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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

@jarome.bsky.social

1.7K followers 840 following 770 posts

Biologist* wondering why the world is so colourful. Currently NYU, formerly Princeton. Generally bird/scienceposting 🧪 Opinions are official Bene Gesserit policy. 📍 Jersey City *actually three parrots in a parrot suit

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Jan 31

Hi new followers (bots and real people alike 😝). I'm not here to collect followers but it'll take me some time to go through and follow back people with shared interests etc. In the meantime here's a nice bird ✌🏽

Expect more birds, science, politics and occasional shitposting :)

A Double-crested Cormorant—a variably black and glossy bird—with it's wings held open, and its long neck looped around so it can preen its wing feathers.

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Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

Keith W. Dickinson @keithwdickinson.bsky.social · 22h

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

The Verge @theverge.com · May 26

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Paul McCartne, Elton John and others signed an open letter.

buff.ly

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · 5d

Every day we stray further from god's light.

1 in 3 Americans have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI bot, new survey says

More than half of those surveyed (54 percent) said that they had some sort of relationship with an artificial intelligence platform

www.independent.co.uk

Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · 14d

E I G H T
H U N D R E D
M I L L I O N

Kyle Horton @kyle-horton.bsky.social · 14d

Truly impressive number of birds migrating tonight. More than 800 MILLION birds up in the air right now❗ #BirdMigration

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · 27d

Sep 28! I can't wait for the weird frog spam.

Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

Anne Hilborn @annewhilborn.bsky.social · Aug 30

Wildlife science is a big one for this too. Paying for work experience and working for free or for a small weekly stipend is distressingly common. Many entry level paid jobs are barely living wage

Thaddeodrome 📼🥵🤯😵 @thaddeus.zone · Aug 28

this "passion tax" appears all over the place & should be talked about more. you see it in book stores and game stores all the time

excitement for particular work is constantly weaponized to depress wages & pit workers against each other

screenshot of a paragraph from op's linked article

Claudy pointed to what he calls the “passion tax.” Game workers, he said, often get paid less than their tech industry counterparts because they’re passionate about what they do, and passion can be taken advantage of. Microsoft is a tech company, making discrepancies all the more arbitrary.

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 30

Summoning both of them at once reveals your true form

Photo of an owl, the species name is POWERFUL OWL — how awesome is that?

Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

lukelukeluke @lukelukeluke.bsky.social · Aug 7

Look what the cat dragged in. Look what the dog hastily scrawled. Look what the baby quietly recited. The ritual has begun, take this knife

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 25

Has anyone succeeded in persuading people you know to drop GPT, Grok etc.? And if yes, HOWWW?

Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 21

Who's out there getting their weather in Kelvin?

"Looks like it'll be a nice day—300 and sunny!"

Screenshot from a weather app showing the options for temperature units which includes Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin.

Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

James van der Moezel @vandacorp.bsky.social · Aug 15

Male king parrot visiting the yard early morning.

#birds #canberra #nature #australia #parrot #photography #winter #kingparrot #ausbird #ornithology #australianbird #canon

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Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

Tired Art Goblin @spaceturtleart.bsky.social · Aug 15

#AvianAugust Day 15 - 'Oma'o. These little guys like to forage in moss and lichen-covered branches. #birds #birdart

A small round grey-brown bird peeks out from behind a moss covered branch

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Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

Simon Stobart @sherburnsi.bsky.social · Aug 15

Black Tailed Godwit on Teesside the other day.
@teesbirds.bsky.social
@rspbengland.bsky.social
@rspb.bsky.social
🪶

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

My building super once asked, "So, do you work?" 🙃

Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

A really fun project with Rosalyn, Ben Hogan, @ajshultz622.bsky.social & Cassie Stoddard. Made possible by awesome museums & curators (@nhm.org, ansp.org) and with lots of imaging help.

Here's the paper, complete with a beautiful feather close-up taken by Rosalyn (if I remember correctly):

Hidden white and black feather layers enhance plumage coloration in tanagers and other songbirds

Colorful songbirds use hidden white or black feather layers to enhance plumage color, an optical trick well known to artists.

www.science.org

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

This optical effect is not news to artists. A white gesso layer has the same effect. I particularly like Dale Chihuly's description of the white underlayer of glass that he uses in his sculptures as a 'cloud layer'.

But, as is so often the case, nature did it first!

A photograph of colourful glass placed in boats. Taken by me at the Chihuly garden/exhibit in Seattle.

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

In the tanagers we studied, males are often more vibrant. To our surprise, some instances of male-female differences were not due to the pigmented feather tips but rather the hidden layer! So the story of males putting more pigments (re: honest signals) into feathers is more complicated than that...

More bad alt text for a dense figure: see Fig 4 of paper.

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

Using a *bunch* of imaging techniques and optical modelling, we showed that a white layer makes red/yellow/orange brighter by scattering light back through the red feather tips. The black layer prevents this backscatter, which would wash out blue colours, resulting in more saturated 'purer' blues.

Sorry for bad alt text, this figure is pretty dense. See Fig 3 of the paper for a proper caption.

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

By looking at specimens at the @nhm.org and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel, Philadelphia, we* found that this phenomenon is widespread across passerine birds!

*the looking was really done by Rosalyn and @ajshultz622.bsky.social

A phylogenetic tree with images of feathers at the tips of the tree. These images show that hidden achromatic layers (white under red/yellow, and black under blue) are widespread.

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

This project began when Rosalyn noticed that red/yellow/orange feathers seemed to have a medial white zone while blue/green feathers had a black medial zone (NB: not the downy part). The value of spending time with your study subjects--even (especially?) if they're museum specimens!

A museum specimen that has had the feather tips trimmed off on parts of a red and a green patch. A feather has been sampled from each region. This shows that the hidden layer forms a continuous achromatic layer under the colourful feather tips.

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

Pick an idiom: "more than meets the eye", "beauty more than skin [feather] deep" etc.

In work led by Rosalyn Price-Waldman, we describe a hidden (and ignored!) black or white layer found below the visible surface of bird feathers which helps make bird colours so striking!

🧪 🪶 #colsci

Songbirds play optical tricks to make their feather colors ‘pop’

Concealed black or white bands on feathers boost the vibrancy of bird plumage

www.science.org

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 13

"Hey, bullshit machine! Is your bullshit bullshit?"

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · Aug 11

The #1 thing that blows my mind about how most people use LLMs: they believe if they ask the LLM a question about how it works or how accurate it is, the LLM will truthfully answer them.

I have seen SO many seemingly-smart people do this.

toilet bones @toiletbones.bsky.social · Aug 11

i don't think it helps that the llms constantly lie to the user about the capabilities of llms as part of its whole obsequious fawning style of interaction that oversells its abilities and obscures its obvious limitations by fundamentally misrepresenting how the technology works

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Aug 8

attacked right in the middle of the work day

MapQuest @mapquest.com · Aug 8

You are lost.

Reposted by Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈

Patton Oswalt @pattonoswalt.bsky.social · Jul 11

“Superman is too woke!”

Literally the first page of the first ever appearance of Superman:

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Jul 10

Loads of people get around by motorbike in Vietnam, so I wasn't surprised when my research assistant told me that some of the staff at our field site who don't speak English refer to me as "bicycle man" 🤣 🧪 #academicsky

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Jarome Ali 🇹🇹 🏳️‍🌈 @jarome.bsky.social · Jul 9

Fascinating how the political class, media, and policy wonks tie themselves into knots about Mamdani. It's always some deep 'analysis' of campaign strategy, virality and tone/targeting of messaging etc., and not just that the guy is suggesting reasonable things and seems to care about people 🙄