Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

"After a month break, I describe U.S. march toward tyranny as a slow cooker, turned up by degrees from Salvadoran gulags to snatched students to detained tourists to big-ticket capitulations. #Trump wants to boil the frog...

...But we are not yet cooked."

If Will Bunch wrote it, you should read it.©

1/...

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/trump-dictatorship-universities-law-firms-20250323.html#loaded

@Jeramee @ziacik @mattgriffin @gleick i think it actually shows something different - it is easy to boycot something that you are not using anyways. i would bet you that people who deface teslas and burn their dealerships did not drive one. they will not convince anyone to stand against the ideas they fight. people who don't buy a tesla but otherwise would, or even get rid of one they already own... or people that switch to a different social media will be the driving force.

If a company has genetic data

And it's going bankrupt

And that causes one of the biggest economies in the world, California, to warn people to delete their data before that happens

Because they're very concerned about who the genetic data will be sold to in bankruptcy court

Idk man maybe it should just be illegal to sell genetic data in bankruptcy court? Or it should require stringent oversight and regulation?

Les auteurs racontent: "So it happened. We have officially withdrawn a paper accepted for publication in a scientific journal because of editorial requests to remove language deemed out of compliance with executive orders."

https://criticalpublichealth.org/blog/2025/03/21/resisting-attacks-on-science/

L'article devait être publié dans "Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Surgeon General and the US Public Health Service" mais les dernières révisions ont réclamé des suppressions des mots interdits "in order to comply with the Executive Order". Les mots en question étaient tout à fait périphériques au sujet de l'article et pouvaient être omis sans changer la teneur principale de l'article.

Face à une requête déraisonnable et injuste, mais qui dans ce cas particulier est sans conséquence, faut-il accepter (pour avoir la paix, puisque dans ce cas là ce n'est qu'un changement très mineur) ou refuser (par principe)?

The arXiv is where we keep papers on math, physics, etc. It's run by Cornell University.

It seems unlikely that the US government would demand that Cornell destroy the arXiv. But the many copies of the arXiv around the world were shut down on September 15, 2024, and it seems that now all the data resides in the US.

If anyone wants to back up the arXiv, they should go here:

https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data_s3.html

and here, which looks cheaper:

https://archive.org/details/arxiv-bulk

The complete arXiv was 5.6 terabytes in March 2023, and growing at about 100 gigabytes a month.

Also read this, if you want to keep your backup up to date:

https://info.arxiv.org/help/api/index.html

If you work on this, please let SciOp know:

https://sciop.net/datasets/

They are a group of people backing up databases.

If you're an #RStats {igraph} user, please update your codebase according to deprecation messages. We try to make changes for the best.

https://r.igraph.org/articles/current-deprecations.html

cc @schochastics.net @kirill

Margaret Hamilton is one of my personal heroes. One of the early programmers, coiner of the term “software engineering”, and lead for the Apollo guidance program software project that got humanity to the moon. Many of the core programming principles we use come from her teams. Never let anyone tell you programming isn’t for women! (And yes, sadly I still hear people say that from time to time)

Updating my sat numbers before my lecture. There are now 7,095 Starlink satellites in orbit, out of 11,094 total operational satellites.

Every one of those Starlink satellites will be turned into metal vapour in Earth's atmosphere, because there are no environmental regulations in space. Ugh ugh ugh.

Great way to start off my morning. Time for some yoga and doing something pleasant before yelling about satellite pollution all over the U of Manitoba physics department.

The U.K. government has quietly scrubbed encryption advice from its government web pages.

This comes just weeks after the U.K. government demanded backdoor access to encrypted data stored on Apple’s cloud storage service.

from @carlypage: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/uk-quietly-scrubs-encryption-advice-from-government-websites/

Hey Michiganders,

This Friday in Lansing many scientists and concerned citizens will gather to stand up for science at noon

You should go if you can! Show that Michiganders support our federally funded research and discovery enterprises, and value our constitutional rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.

https://standupforscience2025.org/local-event-information/

1/7 Have you ever wondered if scholarly peer review could be done collaboratively, openly, and in dialogue with community? PREreview’s Live Reviews are the space for you!

#livereview #openpeerreview #collaboration

I held desperate hopes that Zelenskyy would refuse to give Putin what he wanted.

I couldn't imagine that he would, but I also knew the pressures he was going to face today.

And he stood up to them. He gave them nothing. In the face of their puerile, incandescent, narcissistic rage, he gave them nothing.

My respect for that man grew to extravagant proportions today.

#SlavaUkraini, President #Zelenskyy.

#Germany, we count on you tomorrow (Election day). Be strong and reject the fascists!

What are publishers doing in the name of #OpenScience?

Our Head of Publishing Development, Alessio, is co-hosting an online event on March 13 for #OxFOS25. Register free to learn about how we emphasise transparent and accountable research assessments.
https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/9f66acc1-8dc4-46a1-83cc-924c9da2b2a5@cc95de1b-97f5-4f93-b4ba-fe68b852cf91

As of today, the public swiss technical university @epfl in Lausanne has its own Mastodon server – accessible to all members of the institution, including students (!), and directly linked to their institutional login system.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-epfl-community-gets-a-mastodon-server/

A very warm welcome, EPFL, in the Fediverse, thank you for your efforts, and congratulations!

#openscicomm #scicomm #fediverse #edufedi

I complain a lot about Inkscape vs. Adobe Illustrator when it comes to print design. Do you want to do something about it? Do you want us to have nice free software tools for print?

Well Martin Owens @doctormo@floss.social is making things better, he's the one working on CMYK and revamped PDF export for Inkscape. It seems like a massive endeavour, and it looks very promising!

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1061/cmyk-support-in-inkscape-could-be-a-game-changer-for-professional-print-designers

This would open up Inkscape to a whole new sector. Inkscape is pretty good for digital work, but it lacks crucial features for print. CMYK would be a massive step in the right direction.

You can support his work on Liberapay and Patreon. Personally, I would do so, if I had an income
- https://liberapay.com/doctormo/
- https://www.patreon.com/doctormo

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

https://thebullshitmachines.com

This is not a computer science course.

It’s a humanities course about how to learn and work and thrive in an AI world.

Neither instructor nor students need a technical background. Our instructor guide provides a choice of activities for each lesson that will easily fill an hour-long class.

The entire course is available freely online. Our 18 online lessons each take 5-10 minutes; each illuminates one core principle. They are suitable for self-study, but have been tailored for teaching in a flipped classroom.

The course is a sequel of sorts to our course (and book) Calling Bullshit. We hope that like its predecessor, it will be widely adopted worldwide.

Large language models are both powerful tools, and mindless—even dangerous—bullshit machines. We want students to explore how to resolve this dialectic.