Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

I expected to love Project Hail Mary, I LOVED Project Hail Mary, it also destroyed me in a particularly unique way as the wife of a science teacher after a year of watching all science teaching be relentlessly attacked and defunded. People love this movie, which I'm sure will be a success, and they hate my wife's work and destroy her programs and want us to lose our careers. How is it possible for all this to be true at once.

Change, Technically just hit over 25,000 downloads 🎉 🎉 🎉

I'm so proud of the level of rigor, research AND fun we've put into these episodes, a joy to make. A lot of work and a joy! Proud of us

@analog_ashley @danilo

The big news in the Hicks-Juavinett household is that Ashley just started a newsletter 🥰 🥰 🥰

of note that choosing ghost was not a small choice, because every SINGLE popular science author in her network insisted she HAD to be on substack, so she is starting with a serious penalty in not benefitting from her large existing network all on substack who would have promoted this newsletter across their many science reader audiences. I hope we can get it to flourish 🫶

https://graymatter.ghost.io/the-limitations-of-neuroscience/

I'm imagining the situation here where you start flagging any increase in "effort" as a negative sign lol seems problematic for knowledge work

No wonder the people I work with think that all attempts to measure anything about humans are doomed to fail

I just read a paper proposing that we use heart rate variability measured from developers as they're coding to create a detection flag for code quality issues. This is so theoretically and practically preposterous I have to ask myself if such things are a joke

I have been invited to but turned down 3 conferences talks already this year because they're told me it's new policy to not cover speaker travel under the assumption that your tech employer will cover it. I own my own small business as a researcher and my wife is an academic teaching professor, so I cannot ask my household to absorb that. I just want to generally observe that we are filtering the voices we're going to be able to hear from, with all this contraction

I'm sitting in a cafe writing and these two guys are having a conversation at the table across from me about how at UCSD students don't do anything but midterms and finals, no project based learning, nothing hands on. My wife is literally grading an unreal amount of end of quarter projects from the hands-on project-based labs she teaches at UCSD

It doesn't have to be this way. I have helped multiple older women argue to get past primary care and get to specialists and learn that there is better science than decades ago, that has studied more women, but there's only one of me in these chats. You can't fix the system but if you have an older woman in your life you can ask if you can research something for them, or go to an appointment and make sure they're heard, or suggest the random pains they have are a thing that needs attention.

Our moms are suffering because no one cares and they aren't telling anyone. They're getting diagnoses 15 years late, they're being bullied about medications, they're silent about what they're going through.

The difference between the younger women and the older women in the patient groups I'm in is horrific. I have listened to many, many people's moms describe years of suffering that could've been prevented. I am not trying to lay on any guilt. I'm just saying a little bit could go a long way.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116245673605232276

I am fucking sick of this kind of response from white men on mastodon who cannot possibly imagine not being the main character. My main patient chat is multilingual, and last summer I literally texted back and forth between a Spanish fluent friend and a fellow patient to translate a preprint about a rare condition for one of my patient friends in a country far from the only place that does research on her condition.

Just FUCK OFF. you are EXHAUSTING.

Because mastodon is like a 99% male audience, I will say this: if you have an aging mother you are in relationship with and care about, do NOT make her go through medical stuff alone. I am skilled & mean enough to fight through medical stuff and even so you would not believe how bad it is. Just accept that you cannot imagine.

I talk to a lot of people's aging moms and they are abandoned & alone even in nice families. I don't care how awkward it is, you have to try to ask them about it.

My friends here in San Diego who are R1 scientists, leading some of the most successful labs in their areas in one of the world's densest regions for scientific and medical innovation use words like: broken, bleak, devastating, nihilistic. Half the people I know who worked on equity & science topics have stopped posting publicly about it or producing scicom on it after experiencing too much stress and burden for their safety. Even *left* social media foments rage spirals and pileons

https://scienceandfreedomalliance.substack.com/p/we-will-never-get-more-than-what

https://bsky.app/profile/markhisted.org/post/3mh6t2xxfc627

Gathering a couple of saddening threads on US science from people with the NIH expertise to know. Not a single scientist in my life expects the rest of their career to go as they had expected a few years ago.

https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/i-wrote-research-funding-announcements

I have to dream about a flourishing of investment in science beyond what seems possible now because it is the thing that brings me hope, to imagine that as fast as our society turned on this, it could turn back.

I don't think "science is over," humanity is resilient. I do think individual careers and pathways are lost, and that is a kind of grief that's hard to articulate. I think we'll get what we fight for. It does make me feel sad to see so little content about this outside of my scientific circles. Cures, innovation, and skilled workforces are not inevitable but the result of many choices we make together as a society.

@dalias @mayintoronto having seen regulation drafting up close, it is really difficult. I would love to see an example of how you'd draft "forbidding aggregating data" and "decisions" and how you'd write a regulation that would define something like "giving inappropriate power". I suspect it would have to be very specific to be workable, and that specificity would undermine what you are imagining as powerful regulation

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116211951163287005

Just saw "any usage of machine learning should be regulated" so, yikes