Cladocera @daphsci@qoto.org

This just in: Dystopian science fiction will no longer be sold or streamed in the San Francisco Bay Area or Silicon Valley due to the high risk of it inspiring new tech startups. #tech #scifi

@jason_ritt @manlius @neuroscience @networkscience @complexsystems @PessoaBrain @WiringtheBrain @kordinglab @ricard_sole @c4computation

Great question, not sure. Top or my mind is Nick Strausfeld’s paper describing the origin of the insect’s glomerular organisation of both the antennal lobe and optic tuberculum in the ancestral leg neuropil of the crustacean biramia segment. So yes hox genes and their A-P diversification, also evident in the human brain (rhombomeres and also cerebral cortex).

Every few months, I find myself recommending basically everyone read this one article about the protactile deafblind language. But particularly relevant to mastodon users (AND people working on automated image captioning) is its great discussion of what makes good alt text.

Don't add excess detail! It may make you look like a True Ally, but you're not helping blind people. https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html

@daphsci @SciCommDennis @jason_ritt
Cosmos! Me too. I'll never forget how he described 4D.

Sagan is a great demonstration of the nuances - he inspired so many of us, but he was also a controversial figure, accused of grandstanding and going too far beyond his expertise:

https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/carl-sagan-and-the-rise-of-the-celebrity-scientist/

https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/04/18/lisa-feldman-barretts-new-book-supported-by-a-guggenheim-fellowship-corrects-pervasive-neuroscience-myths/

Old man sitting on bench next to a dog
Another old man sits down and asks, "Does your dog bite?"
"No," says the first man.
The second man tries to pet the dog and is bit
"You said your dog doesn't bite"
"Yes," says the first man, "but this is not my dog."

every paragraph in this paper is blowing my mind https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00236-4 even as someone who already believed in the infinite variety of language, there are just so many deeply researched counterexamples to basically anything you think is universal (especially if you're using english as your basis for "universal")

#MNastodon I sure do know a lot of people either moving to the Twin Cities or planning on doing so this year all of sudden. So I guess we’re no longer super scary? 😏

#MNastodon Gonna make a local
observation as I pack up our perfectly serviceable artificial tree purchased at the Lake Street Kmart: that store and the Super Value employed a ton of local people and enabled a whole neighborhood to get things they needed without extra commuting/buying from the Zon. Watching certain segments of hipster circles celebrate the demise of businesses that filled those needs hits all of my working class buttons. Placement? Terrible. Existence? Useful.

When you see someone like Elon Musk embracing the far right, it's not because the far right has any kind of coherent political or intellectual worldview he agrees with. It's because the far right is the last bastion of shitty people - they will accept anyone regardless of their personal behavior.

The far right have no standards for behavior, identity or beliefs - you only need to share the raw desire to dominate others. The far right welcomes all manner of abusers, thieves, grifters, and scoundrels.

Logically therefore if you're an abuser, thief, grifter or a scoundrel you will eventually find that the only friends you have left are far right extremists.

Sure, I'm the "end o' story" guy in the movie "Fargo" out here chipping away at the driveway, but it doesn't take that much more effort to clear a sidewalk full-width than it does a goat path.

The block-end plow windrows are terrible and are made worse by those temporary bollard bump-outs the city has put up everywhere. #Minneapolis

I was driving to Bloomington the other day when I noticed the City of Richfield has Bobcats.

Bison in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, USA.

#photography #LandscapePhotography #bison #winter #NaturePhotography #SouthDakota #PhotoOfTheDay

This. Is. FASCINATING: “The vaccine, which contains dead versions of the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae, comes in the form of food. The vaccine is incorporated into royal jelly, a sugar feed given to queen bees. Once they ingest it, the vaccine is then deposited in their ovaries, giving developing larvae immunity as they hatch.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/science/honeybee-vaccine.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Sunset XC ski (vertical image). It was the perfect Blue Extra day. Everything was fast, and it felt like no work.

We got back to the car after dark. It was good fun skiing dark trails.

@NicoleCRust Thanks for the question, Nicole. I got a little carried away...

A lack of self-awareness of the communication goal is sometimes an issue. One way I see "getting excited about science" go bad is when there is a clandestine switch of the topic of discussion, hiding a goal shift from increasing scientific understanding to increasing psychological reward.

Someone starts with a show on "The Science of Canine Cognition", which explains currently known "facts" about behavior, neuroscience, history, and so on, with equal emphasis on the process by how these facts were determined, including their uncertainty. Excitement, sure, and relating things to people's everyday experiences with their beloved pets, and keeping the scientific process in the forefront. Motivation and Method gets equal screen time with Result and Discussion. It is a show about a cool area of scientific study.

But people resonate with the doggy facts more than the explanations of experiments. So the show becomes "How Dogs Think", and the description of process gets reduced to "Scientists at Prestigious University have determined..." and everything is "explained" by videos of cute dogs doing things. The essential concepts of uncertainty and empiricism get thrown out, and the narration now contains fewer passages of questions ("How might one figure out if a dog understands English? What does it really mean to understand a language in the first place?"), and more blanket statements ("Dogs know so many words! Look at this adorable dog operate a pedal board that plays words."). It is a show of claims about dogs.

And we might keep going. The show is "Your Dog's Incredible Inner Mind". Claims are selected with a strong "excitement" bias, and explanations are stories that seem to make sense and aren't obviously wrong; maybe a scientist somewhere is willing to say on camera that it might be true. Watch this dog get over the loss of their favorite plushy by "singing" along to Taylor Swift lyrics, just like you might. This other dog writes poetry (remember that pedal board?) in an innovative Romantic-Absurdist style. No questions, no process, just examples with just-so narration. It is a show of our fascination with and emotions about dogs.

And if that last show spurs someone's curiosity and makes them want to learn more about science, great, except that the show didn't actually get them excited about science. It got them excited about dogs. The process by which we come to know things isn't part of that deal.

I'm reminded of a critique from the ancient Internet that the website "I F*cking Love Science" was better named "I F*cking Love Trippy Pictures of Multicolored Fluorescent Stuff".

To me "getting excited about science" means getting excited about the applied process, not the particular list of conclusions best supported by evidence we happen to have at the moment. I see the clandestine switch from Process to Fact behind a lot of the arguments people have over what is "good" general audience science explanation.

As scientists, we don't accept blanket statements of fact, unmotivated and unjustified by evidence, from our colleagues. We should not feel comfortable making those kinds of statements to the public. Popularizing carries the additional burden that you have to explain process at the same time as you explain the subject, because your audience in general has not been trained on the relevant conceptual toolkit. To me that is the core thing that makes it hard. To avoid the failure mode I tried to exemplify above, it's critical at the outset to be clear on what you are actually trying to communicate: Scientific Process, Subject Matter Fact, Emotional Connection, ...?

Why is Josh Hawley still in the Senate two years after provoking a deadly insurrection against the U.S. government? And why hasn't Trump been prosecuted yet?

Life lesson:

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,

ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,

ever, ever, ever

let glitter into your home