tl;dr: Inspired by this conversation started by Ethan Marcotte, I’ve gone ahead and added a small link blog to this website too. Instead of having links of interest disappear into the stream of time that is my Mastodon timeline, I thought it would be nice to collect them also here, in a more findable way.

The Star Wars franchise is perhaps best known for its rather Manichean outlook on good and evil as expressed through the ‘Dark (evil) Side’ and ‘Light (good) Side’ of the Force (similar to 气, qi, or breath/spirit in Daoism) expressed through the Jedi, a type of warrior-monk.

The AHRC What’s On? Project Team: Beth Johnson, Dave O’Brien, Laura Minor, Anna Viola Sborgi What’s Class Got to Do With It? Rethinking TV from the Inside Out School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds 19th September 2025 Keynote : Philip Ralph, award-winning writer of screenplays for television and film and plays for stage and radio Closing plenary panel A One-Day

This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive experienced major upgrade pains, and Rogue Scholar search became unavailable from Tuesday until Thursday. I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version (13.0.0b4.dev0) of the InvenioRDM repository software, and ran into multiple issues. Going back to the previously installed v12.1.0 took longer than anticipated, mainly because of issues with the Opensearch index.

Tom recently emailed me this question: Do you know how to find out how many of the compounds that appear in the chemical literature are mentioned just once? Intrigued, I first set out to find out how many substances , as Chemical Abstracts refers to the them, there were as of 5 June, 2025 . There is a static estimate here (219 million), but to get the most up to date information, I asked CAS directly.

The first time I saw real snow, I panicked. Not because it was cold, my body knew cold better than breath, but because it was finally real. It wasn’t the polymeric white fluff they sprayed from ceiling nozzles to “simulate seasonal cues” inside the dome. This was actual ice crystal, drifting from a slate sky outside the controlled perimeter, collecting in stillness on a field of grasses no longer extinct.

Im April erschien an der Universität Hamburg eine sehr interessante Untersuchung und Dissertation zu Open Access im Wissenschaftsfeld der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Kristin Biesenbender wertete aus, wie sich das Publikationsverhalten der in diesem Feld Publizierenden vor dem Hintergrund einerseits von Open Access und andererseits von wissenschaftlichen Rankings verändert.

First, before the world drowns in madness, it’s a-QUILL-ops, like a quill pen. Not AWK-wuh-lops, like Aquafina. Second, I made good use of my recent birthday and went to the Lego store at the local mall.

It’s plot recreation time! In this post, we’ll look at how we can recreate a plot in R. I thought it might be useful to provide the solution but also to detail the process I went through to get there. We have a FACS plot taken from a BD FACS Aria machine: Briefly, it’s a histogram of the fluorescence levels of 10000 cells from three different sources.

The National University of Rosario (UNR) in Argentina has long been committed to principles of Open Science and public access to knowledge.

Here I summarise a few posts on Bluesky where I raised concerns about some metadabarcoding datasets that were highlighted by GBIF: Looking at these datasets it’s clear that something is wrong. Data The datasets discussed are for CO1 Amplicon Sequence Variants from Madagascar, which are part of the Insect Biome Atlas project.