Weekend Editor

@weekend-editor.bsky.social

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Retired physicist, after a career in machine learning & stats mostly for cancer drug discovery. Also @weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz. Now blogging about stats in the news: https://www.someweekendreading.blog/

"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." -- GKC, _The Thing_, 1929
A paper on phonetic changes resembling accent formation among Antarctic winter-over staff. "Early stages" of accent formation.
Wet bulb temperature forecast for Massachusetts on 2026-Jul-02. The lethal limit is somewhere between 87.8F to 95F. NB: "wet bulb" temps include humidity; above that limit sweating no longer works and the outside is *dangerous*.
Russian casualty rates in Ukrain for the last several years. Shows a statistically significant and large effect size jump in the rate, around February 2024.
Plot of Russian solders killed in Ukraine vs time. The model shows a kink with about a 70% increase in fatality rate sometime around February 2024.
Set of taps for cutting screw threads.
Famous meme of astronauts observing the earth. North America is suspiciously shaped like Ohio. Astro #1: Wait it's all Ohio? Astro #2: (Pointing gun at back of Astro #1, shoulder patch of Ohio state flag) Always has been.
Peanuts 1959-Nov-12: Linus says he loves humanity, but can't stand people.
Sappho #65, "To One Who Loved Not Poetry", original Greek and modern English: But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.
Layout of human packing on the slave ship Brooks, from Encyclopedia Virginia.
The continued fraction expansion for pi, and pecan pies arranged as a picosahedron.
The classic trolley problem, re-imagined with a billionaire on the track vs everyone else, and another billionaire at the switch. Obviously, the billionaires conspire to save each other, not us.
Cross-sections of the Brookes, a 1781 British slave ship involved in the triangular Atlantic slave trade, loaded with enslaved Africans. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage
A board game called "Billionaires & Guillotines" which... well, it's pretty straightforward to work out, isn't it?
Letter from 1948 in which Boston Mayor Curley writes to the president of MIT, asking for engineers to figure out how to use flamethrowers for snow removal.
Etymology of "maudlin" (self-pitying or tearfully sentimental), deriving it from "magdalena", i.e., from Mary Magdalene (~ Maryam Magdalena)
Owl art in Chauvet Cave, in France. Dated to approximately 32,000 years ago. Superb Owl 32,000!
Recent Wikipedia edit history on Sen Mitch McConnell, showing addition of material about his recent hospitalization and subsequent tweaking.
A flag quilt, organized by Mormon Women for Ethical Government, each with pro-democracy writing.
Regression model of Russian casualties over time, using Ukrainian MoD figures. Linear fit to first 100 days, and single data points every 100k plotted after that. Note increase in casualty rate around day 450.
Theatrical poster for the movie _Mary Poppins_. It was the highest grossing film of 1965, though most of that revenue was from 1964.
Extract from Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. “I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air ...
Image of a mitochondrion, resembling the lakes shown above.
A Jules Feiffer illustration from _The Phantom Tollbooth_. I particularly like Tock, the watch dog.
A cat wearing a vet cone, positioned in front of an electrical cord so as to resemble a lamp. Some talking lamps speak more emphatically than others.
BlueSky settings, Moderation tab, in the web interface 2025-Nov-06. Notably no "Advanced" option.
RA Fisher, founder of modern statistics, on why it's important to get a statistician in at the *design* phase, not just to do a post-mortem after you've screwed that up.
Portland's Unipiper: a unicyclist, dressed in kilt and darth vader cape/helmet, playing bagpipes where the drones spout flames.
From the CDC ACIP web site on shared clinical decision making: who constitutes the "clinical" side. ...anyone who provides or administers vaccines: primary care physicians, specialists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, and pharmacists.
Cartoon by Tom Toro. Two men are sitting in a library. The apparently older one says: Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who *do* study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.
Famous turn of the century art advertising "le chat noir", and one of my cats sitting similarly.
A shirt showing a Romanized caricature of the Morton Salt girl, spilling salt over the epigram, "Carthago delenda est."
Charles Babbage, dumbfounded by questions from Parliament about whether his computing engine could, given wrong inputs, generate the correct answers anyway.
Phase diagram (pressure vs temperature) showing ice 9 is restrited to 2-4 kilobars of pressure, and below -100C. Source: Wikipedia.
Professor Charles Xavier, over the years.
Experiment showing expectations of AI speedup, and experimental result of actual slowdown.
At MIT, in building 6: a relief of George Eastman, an early donor. Students love to rub his nose for luck. The nose is noticeably shinier than the rest of the relief.
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], — 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' [... ] I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." -- Charles Babbage, _Passages from the Life of a Philosopher_, ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1" (London 1864)
Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene's response to recent floods is to attempt to outlaw weather control, which she thinks Democrats use against her.
A recursive comic in which Deadpool reads a comic about himself reading a comic about himself... and we can't see if the recursion ever bottoms out.
Two cats, a tabby and a black, sit on a wicker couch in a sun room. One is mildly interested in the camera; the other ignores it with aplomb suitable to his station as Senior Cat.
A clock-radio, still in use. (In a bathroom instead of a bedroom, sure. But still in use.)
Mr Potato-Head: with black bowler, red ears, big eyes, red nose, moustachio'd mouth, blue pants and shoes. He is waving ominously at you.
Famous French poster of la Belle Époque, for a cabaret called Le Chat Noir. A pure black cat with yellow eyes sits in a simiar pose on some steps while supervising lawn work from inside a tent.
Cartoon by Tom Toro: "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who *do* study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."
From Wikipedia, the "Great Gatsby curve": increasing inequality (horizontal axis) causes less inter-generational economic mobility (vertical axis). Basically, people are locked out of upward mobility.
Christopher Marlowe, Faustus, scene iii: Faust. Where are you damn’d? Meph. In hell. Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell? Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast.
Three slogans: imitatio dei, tikkun olam, and apokatastasis.
A black cat crouches on a shelf among fluffy sweaters. He believes this is an inconspicuous perch from which to swat passing humans. He is correct in his belief.
From Wikipedia: the U-238 neutron capture reaction network.
Boxplot of number of additional seats per state, stratified by party. There are a few more Blue seats, but not as many as people tend to think.
Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth, sorta fitting your description of 2 bodies in the process of being compressed... slooowly.
Image of SN1987A from the Hubble, showing a pair of rings.
Chryse Planitia on Mars, where one could "safely" self-isolate during COVID-19.
Denarius coin showing a helmet, 2 daggers, and "EID.MAR".
Red/blue state map of the US, overlaid with number of universities the Trump administration is attacking. It's clearly just political animus against blue states.
For pi day: pi expressed best as a continued fraction, and the continuands shown to absurt precision in a bitmap.