males every few days along the Canal Zone. But some of them have snuck through and now they’re moving up through Mexico. It was a herculean effort to knock them back, and it’s hard to imagine that the assault on science in the US bodes well for the USDA getting a handle on this?