Connected Chaos
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connectedchaos.bsky.social
Connected Chaos
@connectedchaos.bsky.social
M.D. turned neuroscientist turned corporate stooge turned unemployed. Mostly here to learn and amplify things others should see. 🏳️‍🌈 he/him
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Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
December 15, 2025 at 8:41 PM
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Between 1979–2019, top pay (90th pct.) climbed 53%, middle only 23%, bottom (10th pct.) even lower 7%. (Productivity per hour climbed much more at 73%.)

But since 2019, fast gains at the bottom have already reversed about 1/3 of the rise in pay inequality.

A 🧵 about my book: The Wage Standard.
December 11, 2025 at 12:32 AM
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LA quietly stopped repaving all streets last July to avoid fulfilling its ADA obligations. The federal govt says when you repave a street, you have to update all the curb ramps. LA has tons of out of date curb ramps, so the rule makes repaving much more expensive. The city's solution: stop repaving!
LA has stopped repaving our streets
The reason why is probably illegal
futureis.la
December 9, 2025 at 4:44 PM
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There's also a very perverse dynamic at play here where San Francisco's own anti-housing land use and planning system is the reason why the city needs to spend hundreds of millions on contracts for homeless services providers.
December 9, 2025 at 6:34 PM
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Durable, high-strength carbon-negative enzymatic structural materials via a capillary suspension technique. A new enzymatic structural material absorbs CO₂ and cures within hours, offering a strong, recyclable, and carbon-negative alternative to traditional concrete for sustainable construction.
Durable, high-strength carbon-negative enzymatic structural materials via a capillary suspension technique
The enzymatic structural material (ESM) is formed by mineralizing crystals catalyzed by the enzyme carbonic anhydrase, followed by thermal curing to create a bulk structure. Minerals are first precipi...
www.cell.com
December 7, 2025 at 12:07 AM
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insane local news just dropped. i've lived in a part of KC for ~decade and it's been an inside joke with friends and service workers that the local biz/party district is ran by a cartel of biz owners who bully out new ventures and replace them with generic dive bars for white suburbanites.

Well UH
December 5, 2025 at 7:16 PM
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#copyediting

The past tense of "wreak" is not "wrought." The past tense of "wreak" is "wreaked."

("Wrought" is an antique past tense of "work," as in "iron" or "What hath God.")
December 3, 2025 at 11:11 PM
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From the Barnard college newspaper in 1935:
December 2, 2025 at 3:01 PM
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Interim presidents have no business committing the institution to anything, but also seem very prone to believing their excellent faculty are incapable of basic reading comprehension
Bienen is living in fantasy land if he believes that a deal dictating a bunch of rules about admissions and hiring that go well beyond what the law actually requires amounts to preserving control over admission and hiring. Or he thinks the faculty are illiterate
November 29, 2025 at 1:33 AM
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1/10 The Russian narrative is starting to collapse.

For years, Moscow pushed the idea that Ukraine was doomed and Russia unstoppable. That narrative is collapsing under the weight of reality.

Here’s why Russia is failing strategically despite tactical gains👇
November 27, 2025 at 10:04 AM
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An MIT report concluded that producing 5 seconds of AI video is like running a microwave for an hour.

This video is 53 seconds long; the appropriate energy of an 11 hour long microwave session if that study is accurate.

So...maybe we should stick to old fashioned before and after photos.
Striking animation showing the magnitude of glacier collapse since ca 1900 in the Alps! 🧊🔥

All the retreat you see here is caused by human activity, and it will only stop when the last cubic metre of ice has melted! 📈💧

📷 Photos: @glacionaut
🎥 AI Animation: @flashologo
November 26, 2025 at 7:34 PM
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The first official confirmation that Noem herself made the decision not to turn the planes around. A couple hundred men were tortured as a result — and soon after, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Trump admin’s Alien Enemies Act process was a total violation of due process.
BREAKING:

“After receiving that legal advice, Secretary Noem directed that the AEA detainees who had been removed from the United States before the Court’s order could be transferred to the custody of El Salvador. “
November 26, 2025 at 1:45 AM
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Why impact evaluations are so important: not everything that sounds like a good policy actually has the desired impact. While many interventions are highly effective, others don't work at all:
Examining the One Laptop Per Child program in Peruvian rural primary schools finds no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative ones on grade progression, from Cueto, Beuermann, Cristia, Malamud, and Pardo www.nber.org/papers/w34495
November 26, 2025 at 2:07 AM
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Founders on LinkedIn still seem to be struggling with the difference between telling people about their humble beginnings and admitting to straight up committing fraud.
November 24, 2025 at 11:17 PM
Read it
Premium: This is The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA: A 14k word guide to how NVIDIA makes its money, how millions of Blackwell GPUs have been sold with nowhere for them to be installed, and how NVIDIA's future relies on companies raising hundreds of billions in debt.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-g...
The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA
This piece has a generous 3000+ word introduction, because I want as many people to understand NVIDIA as possible. The (thousands of) words after the premium break get into arduous detail, but I’ve wr...
www.wheresyoured.at
November 24, 2025 at 8:35 PM
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Trump’s school voucher credits are effectively subsidizing whites-only schools.
The Trump Administration Is Quietly Preparing to Bring Back School Segregation - The American Prospect
It starts with vouchers and the destruction of the Office for Civil Rights.
prospect.org
November 24, 2025 at 12:30 AM
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There was a significant volcanic eruption in the Afar region of Ethiopia near the Erta Ale volcano today. METEOSAT-IODC weather satellite picked up imagery of the ash cloud moving east over the Red Sea and Yemen.
November 23, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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hear me out: Hambien
November 21, 2025 at 10:24 PM
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It gets lost in the shuffle, but the Speaker of the House is someone who, by all rights, should’ve had his career ended a decade ago by a Shreveport TV news investigative team.
Fond memories of that time Mike Johnson was president of a local law school that never opened its doors, in part because it was attached to a Baptist college that was losing its accreditation, and in part because it was always a scam from the start
Mike Johnson -- who is, yes, theoretically a lawyer -- has not had a chance to look at the American Constitution because he's been very busy lately, folks, he just can't see everything, gosh, how is he supposed to know if it's wrong that the president called for the execution of congress members?
November 21, 2025 at 3:09 PM
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Not only that but every time he golfs he does it on one of his own properties & charges the government, putting tax money in his private coffers. Each golf trip is a self dealing grift and an unconstitutional emolument.
Trump has played golf more often in five years than Obama did in eight, outpacing his first term by playing golf on 1 in 4 days during his second term and about 1 in 5 over the two terms. He’s on pace to play more than Obama did *in this term alone*.
www.pbump.net/o/an-officia...
November 20, 2025 at 4:12 AM
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I can't be clear enough that in the UK, the transphobic rot has seeped so far into our systems that the Equality and Human Rights Committee is pressuring the govt to release new anti-trans guidelines based on the presumption that We Can Always Tell
Looks like the EHRC guidance is that cis women and trans women alike need to adhere to suitably feminine appearance standards and carry their gender papers everywhere
November 20, 2025 at 7:32 AM
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A judge ruled it would violate the UN Convention Against Torture to deport Britania Uriostegui Rios, a trans woman, to Mexico. ICE did it anyway.

She arrived with no money and serious mental health issues. She's “constantly afraid of being discovered, tortured, or killed" because of her identity.
November 19, 2025 at 10:29 PM
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Peter D Carter: Undercooling la Niña, Oct Warming +1.34°C
Very high degrees of warming affect both poles.
Large Siberia cold region from large snow pack-more albedo cooling. NASA GISS
November 19, 2025 at 6:31 PM