Carl T. Bergstrom

1. Today I learned that my collaborator @jjinsing@ecoevo.social had his NSF postdoctoral position terminated in yesterday's round of cuts.

Jay is the lead author on a fascinating paper I was involved in, about how male mimicry by female hummingbirds provides the first example of a type of signaling system that we predicted from theoretical principles over a decade ago.

This is infuriating.

And I believe it's due to anti-trans bias.

Why do I say that?

A small fraction of the female birds of this species — and in fact, many other hummingbird species as well — adopt male plumage. It's a fascinating phenomenon and probably evolved because that females with male plumage are less likely to be chased away form food sources.

Photo: Michel Gutierrez, Macaulay Library.

Goddamn sexy ducks.

New buddy flick just dropped.

#crows

Pelagic cormorant.

1. For the past thirty years I've had the best job in the world.


I've had the opportunity to follow my curiosity; explore the workings of nature and society; mentor students and junior colleagues in the same process; and teach generations of students about it all.

Curiosity-driven research isn't just fun; it led us to develop tools that thousands of scientists use to find meaningful patterns in massive datasets (e.g. www.mapequation.org). 





Separately, I've had the opportunity to be part of the largest collective intellectual effort in human history.

In 2020, the scientific community came together—remotely, by necessity—in response to the COVID pandemic, to understand how this disease spreads and what that it does to people, to find of returning life to a semblance of normal amidst a pandemic, to develop a vaccine in record time.

And I've been able to teach 1000s of students. I've written a popular textbook about evolution; developed a class and book about critical thinking that is used around the world; and most recently launched a humanities course about LLMs that will be taught at scores of schools in the fall.

But right now my job doesn't feel like the best job in the world. 

Targeted attacks on university funding have put every US institution into a severe crisis. As of now, there is no way we will be able to continue doing the biomedical research, the conservation science, etc. that we always have.

@lain_7@tldr.nettime.org @Schouten_B@mastodon.social @wrosecrans@mstdn.social @sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange @mattblaze@federate.social

Again, this is a direct screenshot that I took myself of the graphic that was attached to the article on the New York Times website.

It is entirely undoctored.

Other people commented on it right there on the website.

What an absolute unit.

#birding #birdphotography #owls